On the Tenth Day of Christmas My True Love Sent to Me...

...Ten Lords a-Leaping. Lucky old me!
Over Christmas I went to see the Bristol Old Vic's anarchic and inventive production of Peter Pan. Rather than have conventional flying, Peter, Wendy and the Lost Boys used bungee ropes to convey the magic of their flight to Neverland, which was set in a graffiti-strewn urban back alley, with plenty of lords a leaping, tumbling and skirmishing.

There was none of the sentimentality of JM Barrie's original, but Tristram Sturrock's wild eyed, athletic Peter was mesmerising. The reason I'm talking about it in a creative writing blog is that it demonstrates the power and potential of revisiting an established idea and turning it on its head. I went with my nephews, Gabriel (nine) and Louis (six) - hello boys - and they were as open-mouthed with wonder as I was at this old story turned into something new and bold and original. Don't be afraid to take risks with your work, to be subversive, and remember that originality doesn't necessarily mean coming up with something no one else has thought of, but can be most potent when you re-examine something familiar with a fresh eye. That's often what takes the breath away.

As a little postscript, my great-grandfather was an actor called Arthur Whitby and he played the Rev George Amy in the original production of Mary Rose, also by JM Barrie.  Arthur asked Barrie if he would go and see my grandmother in a play as she was just beginning her career in the theatre. Here is the great man's reply.

He says, "Yes I shall go in and see your girl one night. And be very interested to see a child of yours. I didn't know that Mr Amy had any family but I have just now enlarged the vicarage and plumbed in a charming bathroom. You might suggest this in your performance. (I believe you could do it)."

All Barried out now - see you next week!

An Alphabet of Better Writing # O

O is for...Originality

Some people claim that there are only seven basic plots, or four, or that all the great stories have been written and that the novel is dead in any case.  If you listen to all of that, you may as well put your pencil back in its case/shut down your computer right now. All is not lost, however: in the words of jazz musicians Melvyn Oliver and James Young, it ain't what you say, it's the way that you say it...

It's easy to tie yourself into literary knots in the quest for originality, straining after increasingly fantastical stories and more fractured and convoluted ways of telling them, but I suspect the answer may be simpler than that.  What makes your work original is that it is written by you (this is also a potent argument against plagiarism -- just don't go there, unless you stringently and respectfully acknowledge your sources).  What marks it out from the work of any other writer, is that you will have brought your own experience and vision of the world to bear upon the writing of it.  French winemakers have a word for it: terroir.  This is the effect that climate and geology have upon their precious grapes -- a pinot noir grown on one slope will be immeasurably different from one grown a little further down the field.

It's the same with writers. You will bring your experience of love, loss, betrayal, redemption, or any of the endlessly engrossing themes of literature to bear upon the story you are telling.  Your insight into the workings of jealousy will be different from mine, the story you will write about it will be a world apart from the one I might attempt.

If originality is something which exercises you, then rather than groping for new stories to tell, you could use your time much more productively in developing your own voice.  This is a process of distillation that involves drafting and redrafting -- an Olympian authorial fitness plan of editing, reading, listening and thinking.  There's plenty of precedent for telling old stories in a new way -- think Chaucer, think Shakespeare, get writing...

Summer Shorts - Originality

The great David Lodge's fantastically helpful book The Art of Fiction contains some interesting and original thoughts on, well, originality.  He says, "The essential purpose of art is to overcome the deadening effects of habit by presenting familiar things in unfamiliar ways." You should take this to heart, as it is a crucial part of what makes a story interesting. To sharpen up your way of looking at things, follow his advice and take something with which you are incredibly familiar -- it could be a place, or a person, or even or a fairy story plot - and rework it into something fresh and unusual.  Stamp your own personal vision onto it, because no matter how mundane it is nobody will see it in quite the way that you do.

This One's Mine

Your originality is what marks you out as a writer from everybody else.  When you read articles saying that there are only four basic narratives, or seven, (or even twenty-five), it can be tempting to think that the chances of coming up with something fresh are less than zero, but take heart...

Even Shakespeare snaffled other people's plots, making them so utterly his own that his sources have been completely eclipsed. When I'm teaching creative writing and set my group a subject to write about, I'm always astonished at how completely different all their stories are. This is largely because each of us bring our own particular talents and experiences to bear. It seems to me that (as with happiness) the answer lies in the little things, right down at the nuts and bolts level.  One student will describe something as hot, another as febrile, and already we're in different territories, doing different things.


If you want to put this to the test, try describing something that is incredibly familiar to you - the walk from home to school, or answering the phone and hearing the voice of someone you love - with a fresh eye.  Infuse what you are describing with your own uniqueness, so that it is coloured with how you are feeling as you write, whether you slept well the night before, even whether you are cold but don't want to stop writing in order to put the heating on. Bring to bear on your work all the different reference points which mean something to you, and you will truly own what you are writing about, it will be unmistakably yours, an original...