Tag: short story

Postcards from places you’ve never been

~ simonsylvester ~ Leave a comment

Is it morning? Or is it night? Sunrise? Dusk? Noon? You leave your lodgings. Hotel? Hostel? A stranger’s house, a blanket on the floor of the parlour? In the lobby is a dusty man at a dusty counter, watching a silent television. He looks away when your eyes meet. Is it raining outside? Or scorching sun? Bright again and humid with mist? Sweltering or snowing or sorry with sleet? You walk on. You walk to the main square. Is it teeming with vendors on market day? Or is it empty, ghostly, stirring with old newspaper? Are there statues? Monuments? Sculptures? Lampposts? You’re hungry. Are there cafes? Are there street stalls? Is there a man in a low window, selling dumplings and bread, or pastries, or crepes in paper cups? Are there pigeons squabbling for crumbs? Gulls? Sparrows? You walk on. You turn away from the main square. Wander the backstreets. Most are houses, tenements of flats, but some are shops. A wigmaker. A dentist. A carpenter. A shop selling accordions and concertinas. A shop selling puppets, the window draped with marionettes. Laundry strung between the houses. Scaffolds, ladders, aerials. Classical music, radio static. The sound of sports commentary in a language you don’t know. A gap between two houses opens onto a mason’s yard. There is no one in the yard but half-finished carvings stand in stacks and towers. Are there mice here? Are there small white cats? Are there stray dogs? Are there children? A woman stands on a balcony wearing a man’s jacket, smoking a cigarette. An old man sits on a step, both hands on his walking stick, soup stains in his beard. You walk on. You walk until you come to water. Is it a canal? A river? A fountain? A wharf? A harbour wall? What does it smell like? Are there boats? Gondolas? Barges? Junks? Ferrymen? Pontoons? You cross a bridge. A beggar sits halfway, a bowl between her feet, two copper coins in the bowl. The stone stairs are scalloped. The backstreets open into a narrow square. A busker plays the violin. He is blind. You walk on. Here is a tall building. Is it a church? A temple? A ruin? A library? A hospice? A guildhall or a college? The door is huge and padlocked and there is moss on all the windowsills. You walk on. You walk on. Keep walking. Look around you. Look up, at the rooftops, the skyline, chimney pots, balconies, downspouts, carvings, tiles. Look down, at your feet – at flagstones, or cobblestones, or wooden boardwalks, or bare dirt and dust. Can you hear a far-off train? Can you hear a foghorn? Can you hear the screaming swifts? Can you hear the children singing? Are they real, or did they die two hundred years ago in a fire that swallowed the street? Can you hear the hammers, chisels? A trumpet, a cello? Hawkers in the market. Cooks quarrel over the price of meat. Small pink flowers grow in gutters. You walk on. You walk on. You come to a small dark shop, a hole in the wall. Mementos, beads, hats, pencils, miniature saints. There is a dusty rack of postcards. You scan the images, pictures of this city and its people. One postcard in particular catches your eye. It reminds you of someone. An old friend, maybe, before they moved abroad. An estranged family member. A lover with whom you argued every bitter, awful, wonderful day. Whoever it is – someone you haven’t seen in a very long time – but this postcard, this shop, this street, this city, this sky – reminds you of them. You buy the postcard. Keep walking, if you wish. But when you’re ready, you write the postcard. Something here conjures your past – something here speaks of your future. Stand at a strange counter. Buy a strange stamp. Is that a toucan? A gunboat? A god? Pay a penny, or a pfennig, or a few centimes. Send the postcard.

Who to?

The Talking Skull

~ simonsylvester ~ 1 Comment

A quick storytelling post on the back of another Verbalise at the Brewery Arts Centre. The slots are 4 minutes, and I’d struggled to find a piece I liked that fit that time frame – despite having loads at 1-2 minutes and several at 5-6 minutes. Eventually I settled on The Talking Skull; originally from Cameroon, I think, and a story I’d known for a long time before I started telling any myself – and one I heard completely reinvented by Nick Hennessey when I was on the storytelling course.

While keeping the structure the same, Nick moved the action to the gibbets and heaths of old England, bookending it with singing and drums and a clutch of corbies. I’m nowhere near drumming and I’ll never be a singer, but his translocation of the story was so deft and absolutely something to learn from. I shifted mine to the mosses of south Lakeland and used a Baron of Kendal for the villain. It’s a fantastic wee piece and I loved telling it – and I loved exploring how the bones of a story can hang with different skins. That’s something to remember.

My son drew the backdrop for the projector – much obliged that lad – and many thanks to Ann The Poet for the photo.

Blooms

~ simonsylvester ~ Leave a comment

Since becoming so suddenly single, I’ve picked my roses with care — the delicate Life Begins At Forty, perfectly porcelain white — the convalescent You Only Live Once, pink as pink could be — the melancholy Absent Friend, flushing so sweetly into yellow — and Celebration Time, of course, visceral and rich, wetly crimson.

They grow so prettily around my husband’s grave. They flourish and curl, they sing with colour. But alas, I think I’ll have to cut them down…

My neighbours are getting suspicious.

Belly

~ simonsylvester ~ Leave a comment

We argued about everything, we argued about nothing. When he finally decided to leave me, I couldn’t bear to see him go, and I had to drop the bombshell — that I was pregnant. He’s a good man, so he stayed, and now we shop for prams and cots. We still argue, more than ever, but he bites his tongue. Like I said, he’s a good man. But the weeks are racing by, and he won’t stop looking at my flat flat stomach.

Rats

~ simonsylvester ~ Leave a comment

She carried herself into my office like the cradle of life. Knew she was bad luck. Dames like that don’t carry themselves into offices like mine. I shoulda said no. She looked so pretty when she cried. I took the job. Simple enough, right? — her old man can’t be found. All I gotta do is find him.

Now she’s gone and all. Her cheque bounced like a goddamn ball. The address she gave was demolished a decade ago. The cops come calling. They say, Charlie, you’re sniffing around. How come you’re sniffing around, Charlie? What do you smell?

I think I smell a fucking rat.

Screen Play

~ simonsylvester ~ 4 Comments

Shakubuku, n. — a swift, spiritual kick to the head.

I’ve been needing one for a long time. I’ve needed a change of direction.

Writers have different reasons to write — callings that send them back to those keyboards day after day. For some it’s character — others write for the love of language — some write with a message, or to exorcise a ghost. And all these things are connected, of course, but I suspect each writer has a particular theme or mission that drives them more than the others. I write for the story. Stories are a purely human magic. They fascinate me and have always fascinated me. I don’t know of anything in art as satisfying as a complete and perfect story, completely and perfectly told. That’s the compulsion that drove me to writing and filmmaking and editing, and it’s story that keeps me working despite the reasons not to.

I teach film production. Each year, I work as something like a producer/story supervisor on many dozens of student films, contributing anything from gentle advice to full rewrites  — I’ve overseen literally hundreds of student shorts in the seven or eight years I’ve run the course. During the final projects, I invest a huge amount of creative energy in making sure my learners are heading in the right direction, and that’s fine — that’s part of the job, and I certainly don’t begrudge the students, who are awesome. But I need to start conserving more of that energy for myself. Last year, I spent so much time writing with students that I didn’t manage any of my own — not a word of it, not for months. I was drained. As the college workload has increased, year on year, my ability to sustain a novel has declined. I’m sad about that, but I’m not going to drown in it.

I’ve been brewing for a while on trying something new, and maybe writing some film scripts of my own — it’s a medium I love, a process I know, and I wondered whether I’d find a script easier to pick up and put down than a novel. After months of doldrums, I did something about it. I started writing.

It’s true that a change is as good as a rest.

I’ve now finished three short films, coming in at variously 3, 11 and 23 pages. I’ve written and submitted a pitch to this competition, booked myself onto a short film workshop and started organising my ideas. At the moment I can envisage another half-dozen shorts and a couple of feature films. Not to say that I’ll write them all, or even start them all, but I have plenty to think about, to be getting on with. I’ve loved the exchange of dialogue, of honing lines, of stripping a story back to the bones. I’ve thrived on the blocking of scenes and the problem-solving, unravelling snags in the story. I’ve even loved learning new software. Finding my way in a new medium has been a joy, and I’ve enjoyed these steps in screenwriting more than I can say.

In tandem with this, I’ve been reading some classic works on story structure and writing for film. I’ve worked my way through Syd Field‘s Definitive Guide To Screenwriting and his excellent collection of analysis, Four Screenplays; Blake Snyder‘s cynical but efficacious model of conventional film structure, Save The Cat; Darren Aronofsky‘s blistering Guerrilla Diaries; John Yorke‘s sublime study of storytelling, Into The Woods, and am currently reading The Writer’s Journey by Christopher Vogler. After that, I’m heading into the bible of storytelling, Story by Robert McKee. More than anything else, I’m thrilled to be learning again — it’s been too long since I threw myself into something new, and I’m really enjoying the knowledge I’m gaining.

None of this means I’m giving up on writing novels or surrendering my short stories. Indeed, I’ve been writing lots of flash fiction lately, if you’d like to have a read. But for the good of my mental health, I need to do something different, even if it’s only for a little while.

Here’s a thing: a long time ago, I studied English Literature at Lancaster University. In the last weeks, after the exams, one of my tutors asked me a question that completely disarmed me — why, he wondered, had I written all my final year essays about films? At first, I was puzzled, but when I checked — he was right. Unconsciously I’d been exploring cinema, rather than literature. It was his observation that sent me off to study film in depth, and from there to work in television.

I’ve been thinking about some of the things people have been kind enough to say about my work. The single comment I hear most often is that my stories are ‘atmospheric‘. I’ve taken that to mean that readers have enjoyed the emotions and tensions of the worlds I’ve tried to make — that they’ve shared a feeling of empathy for the world — that they’ve been convinced by the places and feelings I’ve tried to create. But any richness I’ve managed to capture in my prose has come from my film training — imagining those locations as though composed through a camera lens, then layered with sound, light, weather, the bustle of background detail.

As with my university essays, all those years ago — maybe I’ve been writing the wrong way round.

Shakubuku, peeps.

film set

Battle

~ simonsylvester ~ 2 Comments

See them quaking in their black hearts, yonder — villains that they are. Blackguards! Fearties! Bespawlers and bampots! Rogues!

My bright and bonny lads bang shields. We’re ready. Our swords are sharp. We’re fed and rested. Any man of us would give himself for the others, and gladly too. Then it comes, the word o’ God, a thunder from on high, a command that we obey:

“Knight to Rook three, man.”

And the battle is begun.

lewis chess

Not Round Here

~ simonsylvester ~ 1 Comment

Dint you hear?

One of them mermaids up the canal.

I know. Fancy! Up on the gas main she is, combing her hair and singing them dirty songs. Barely dressed, I heard. Filthy things. Mark my words. She’ll be hounded out soon enough. A right round flea in her ear.

Mind you.

My Eric spends a lot of time fishing, these days.