(13, 14, 15 June)
The event – a live workshop – promised to
let the audience in on what it was like to attend those held at the International
Institute of Modern Letters at Victoria University in Wellington. This particular evening, among the full house
at Bats Theatre in Wellington, I spotted any number of people for whom the
class would not be an eye-opener (Damien Wilkins, Emily Perkins, Chris Price, Elizabeth
Knox, and VUP’s Fergus Barrowman, to name a few; clearly there were some
current students in the audience as well.) But for others who may have wondered
what does actually happen in these workshops, this was a good rendition, if perhaps
a rather well-behaved and possibly rather earnest one.
According to the publicity material, the
“student writers” for that evening had written their stories in response to an
exercise devised by Kate Duignan (found on page 94 in VUP’s The Exercise Book).
The exercise, Negotiating with the Dead, is designed to force the writers to
“jump the tracks and leave the world we know…” thereby producing something
“nicely ominous and noir-ish.”
Each student had read the others’ stories
ahead of time, but they hadn’t seen the notes each wrote to each other in
response to the work. This meant the workshop scene hadn’t been rehearsed (nor
the “ums” staged). What we were getting was what might happen in real time.
For many of us in the audience, our first
glimpse of the work was a series of one page excerpts handed out by
director/producer Pip Adam in the bar at Bats before the show – a lively
meeting place but not really ideal for a quick read. On stage, the writers read
aloud from these one-pagers. What the audience didn’t see (unless they had seen
a link to it on Facebook, which was apparently not there the day after the show)
was the full text. I had Googled the event before attending but the actual
texts had not shown up. A friend commented that he would have liked to have
read the entire stories ahead of time and thus had a better grasp of the
comments.
That said, the audience clearly enjoyed the
humour in some of the excerpts with laughter particularly during the extract
from Headaches by Kerry Donovan-Brown, and also Emma Martin’s Big Sister,
Little Sister.
The comments from the students of the
chosen writer, in general represented the kinds of remarks made in many a
writing workshop: a story might feel “a
bit show and tell, with a tendency to tell readers what the character is
feeling,” or that there was a risk that the reader didn’t particularly care
over much what happened to the narrator.
One had a few “logistical issues, in terms of timeline”. With another, the
reader had to spend time unpacking some of the sentences trying to work out
what was happening and what was important. The working out what the “what the
story was really about” comment came up, as did whether a story was really part
of something bigger or was indeed meant to stop where it did. (The writer owned
up to just stopping it there.)
For people interested in the craft of
writing, it was all very valuable stuff, if at times distinctly hard to catch,
due to one or two of the people on stage having soft voices, and possibly the
acoustics at Bats. Would it not have been possible for the writers to have been
“miked”?
I was interested to hear facilitator Lawrence
Patchett point out that the exercise called for the writers to write a “First
person piece in which the dead are given voice”. Author Emma Martin was the
only one to keep to this rule! (But that’s creative writing students for you,
or as one writer cheerfully confessed, he wasn’t good at following
instructions. “I saw the word ‘dead’ and went for that”.)
As for the “exercises”, a great question
from Lawrence. Workshops are known for their exercises, but when alone and
wanting to write, did the writers actually use them? From two participants came
this: doesn’t usually but did use one
from a workshop and this has now a part in his novel, the other said she was not
a big one for writing exercises.
Overall, an evening that was perhaps more
informative – earnest? – than entertaining, with many similarities to the kinds
of “The author in interview with…” events more often run at lunchtimes.
That said, I went prepared for the next
Exercises event, Building a Script, the following evening: ready to bag a front
row seat (so as to hear everything!), and by good chance bumped into the
facilitator Dave Armstrong on the way in. Forewarned, he then boomed at the
audience, “Can you all hear me?’ and when one student spoke with hand across
his mouth, got him to repeat.
In contrast to the quieter atmosphere of
the previous evening, the scriptwriting event encouraged interactive audience
participation. Each student gave us a rundown of their main character (for a
script) and the facilitator and other students shot rapid fire questions at
them. “Which flatmate does she like best?’ “What does he like to eat?” “What
kind of car was it?’(The writer could make any reply except, “I don’t know”.)
The energy was no less when it was opened
up to the (smaller than the previous evening’s) audience, with people firing
questions one after the other: “Have you done any forensic research into that
part of the plot?” and “How old was she when she lost her virginity?” It was
clear that some of the questions took the writers by surprise (especially the
one about why the mortician who kept his parents’ stuffed bodies in the living
room of his house didn’t like his two young children. It seemed no matter what
the writer answered, the audience found a way to probe deeper!)
Most useful to any aspiring writer would be
the pearls of scriptwriting wisdom Dave Armstrong imparted along with other
discussion. Such was the interest in the questioning process, less time was
allowed for a second exercise in a change of status or value in a drama or
comedy: the key point at which the drama and conflict really gets going and
when change occurs. However, each student did get to showcase their individual
script for a scene based on this premise.
About the reviewer
Wellington writer Kate Mahony is well
versed in the ways of workshops having been a student in William Brandt’s Short
Fiction course (IIML 2005), Bill Manhire’s MA in Creative Writing (IIML 2006)
and the Iowa novel workshop (2007). A long time ago, she spent a week at the
Arvon Foundation’s residential writing workshop at Totleigh Barton in the UK.
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