Tag: Writing

Fox Woman

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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.

Next telling is at the Brewery open mic supporting Rose Condo – either a Zen koan called Two Tigers & A Strawberry or Queen Albine, depending on how angry I am on the night about English nationalism. Chances are I’ll be quite angry.

Autopsy by Brian Turner

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I’ve just rediscovered this – posted on Youtube almost 10 years ago (!) for my friend Kirstin who teaches English at secondary school. She asked loads of her friends to record their favourite poems for her class, and this was my choice: the shattering Autopsy by Brian Turner. I don’t know why I didn’t post it at the time, but I’m very happy to do so now:

The Six Blind Men & The Elephant

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Another storytelling update! This week I told a story in school for the first time – popping down to tell The Six Blind Men & The Elephant to my son’s class, who are looking at Buddhism. It’s a lovely wee school and the kids were very welcoming, a string of high-fives lined up on the way in and the way out. I’d planned a straightforward telling with some questions to follow, but once we were in the moment I started calling on the kids for ideas of what the blind men thought of the different parts of the elephant. They loved getting involved, which is a lesson for future tellings. Afterwards we had a fantastic chat about the importance of sharing – and of knowing how other perspectives can deepen and strengthen our own knowledge – and then we went round the class, imagining how the bits of our own favourite animals might resemble something completely different. It was a lot of fun.

I was packing up when they asked me for another story, and their teacher kindly gave me the time to tell it. I shared Gobbleknoll, and this is where the fluidity of storytelling showed itself so marvellously – even as I was telling it, I sanitised the tale and teased out the bloodier elements – and I thought nothing of stopping to expand or explain something, even to spell out some words. My knowledge of the story and my prior tellings gave me the freedom to tell it for this particular audience on this particular day. That was exhilarating and wonderful and fun and right. The kids loved Rabbit and his stone shoes and his ears tied down. Gobbleknoll has nothing to do with Buddhism – I could have told The Vain Crane or The Tigers & The Strawberry – but it went over well.

I’m learning several more stories at the moment – Aioga, The Name, Three Golden Heads Of The Well – and more and more, I’m finding my own ideas and instincts stepping in. Adding a few words of description here, or a colour there – adjusting a clunky dynamic between two characters – expanding or reducing dialogue. A story is not a box with walls, but a gateway – a road.

I’m learning.

The Magic Bowls

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A quick post in celebration of communities, no matter how small: having finished my storytelling course back in March, I recently met up with my classmates for the first of an irregular and very informal story circle. We met at Kendal Castle towards the end of the heatwave, with just the thinnest edge of cold creeping into the evening. It seems to be a wonderful year for swifts, and a score or more of them barrelled overhead. I told The Magic Bowls, which I first heard on Jay Leeming’s superlative Crane Bag podcast, then later found online.

I’m understanding more and more the looseness and freedom of storytelling; to let the story find its own shape in the space between the teller and the audience. I added quite a lot about the man and his wife at the beginning, because I wanted more love and empathy than the written version suggests – I wanted him to have a reason to come home, rather than keep on walking. I invented descriptions for the tree spirits, with moss for hair and snailshell eyes. Jay’s version turns the burly men into barbers and I kept hold of that, because it’s perfect. I added some participation in the banquet scenes, calling on the audience for their favourite meals: ‘Yes! They had pizza there too, covered in basil and oozing mozzarella!’ Stories evolve. A storyteller needs to give them space to change and grow and flow.

I don’t know how long it took to tell The Magic Bowls – only that it was my longest piece so far, and by some distance. Perhaps 20 minutes? I probably could have timed it or something, but also: much of my joy in storytelling is how ephemeral it is. In a world where so many things are digital and pinned into pixels forever, I like the fleeting moments. I talked too fast at times I think. I need to learn to dwell in some images for longer, not least to vary the pace throughout. I reckon this will come with experience.

Our circle will meet again in a month or two – no idea what I’ll tell, but I’ve a huge list of stories to learn, stories that really sing to me; stories of trees and bees, stories of loss and belonging, and stories which might not be stories at all, half-images summoned from the depths of murky memory. Leviathans inside us all – born with stories already in the cords of our beings.

Gobbleknoll

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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.

Open up.

I want a word with you.

Telling tales

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I’ve recently finished a 10-week storytelling course run by Emily Hennessey and Nick Hennessey of Stealing Thunder storynights. It’s one of the best things I’ve ever done. It’s taken me a while to process to the point that I can write something about it, and in truth I am still digesting, still chewing it over.

Readers of this blog will know I have a longstanding fascination for myths, legends and folktales – that is after all the substance at the heart of The Visitors – but this was the first time I’d ever explored performance skills in any depth. I loved being challenged physically and emotionally and narratively. I loved having my barriers knocked down and becoming something of a child again – finding wonder. I loved learning how folk tales strip away the layers and layers of window dressing we pile onto our stories, opening up the bones of what a story truly says. I loved the simplicity of it; how the arrangement of those bones bring meaning and comfort and magic. Many tellers, many tellings… I learned how stories float like seeds, and different storytellers bring radically different interpretations. I learned some of how the body and voice capture the story, can make it even more simple – a gesture, an almost imperceptible tilt of the eyebrows or the shoulders.

In truth I’m still reeling with it, still counting the distance travelled in those 10 weeks. I finished by telling The Pear Drum, an old English folktale – a caution to naughty children. I loved that too. I loved watching my peers on the course tell their stories – Bridie with Toller’s Neighbours and a line of lanterns in the dark – Ginny and the Grimms, clutching a severed head and dripping three drops of blood on the stairs – Jules and a selkie story, a seal pup in an apron. Magic happened in that horseshoe of chairs.

Above all, I loved the immediacy and urgency of the dynamic between the story, the storyteller and the audience. It happens in a heartbeat and is gone. For all the work I’ve done in prose, screenplay and film, for all my work in screen editing and story editing, for all the books I’ve read and words I’ve written – I don’t think I’ve felt so connected to the pulse of story that beats in us all. Story is in our DNA, knotted in the fibres of our souls. Story is the thing that makes us human.

I don’t quite know what to do with all of this just yet – only that I want to do something, I need to do something. This course has really lit a fire in me. I want to stay alight.

Turn On Tune In

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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’s Propellor 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?

Grey rubble, green shoots

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2024 then eh? Completed it mate. Somehow. This has been a really hard year for almost everyone I know. I’m not going to dig into the difficulties here – I’ll try to focus on the good things that happened and move onwards in good heart. The headline is that I’m ultimately fine, and so are my family, and I’m fiercely aware the same can’t be said for many millions of others. Enough to say that I’m quietly pleased to be moving to a new calendar.

The systemic implosion of TV and documentary commissioning has had a huge impact on my work this year. I understand this as a bit of a perfect storm, with the inevitable rebalancing of the post-Covid bubble exactly at the crisis point of new media’s schism with broadcast media – just as AI nibbles into post-production crewing. In truth the industry probably needs this time of reckoning, but it still hurts. Between January and June, in the absence of other jobs, and in combination with looking after poorly family, I instead wrote a novel and took on a term teaching at Kendal College. That carried me into the summer, and from there my editing work picked up. In recent months I’ve cut films for Cumbria Wildlife Trust and Beyond The View, as well as writing/script editing and cutting the trailer for Kendal Mountain Festival 2024:

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…I enjoyed that one – both the editing and the words, which I wrote in collaboration with outgoing festival creative director Claire Carter. Right after the festival I cut the KMF highlights reel, and also a brilliant performance by classical clarinettist Jack McNeill at an iconic Lake District location. I’m really excited for people to see that, but it’s Jack’s to share, so I’ll wait for him to release it before posting it here.

2024 brought more voiceover poems – the second for a map-making company in the US, and the third is here in the opening minutes of this excellent documentary about Sandscale Haws nature reserve:

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My biggest project this year was editing a documentary about the Refugees Rock charity, but that won’t be released until January – so I’ll share it and say more about it then.

Two of my highlights of the year came at concerts. The first was realising a 24-year ambition to see Godspeed You! Black Emperor live. Their seminal album Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas To Heaven was released in the year 2000, immediately and completely transforming the shape and momentum of my listening. It was the first time I’d heard field recordings folded into music, and that returned me to my early teenage years, where I stayed up late with my radio, inching through frequencies, FM then AM then MW, seeking out broadcasts on the very edge of listening. That experience – snatches of voice and song like ghosts in clouds of white noise – made me a ghost myself, another traveller lost in static. Political, defiantly analogue, wild and ferociously human, Lift Your Skinny Fists is my favourite album, and I’ve loved almost everything GYBE have released since – but I’ve never had the chance to catch them live. I bought tickets the moment they announced a UK tour for the new record. Mon and I caught them in Manchester, and they were everything I’d dreamed of for those 24 years – by turns devastating and euphoric, utterly transporting, great walls and waves of sound collapsing into chasms of silence. The live concert took all the craft and the bones of the records and piled on blood and muscle and power. It was extraordinary. The title of this post – Grey Rubble, Green Shoots – is taken from the new album. Seems fitting.

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The second gig was neither wild nor fierce but was equally special. At the start of the year I spotted Orcadian composer Erland Cooper due to perform at St Mary’s Church in Ambleside as part of the brilliant Aerial Festival – an unambiguously artistic celebration of the connections between music and land that casts a spell across the Lakes every autumn. I already knew some of Cooper’s work, and his record Folded Landscapes is a core part of my writing soundtrack – more on this in a second – but I didn’t really know what to expect from this concert. It was the premiere of his new work Carve The Runes And Then Be Content With Silence – written several years ago, recorded onto a single magnetic tape reel which was then buried until such point as it was discovered. Read that last sentence again. Cooper buried the only copy of the recording – and when it was discovered and dug up, he rewrote the score around the warping and degradations of those years in the soil. Where the tape had stretched – that stretching was factored into the final score. Where the tape was destroyed, lacunas of silence now punctuate the piece.

Unapologetically rooted in the seas and skies of Orkney, Cooper often uses birdsong, field recordings, poetry and oral history in his work (much like Godspeed You! Black Emperor, now I think of it) and so it was with Carve The Runes, interspersed with snippets of poems by George Mackay Brown. Uprooted and planted again in Ambleside, the concert was a work of extraordinary beauty, movements both melancholy and uplifting. Performed by the BBC Symphony Orchestra, the concert made me realise that I had never experienced live classical music before – by which I mean unamplified. The sound filled the church like air… it didn’t feel to me to enter my brain through my ears but to exist in my mind spontaneously through an act of communion with the people and the place. I’ve never experienced anything quite like it. Mon and I floated home as though carried by the fog.

That novel then. I’ve been brewing on it for years, and had about 20,000 words of notes to work from. I started writing in January and had a 90,000 word manuscript finished in May, which I think is pretty good around the other things I had going on. I sent it to a dozen excellent reader/writer friends, and took receipt of some strong and consistent feedback. My redraft now needs redrafting, but I hope to get through those tweaks and send it out in January. It’s more speculative/fantastical than The Visitors, but it covers the ground I wanted to cover. It’s the book I wanted to write – about loss, and change, and grief, and awe. I’m long enough of tooth to know that doesn’t mean it’s a book people will want to publish or indeed to read, and that’s okay. In the past I’ve spent years working on novels I didn’t believe in, but I believe in this one. Even if I can’t find a publisher I’m glad I wrote it.

I think that’s enough for now. It’s been a hard year, and I’m glad to shut the door on it. I go into 2025 with my family around me and a good sense of the things I’d like to do with my time in this world… I might even lay down another Resolutions blog post… not least resolving to write about things like Godspeed You Black Emperor when they happen, rather than accumulate the weight of so many things to write about that I never actually have the time to write them. Should probably have worked that out by now…

Much love to you people. Heading into 2025 like Lindow Man:

First with the berries, then with the blade,
third with the noose and then with the stave
baptised in bog and cast into drown
throne cut from sod, moss for a crown
so I go to meet my god:
headfirst in water
a mouthful of mud

Scraps

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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.

Under the hammer

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A year at least, I think, since I posted anything; it’s been a time of change. In Easter 2023 I made the monumental decision to leave Kendal College, where I taught the Film Production course for 12 years. While I always loved teaching the students, the job itself changed radically in that decade, and honestly I was becoming unwell. Leaving was an exceptionally difficult decision… but also the right one. I’m a different person for stepping away. I didn’t realise at the time how heavy a thing it was to carry.

So what next? I’ve left to pursue freelance editing and to carve out time to write. I haven’t exactly stopped writing, but I’ve written far more screenplays than prose, and when I sit down with my novel it’s increasingly hard to pull the right words together. That’s a part of myself I want back, and I understand it needs work. My novel has been stalled at 30,000 words for over a year while other projects called me away; last week I sat down and wrote 500 words on it. That felt good. I want more of that feeling. Writing is a muscle: use it or lose it.

What else? I’ve finally released The Potter’s Field. There’s a lot I’d do differently if I was starting again, and overall the process confirmed I’m more of a writer and editor than a director – but I’m also exceptionally proud of what we pulled together on a shoestring. Particular shouts for Jenny Ann McKay and Marie Rabe, my sensational lead actors. They had incredible chemistry from the very first rehearsal, and it was all I could do to get out of their way. I’m proud to share The Potter’s Field:

I’m also thrilled to announce the release of Maggie, a short horror I wrote for the talented James Kennedy. James has done a phenomenal job with my script, and the performances by Shaun Scott (he of Moon Knight, The Bill) and Lukwesa Mwamba (she of Carnival Row, Doctors) are so good. The film won awards all over the world and has now been picked up by horror channel Alter, where it was seen by 50,000 people in the first two weeks – very humbling. I’m now working on a feature film based around the same characters. I’m not naturally drawn to horror, and I don’t mind admitting that plunging back into this world has given me a few sleepless nights…

I also wrote, co-produced and edited this promotional piece for Impact International. It was a challenging brief and I’m really pleased with how it turned out:

My other work of note was cutting 1h30m of drama scenes for the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. I put myself through a mangle to get the first cut delivered inside a week; a few months later, as I was teaching myself some new software, I went back to recut my favourite scene, Hand To God. Brilliant acting – mind the language though…

There have been some other commercial edits, and a little copyediting work – but the big news is that I’ve done some editing for the iconic BBC property show Homes Under The Hammer. It’s been an absolute blast cutting Homes – I’ve loved every moment. Back for another shift just before Christmas.

To tie all this together, I set up a website as a portfolio for my editing – if you’re interested in my other work, mosey over to SimonSylvesterEditor.com for loads more films.

Now what? I’ve just finished a short doc called Red Needle that I can’t share till the new year; that’s some of the best work I’ve done, I think. I’m redrafting my feature script for Maggie – after a couple of months away and some good feedback, I can see that I need to cut some characters and some locations, to condense and combine and simplify. The core of the story is good, but I’ve added too much around it. I sometimes think that screenwriting is as much about the things you don’t write as the things you do.

There’s more to say – I’ve rediscovered a childhood hobby, I’ve been to France, I’ve started swimming in the Lakes – but I’ll keep the powder dry on that lot. I’d like to get back to blogging more often – use it or lose it, right? …and so I’ll leave myself some things to talk about.