The Exercise Book Live: a review by Kate Mahony

(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.