Friday Writing Experiment No. 38: Adventures In Time And Space

by Andrew | Leave a comment

Last night (and we nearly missed it) we caught the fantastic tv film Adventures In Time And Space, about the creation fifty years ago of Dr Who. The writer, Mark Gatiss, did a very affectionate piece about the making of it in yesterday’s Telegraph, and he’s also made a lovely short about the film too (and what else other than genius might we expect from anyone involved with the very brilliant League of Gentlemen).

I had maybe expected something designed for today’s fanboys and girls, and there was plenty of that, for sure. But what was perhaps more powerful was the genuine pathos the film established, particularly in the depiction by David Bradley of William Hartnell, who played the first Doctor. I also loved the portraits of producer Verity Lambert and director Waris Hussein breaking glass ceilings, and I’d forgotten that the first transmission went out the day after Kennedy’s assassination (did Lambert really insist on it being repeated the following week?!). It was a real nostalgia trip to a golden age of television at the BBC. It reminded me of a recent walk along the Thames in Hammersmith, when we stumbled across the former Lime Grove studios. It also reminded me of Dr Who annuals.

It also took me back to the age of four, when Daleks ruled in black and white and terror bolted me to the sofa in Cherry Tree Cottage. Back then, we didn’t have the immediate gratification of watching next week’s episode over on More4 or catching up on what we missed on iPlayer; we had to wait for next Saturday, part of the nation’s (or even Terry Nation’s) collective hivemind.

As I type this, Dr Who is covered on a story on the ten o’clock news on BBC1, soon to be followed by the last two Doctor Whos on the sofa with Graham Norton, while simultaneously on BBC2 the Culture Show is doing a special, which among other things shows Valerie Singleton creating chocolate Daleks out of Walnut Whips and Smarties (talk about nostalgia). I love it that the BBC is so shameless in plugging one of its treasures, but also that it’s being acknowledged as a Google doodle.

I’ve not always been the greatest of fans of the revived versions, for some reason I’ve not been able to put my finger on. The plots, story ingredients, and performers are strong, after all. Maybe I am a bit stick in the mud, and maybe I’ve found these productions a bit too run-around and chasey and shouty? And sometimes a bit mawkish in a soapy kind of way (though maybe that is a generational thing – hard-faced oldster speaking here, reflecting on how Coronation Street now feels more Hollyoaks than Alan Bennett). And their special effects are (mostly) too good, and thus suffer in comparison with the beloved creakiness of those primitive yet very striking sets of the 60s and 70s, greatly enhanced by over-the-top music.

Taking these thoughts further, something that occurred to me last night was that the low-budget productions back then were served well by things considered constraints: the close focus on those stagey sets, the overwrought mannerisms hamming up clunky dialogue, that music, those cliffhangers. And no colour back at the start, but no loss in that, really. And most haunting of all, that theme tune made on a shoestring in the Radiophonic Workshop by Delia Derbyshire. (Who could invent a name like that?) Even the Tardis was a constraint in itself – an exercise in expansiveness. We knew that set was some flimsy, wobbly cellophane confection, but it was a thing of wonder. We were forced to use our imaginations, and our emotional investment spilled over. There could be great tension within the limits of these productions.

For this week’s writing experiment: Spin some magic within a very tight constraint you’ve created for yourself. Maybe a very confined space, and/or a very short span of time. You could, perhaps, create a time-travelling spaceship-in-disguise of your own, but if science fiction is not your genre perhaps you can compress lots of meaningful action into one small room that contains far more than its appearance might suggest. A small room could also be a small and very tightly organised but allusive stanza of poetry.

And now, too, we hear that the Clangers are coming back! Eek. I can’t take it! Long live the BBC.

Friday Writing Experiment No. 37: Old Friends, New Faces

by Andrew | Leave a comment

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Today I am in Rome. My life isn’t usually so Hilda Hatbox, but it’s my old flatmate Milva’s fiftieth birthday party (you’d never guess she’s a day over twenty-five, though she is wearing Harold Lloyd specs now). Various old friends have come in from different places – London, Sweden, New York, Germany – and also in attendance will be friends from Italy as well as Milva’s family. The party tomorrow should be a jolly event, and this evening some of us are eating at a restaurant in the Jewish quarter – deep-fried artichokes, I’m told. Also today squeezed in an exhibition on Augustus (their penises were really, really small in the olden days, weren’t they?! even the emperors! I mean, you’d think an emperor …), and some lite Xmas/selfie shopping at a market nearby (shirt, Tibetan singing bowl, nail file set, scarves, plus a final touch for my outfit for tomorrow night’s sixties-themed birthday party – it does feel a bit Grande Bellezza, doesn’t it?!). Even managed to fit in some shopping at the Basilica of San Giovanni. New pope tat abounds. Oh, and had a fantastic bowl of pasta and two glasses of fruity red wine for lunch.

But that’s all the selfish stuff. I am also remembering visiting Milva a couple of years ago. We looked at old photos from when she shared a flat more than twenty years ago. We were so young! We could have wept. Those innocent faces. Where did the years go?

It will be great fun to see people tonight and tomorrow. It’s been so long! Life moves along, but then fortunately it has occasions when we all come back together.

For this week’s writing experiment: write about a reunion. Old friends, new faces – because old friends have newer (and older) friends and lovers they bring along too. This can be based on a real-life gathering, or an imagined gathering of real people, or it could be purely fictional. Bring your people/characters to life with a couple of details, though not too much slavish description, perhaps. Let them come alive with interaction, dialogue, and memory, as well as a sense of where they might head next.

Friday Writing Experiment No. 36: Second Homes

by Andrew | 8 Comments

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I’ve just returned from a trip to Boulder. It was wonderful to be back there. Through my eyes I breathed in the vast open spaces of the high plains, the Front Range rising in the distance. Ah! That vista conjures up so much. I felt back home.

I took two buses to Loveland, thinking that Loveland, Colorado is one of the most magical names a town could dream of. When I changed buses I stood under a tremendous old tree in Longmont, and thought of Sal Paradise sleeping under a tremendous old tree in Longmont in On The Road. I beheld an even more tremendous old tree in the great sycamore that Naropa’s Arapahoe campus is built around.

I befriended a dog and a cat and a parrot, and saw again an old-friend dog and an old-friend cat, and I read some of a book about dogs, and I heard stories about squirrels and raccoons. I also heard some shocking stories about the floods in Colorado, about streets turned into rivers and houses swept away and rain that was silver and hammering, and shocking simply because it was so there. I went for a walk along Pine Street, visiting great friends as well as Mork and Mindy, and then passing by the house where we used to live, and finally heading to the Boulder Public Library, where I saw more flood damage.

I ate chile rellenos, and deep-fried Brussels sprouts, and espresso-glazed donuts, and an apple and kale salad that must rank among the best things I’ve ever eaten. Gluten-free has replaced soy as dietary neurosis. Lots of homeless people. I meandered down Pearl Street, and bought books in my favourite bookshops (the Boulder Book Store, Red Letter, and Trident); the weight of the twenty-five of them in our luggage confirm that print is not dead. I thrilled for various friends’ publications past, present and future. I went to yoga, and was taught how to speak to plants. I saw many old friends. Seeing old friends and meeting new ones was probably the best part of this trip.

A particular highlight was visiting a class at Naropa. Thank you for making me welcome, o writers of Experimental Prose, and for giving me a copper heart from the class shrine. Afterwards, I realised, this gift made me feel like the Tin Man. And there was I thinking I was more like Dorothy. (Ella: you make a great Wizard. Bhanu: you are a great teacher.)

This reminds me of another Dorothy, a member of the British Airways staff we befriended on trips through Denver airport when we lived in Colorado. She was English, from Malvern. She’d married an airman and moved to Colorado, another Dorothy in the wide open spaces of the American West, but this one a Midlander. She had the best stories, the best lines. ‘Here, have a bottle of champagne and a crap sandwich.’ ‘Have rods been through these?’ (She was talking about curtains, relative to customer service in England.) We like to think we are friends of Dorothy. And there’s no place like home. This Dorothy had homes in two places.

Even though my home is now London, Boulder will always feel like home to me in some way or other too. For various reasons, and because life is always complicated (and yes, these are First World problems), living in Boulder was not always easy, just as now living in London is not always easy, as any Londoner will agree, and as I discussed with natives of London in Colorado. And just as complicated are the attachments and nostalgias you can feel for a place you’ve left. Home is such a rich idea, but it can be complicated, can’t it?

But life goes on, and we make accommodations, and indeed we use the power of that word accommodate to settle ourselves into a place. What was instructive, a while back, was one of those Colorado-resident natives of London telling me that Boulder would always be a home for me. Even if I’m not living there, it simply occupies a space within me, and I just have to create space for that and let it be. It’s as easy as that. If we think in practical terms (a flight, a passport), every now and then we can physically go home again too: it’s always there, available, if we let it. And of course we are lucky today to have other ways to maintain connections too (Facebook has its uses). But most of all it’s a state of mind, or maybe the heart. The Dorothy stranded in Oz was looking for home, and eventually found home was wherever she made it, and perhaps however she made it; there’s no place like home, and that was Oz as much as Kansas.

I’m thinking too of the powerful conclusion of The Satanic Verses, and the ways in which its characters succeed (or fail) at creating homes for themselves. So many great and well-loved books are about the search for home.

For this week’s writing experiment: Write yourself back to another home of your own that you created for yourself. Somewhere you know well, even though you are no longer there. Somewhere you made home (rather than the home you were born into). A place you can return to, maybe. If you want, do this for a character of your creating. Or fashion an ‘I Remember’ out of your reminiscences of what once made someplace your home.

Establish a setting, and maybe people this landscape with a memorable character or two. Think about tone, maybe write with affection, and to bring that place to life you’ll probably need (as ever) concrete and specific details. 

Friday Writing Experiment No. 35: Bring In The Light

by Andrew | Leave a comment

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In recent and forthcoming weeks we celebrate Diwali, Bonfire Night, Halloween, All Hallows aka the Day of the Dead, the changing of the clocks, the onset of winter. A time to remember that life is made of cycles, and that winter is a time of rest for the earth. A time to hunker down with good books and writing projects. A time for the indoors, for making fires.

I remember visiting Sweden one January, and being charmed by the presence of candlelight everywhere. Candles flickering in little glass snowballs on cafe tables, darting in a deep red bowl on the high windowsill of some apartment. A hotel in Stockholm is even designed with mood lighting in mind, and the bedside lamps are programmed to light up the rooms in soft shades – blue or orange or indigo, or cycling through the rainbow if you desire. It struck me that the Scandinavians really make an effort to bring light into their lives at this time when daylight is at a minimum.

Light. Life. Love. Clarity.

For this week’s writing experiment, consider how you can bring light into a piece of writing. You can do this literally, e.g., devoting an ode to a candle or writing a story that involves lamplight. Or you can consider things figuratively, and work out how some concept of light might bring a piece of writing to life, or maybe help you revise a piece that needs some assistance.

You might also want to consider an earlier writing experiment that tasks you on writing by candlelight.

Friday Writing Experiment No. 34: Windy Ditties

by Andrew | Leave a comment

The clocks are turning back tonight, and the path’s twirling with red and yellow leaves because it’s getting very blustery out there. High winds are predicted over the next few days, which made me think about winds in literature. Shelley’s ‘Ode To The West Wind’. ‘Windy Nights’ by Robert Louis Stevenson. The cyclone that gathers up Dorothy and Toto in The Wizard Of Oz. Mary Poppins blows in on a wind (you want to skip to 2:01 there, rosy cheeks and everything), and of course all those answers are blowin’ there too in the Bob Dylan song. Gone With The Wind, The Shadow Of The Wind, Written On The Wind, The Wind In The Willows. In Tibetan Buddhist philosophy the windhorse holds a central place representing basic goodness, and most mythologies have gods or goddesses of the wind.

I was reaching for the memory of how Cathy’s ghost visits Lockwood at the start of Wuthering Heights, and turned to my tatty Penguin Classic: ‘I heard distinctly the gusty wind, and the driving of the snow.’ Then duh! Of course, ‘wuther‘ is a word that describes the wind (‘dialect English to blow with a dull roaring sound’).

And is there any song more lovely and more haunting than Kate Bush’s ‘Wuthering Heights’? But is it out on the ‘wiley’, ‘wild and’, or ‘winding’ ‘windy moors?! I’m not sure I ever figured that out. We used to singalong with ‘winding’ as kids. Ah!

For this week’s writing experiment: Compose something that uses the wind. A character that blows in on a wind, either literally or metaphorically. An ode to the wind, or a haiku (I’m thinking haiku are often very still, but do they have to be?!). A tale about a windy deity, or a story that uses the wind in some other way, or maybe just a piece that uses wind in the title. Maybe look up wind-related words in an etymology. Blow out the cobwebs with some revision of an old piece by writing a wind into it. Consider how you too can conjure up all the romance and associative power and elemental energy of this force of nature.

As ever, be concrete and specific in your choices in writing.