I don’t really consider myself a poet. On the few occasions I write them, I’m always quietly surprised that my poems seem to strike a chord with people, as it’s not a form I feel I can commit to while storytelling and prose sing so much louder. That said – every so often there’s something which can only be a poem – often when I’m angry, or sad, or awestruck.
Awe is important to me. Awe is my religion, unhooked from any god or scripture. Any interaction with the wilder word is my worship. A goldfinch on the teasel, whale bones on the beach; spiderwebs, the graves on Isle Maree. When I was commissioned to write a poem for filmmaker Dom Bush, it was awe that spoke to me.
Dom has made a stunning film about the National Trust reserve of Sandscale Haws. I spent a day there, whipped by wind, wandering the dunes and the low tide shoreline, picking my path about the many million shells, watching terns, counting caterpillers on marram. Sandscale Haws has Viking roots – the name is sandra skali hawse, a home on the sands – and an industrial legacy of brickmaking. I drew on both in my poem, as well as the myriad species that live and thrive in the Duddon Estuary.
I’m sharing only my few words here; if you’d like to see the whole film, it’s here.
Wee update with my news – over recent months I’ve been telling stories wherever people will listen, from my story circle to Verbalise to Kendal Mountain Festival to a headline slot at Ink Deep (a new spoken word night in Kendal). I told 30 minutes of stories at that one – The Name, The Pear Drum and Facing The Giant, finishing with a short Eskimo story called The Spirits of the Northern Lights. I also recorded a 90-second version of that one for National Storytelling Week (now been and gone). My telling looked like this:
It’s strange how much goes into a single story, even one as small as this – I spent a week of dog walks and school runs practising Northern Lights – partly because I needed to get it under 90 seconds, but mostly to find the flow in the words and build some phrases into muscle memory.
It’s been a year since I started storytelling with incredible tutors Emily Hennessey and Nick Hennessey. In that time, as well as the stories above, I’ve learned The Talking Skull, Aioga, The Fox Woman, The Magic Bowls, The Hobyahs, Two Tigers & A Strawberry, Stone Soup, Raven & The Whale, Six Blind Men & an Elephant and Gobbleknoll. That’s a small repertoire, yes, but growing all the time, and most of all – I’d feel confident going back to any of these stories. I’ve told each of them to myself (and the dog) dozens and dozens of times. They’re part of me now… even if the dog is sick of me .
Learning and performing traditional tales has upended everything I thought I knew about stories, energised me personally, and also reinvented my writing practice. The simplicity and clarity of folk tales is so utterly grounding – I’m increasingly trying to incorporate that simplicity into my own prose. I’ve also started writing longhand, rather than on a keyboard, and this too has been transformative. I’ve always plotted and planned and noodled in notebooks, but very seldom written extended prose by hand. Taking a novel to the notebooks has been an extraordinary thing. Everything becomes much more linear and causal – and if it isn’t connected, it’s easier to spot a fracture in the narrative. Slowing down to handwriting speed – probably less than half my typing speed – has also slowed my thoughts, giving space to notice and dwell and follow interesting threads. It’s steady and feels somehow more truthful. Most radical of all – I suddenly have countless more moments in the day in which to write. Whereas I once needed a minimum of half an hour, a cup of tea and a playlist to sit down and write – now I’m scribbling ideas and phrases in minutes here and there, from boiling the kettle to the moments before bed. It’s still early days as a process but I’ve been staggered at how staying in touch with my prose makes it all the easier to keep writing.
As to what I’m writing… ah. Enough to say that something I’ve daydreamed about for almost twenty years is quietly taking shape. I’m writing without agenda or plan, dwelling in spaces between ideas and images, forging some links, breaking others. I’ve given it a name but I’m not ready to share that yet.
Another tale, another telling; at my last story circle, I performed a Siberian folktale called The One-Eyed Man & The Fox Woman from a wonderful collection called The Sun Maiden And The Crescent Moon by James Riordan. It’s a story I first heard on a podcast told by Daniel Deardorff. By way of drums and dreams he seized me by the scruff and never let me go; when I started storytelling, The Fox Woman was right at the top of my list of pieces to learn. It’s longer than Gobbleknoll or The Talking Skull, about 20 minutes or so, and I’ve been working my way up to it by way of shorter tales.
There’s an otherworldiness to this one. The titular One-Eyed Man is a pretty small part of the story – the journey belongs entirely to the Fox Woman – her anger, her longing, her choices, her consequences. It holds at its heart a crystal truth about moving through life; about what a person should tolerate, and what they cannot. It’s about ageing, changing, desire, belonging and peace. It’s vast and it’s wild.
The Siberian stories are strong. I’m currently reading The Turnip Princess by Franz Xaver Von Schonwerth: 72 folktales and fairy stories collected roughly in parallel to the Grimms, then lost for over a century in a city archive. As with my recent reading of some Russian stories, I’ve been struck by how many of them are structurally quite weak; elements appear at random with successions of unconvincing ‘and thens’ disconnected from what’s already happened. What I admire in the Siberian stories (as with Inuit stories) is that most elements of the story happen because of something else – the magic remains wild and vital, but the threads of story are causal and connected, rather than consecutive – at times almost random. As a side note, it’s fascinating to see the movement of stories through time and place – there are quite obviously elements of Grimms throughout The Turnip Princess, then what crops up but half of Three Golden Heads Of The Well? (Another story high on my list to learn.)
I’m off topic. Back to Siberia. The stories are rich in blood and fat and sinew. Eating, not eating; animals that talk to people; the Moon sneaking down by night to steal a bride; clayman, raven, elk. Animals are completely and vitally integrated with people – survival depends on food, and food is meat, and meat is animals, and animals is hunting. This is the prism through which almost every story plays out; from the mythic to the domestic, tales of tooth and blade and fur and fire. Odd thing for a vegetarian to say, but count me in. I’m there.
Telling The Fox Woman went well, I think, I hope. Ten of us met in an old Quaker graveyard high on Fellside, looking out across the town, with a large ginger cat slinking through the long grass, and the last of the summer swifts high overhead, and a robin ferreting through wild blackberries. I brought in repeated motifs to bookend the story, and that seemed to go well; one of the jokes didn’t land at all, but the other landed superbly. I extended the scene with the baskets of skins, which felt to me to make sense to the story, and I removed the scene with the reflection in the pool. I managed not to rush – to slow down and relish the flow of words. I’m increasingly drawing on my well of prose and poetry when conjuring the images. I still have a very long way to go in using my body and voice and face, and this is something to work on.
Well I don’t know. You wait six months for a gig then two come along at once. Two concerts in two weeks for me and Mon – first King Creosote at the Brewery, and then Elbow at Castlefield Bowl in Manchester. Two very different performances united by virtue of being bloody wonderful.
King Creosote was in the Brewery’s biggest space, the theatre, but also incredibly intimate by virtue of us being on the front row and in actual touching distance of the stage:
Kenny played loads from his FIFTIETH studio record I Des and a handful of classics, and it was brilliant – I especially loved Burial Bleak. His creativity and relentless curiosity were in full play. Props also to his ‘support act’ – alter ego KY-10 – half an hour of ambient techno and spoken word – the story of a seagull called Hrafn meeting with the ocean through the medium of jellyfish. Energising and enchanting and totally transporting.
Elbow was a different sort of thing – we drove down to Manchester and stayed the night as an early birthday present. This was our second time at Castlefield Bowl (after Bloc Party a few years ago) and we were once more blessed with glorious sunshine. Support act The Slow Readers Club were strong – they were new to me, but on the same sonic spectrum as Editors/Future Islands/Joy Division. Elbow emerged at sunset and played two hours of absolute belters. I was moved to tears by penultimate tune My Sad Captains; one of my favourites, and the song I used as a lullaby when my children were young enough to want such things.
Oh, long before You and I were born Others beat these benches with their empty cups To the night – and its stars To be here and now, and who we are Another sunrise with my sad captains With who I choose to lose my mind And if it’s so we only pass this way but once… What a perfect waste of time
There was a great grey lump of a hill that ate people…
…and Rabbit’s Grandmother told him never to go there, and Rabbit being Rabbit he went there as soon as he could, and he thundered his paw on the flank of that hill and called out, ‘Ho! Ho, Gobbleknoll! Open up! Show yourself! I want a word with you…’
…but Gobbleknoll knew Rabbit was trouble, and Gobbleknoll stayed shut.
So begins Gobbleknoll, a short folktale I came across in an Alan Garner collection and originally from the Sioux people. I performed it at the Brewery open mic last night, making for my first public telling, and first time performing since the Stealing Thunder storytelling course.
I added some bits and removed some bits – an extra beat in the middle, and a tweak to the end. Stories evolve. They flow like water from person to person to person, always changing and yet always water. I loved giving the story space to breathe – feeling it settle into the contours and corners of the room. It seemed to go over okay – lots of people spoke to me at the interval or after – most simply stating how good it was to hear a folktale. Adults aren’t given many opportunities to be children, and that’s one of the great gifts of storytelling. Storytelling shuts the door on the scream of life, if only for a moment.
Next up I’m reuniting with my peers from the story course… we’re forming informally, meeting irregularly in a circle to share new work. I’m preparing a story called The Magic Bowls for that one – it has the most wonderful twist.
Storytelling then. Feels like I’ve begun. If I get the chance, I’ll record my take on Gobbleknoll and pop the audio on here.
D’you know what I haven’t written about for a while? Music, that’s what. I’m always on the hunt for music I can work to, whether that’s writing or editing. It must be instrumental, or near enough, because voices are distracting – it needs to be tonally consistent, but not bland, not wallpaper. I like a regular, driving pace, something to push me along, but nothing manic. And if all that wasn’t enough, I have to actually like it too – enough to listen to hundreds of times, which I absolutely will. I’ve probably listened to Come On Die Young and Lift Your Skinny Fists many thousands of times, and (old age permitting) will listen to them many thousand more. I essentially want music to carve out a cave that I can work in, and emerge, blinking, several hours later, with something done.
On the turntable at the moment:
Yes please. I love a computer game soundtrack, with particular nods to past and present favourites Botanicula, Fez and Thomas Was Alone. Creaks is another darkly surreal delight from the mighty Amanita Design, and it’s great: track after track of brooding, playful, mysterious trip-hop, true to itself and served up sleek as hell by Hidden Orchestra. I’m a fan.
Jon Hopkins next. Ritual is a brilliant record – essentially a single 40-minute piece of music that builds through phases like a rising tide, a dream, mesmeric and transporting, finally breaking and washing out into the light. It’s completely immersive.
Three records in particular have been the soundtrack for writing my new novel. I mentioned the new Godspeed You Black Emperor record in a previous post, and it’s still very much doing the rounds. Six months later and that concert is ringing in my ears. Get it listened folks.
The second is the self-titled debut record by Irish-American folk group The Gloaming. Singing in Gaelic (and thereby circumventing my no-vocal rule) this record serves a compass for me – no matter my emotional state when I sit down to write, the first notes, the first few seconds and I’m settled back into a writing headspace. Just give me a sea to sail on.
The third is Erland Cooper. I’m a fan of all his work, but in particular Hether Blether, Folded Landscapes and most recently Carve The Runes Then Be Content With Silence (which I wrote about in my last post). I’m only now discovering the vast world of modern classical, and in all truth I find a lot of it quite similar – there’s a sort of cookie-cutter piano noodling that crops up again and again. You know the one. It’s such a relief then to find groups like Jack McNeill’sPropellor Ensemble or Benji Bower and the Terra Collective. I like Cooper for the arrangement of strings, which never do quite what I’m expecting, for the snippets of field recordings and poetry, and for the odd electronic snip or surge that brings his music into a new realm altogether.
Last for now – I’m a recent convert to Christine & The Queens. Late to the party I know, and not for writing – much too involved and demanding – but aren’t they bloody wonderful?
After a couple of weeks away, and on the back of notes from some excellent readers, I’ve started redrafting the novel. It feels strange and strangely comforting to splash back into that watery world of flooded hearts and flooded houses. I’m weirdly thankful for the industry slowdown that’s given me the space to write, but things are starting to pick up again, and I’m back to work editing some really exciting documentary projects. That means redrafting comes whenever I can grab it – odd mornings and evenings, scrambled hours here and there – and all the while, quietly, quietly, starting to think about what follows…
This is a picture of the cork board above my desk. Each of these scraps is the ghost of an idea. I don’t know what will happen with my current novel, and I don’t know where I’ll land next. Some might be screenplays. Most will likely go no further than this. I’ve reached the conclusion that every project is so distinct that writing a novel essentially means starting from scratch, every time, and learning to write all over again. Maybe one day I’ll stumble across some sort of process that allows for better structure to my writing and my time. Until then – scraps and pins.
According to the good people at WordPress dot com, this is my 300th post, which I see simultaneously as an amazing thing and also an awful lot of words that no one’s ever going to read. As ever, though, I write this mostly for myself; it helps me to clarify my thoughts.
I’ve written before about my experiences with The Pitch. As one of the runner-ups, I was awarded a small production fund to do something with. After spending much of the last year not really knowing what to do with the budget, I’ve moved increasingly to the thought of making a short film myself; in and around Kendal, working with the talented people who live here, keeping the whole thing as local as could be. Without having a clear idea of what to work on, I started mulling on single images and scraps of ideas:
A hanging tree high above a valley.
A stack of flat stones on a riverbank.
A kite, bobbing, soaring, sliding on the wind.
A man with an axe, walking towards a small house.
This was an experiment in free-writing as much as anything else, letting ideas move through association. And there was no story and there was no story and then suddenly there was a story: The Potter’s Field.
Potter’s Field in Hart Island, New York, c.1890
In the Bible, after Judas betrayed Jesus, he tried to return the 30 pieces of silver, but the Priests wouldn’t take back the blood money. Instead they used it to buy a potter’s field for the poor of Jerusalem. A potter’s field is an area of land where all the seams of workable clay have been extracted, leaving a chaos of rocky trenches and holes. These fields are no good for farming, but all over the world they’ve been turned into pauper’s graveyards; burial grounds for strangers and destitutes. After hanging himself, Judas was buried in the same field his blood money paid for.
I found this utterly extraordinary. There’s a circularity to it, a Zenlike completeness, a sweeping up, a recycling of something wasted. It shapes a terrible betrayal into a coherent future: not righting a wrong, but filling a void: what’s broken can always be fixed, and what’s fixed will always be broken. I couldn’t find a moral in it, and that ambiguity sung to me. The ideas began to tumble, spilling like dominoes: a woman betrayed. A guilty man. A child. Two children. A river, a farm. Chickens and eggs. And a kite… the joy of flying a kite.
After months of chewing through images like puzzle pieces, suddenly and sharply the whole picture hung together. I wrote my first draft of the screenplay in about an hour, and was on my tenth draft in a week. It’s probably the most personal story I’ve written, and though I’m not in it, I’m also in every single line. Ultimately, the story is really simple: it’s about someone trying to say sorry, and someone else who isn’t quite ready to forgive.
Now I need to make it. I want to make it. That means producing and directing: the organising, galvanising, driving and delivery of a project from first idea to final edit. Finding a crew, casting actors, sourcing locations and kit, props and music. Insurance. Catering. Scheduling. There’s so much to do, it’s sometimes hard to know where to begin, and so I’ve built myself an armour of spreadsheets and lists. Spreadsheets for each of the schedule, shot list, budget, props list, costumes, research sources. There’s safety in those numbers. Making sense of the mountain; single steps on a journey.
I’ve surprised myself with how much satisfaction I’ve discovered in the budgeting, in the planning. At the moment I’m working out menus for a three-day shoot. How can I feed fifteen people with healthy food and snacks and teas and coffees and keep it on budget? These challenges are testing different parts of my brain, and I’m really enjoying the new processes. It’s good for me to learn. And I love cooking. Just like this guy:
Delicatessen
Along with the pragmatic work, I’m constantly divining a creative language for the story, thinking and feeling my way through how I want it to look. I’m lucky to have the gifted Dom Bush as my Director of Photography, and I’m already so excited at what we’re going to cook up. Dom has such an eye for a face, for a moment. The story is very intimate and I’m looking for emotional spontaneity in the scenes; I’ve been studying Normal People and Sound Of Metal and Beasts Of The Southern Wild, trying to better understand how those moments have been captured so wonderfully.
I’m still a writer, or trying to be. I’ve never wanted to be a director, but I want to direct this. There’s magic in film. It does things no other medium can do. This story is personal, and there are truths in it I want to tease out. In so much of my work, all of that happens in my head, my notebook. It’s a new experience for me to open it up, to share the process with others. I’m learning a lot. It’s good.
I’ve called this pt.1 because I’ll wrote more about this along the way. Same Bat time, folks, same Bat channel.
I’ve recently taken up chess again, years after learning the rules as a kid, and wanted to take a moment to share a quick observation:
Chess speaks the language of story.
This was an idle thought at first, but the more I unpacked it, the more connections I discovered. Like screenwriting, chess is a constant balance of multiple conflicts. Like all good antagonists, the opponent can’t be passive. They force the story, constantly shift the sway of the game, forcing plans to adapt or collapse under pressure. Chess is a game of change, of assimilated knowledge, of action and reaction. Like screenwriting, it demands sacrifices to reach the ending — the bigger the sacrifice, the greater the risk and the reward. Chess fosters courage. Like a good screenplay, chess strips away and resolves minor skirmishes as the bigger heft of story emerges. Like a good screenplay, all the pieces are on the board at the beginning. Like a good screenplay, every piece is important — a minor piece played early holds a crucial role at the end. Like a good screenplay, the final outcome comes down to one or two pieces, finely balanced at the end of the attrition. A seesaw of movements, each outdoing the last, building momentum or shoring up defence. Planning. Problem-solving. Acceptance. Final stands. Last gasp attacks. Forced to find and take the least-worst option. Simple mistakes — or opportunities seized and squandered. A lot of thinking and plenty of gut instinct. The ambiguous ending of a stalemate, or the binary of triumph and despair.
Regular readers will know I’m a big fan of an extended metaphor, but come on: there’s a lot there, right? The engines of chess are the engines of drama. There are questions over whether chess can actually change the cognitive function of the brain, but at the very least it’s teaching me conscious patterns of behaviour I find useful in my writing.
Writing with an update on my shortlisting for the IMDB/FilmBath Script To Screen award — thrilled to say that although I didn’t win, I was awarded an Honourable Mention for my work, and the judges identified my storytelling as a strength. I’ll dine out on that for a while. I’m equally pleased to say that the best script won — I was blown away by Katie McNeice’s short ‘Lambing’, about an intersex baby born to a farming family in rural Ireland. It was sparse, powerful, elegant and disarming, and I’m glad it won the award. I’m genuinely honoured to come second to such a brilliant story, and can’t wait to see the finished film.
I was looking forward to seeing the actors read my work, and here they are, with thanks — six students from the Bath Spa University acting degree with a live performance of A Bed For The Boy:
Equally and wonderfully nerve-wracking, the judges then gave live feedback on the stories — here’s the excellent Andrea Gibb talking about my work.
Thanks to Andrea, Amma, Col and Holly — it’s been so brilliant to be involved with FilmBath and the award, and I couldn’t ask for more.
