Morning After Mayhem

Nottingham, Festival of Words team prepare to launch
@wordsnovel as part of Word of Mouth at Mayhem

What a great night!
I met a load of really interesting people at Mayhem last night - a great combination of Mayhem fans (including a chap whose horror make up was eye-wateringly good) and Broadway cinemagoers who had just come out of seeing Skyfall (all very impressed with Mr Bond).

The lineup was great - classic takes on old stories, archive chillers from the seventies and early eighties projected on the wall, and me.

It's my second time I've had work showcased in Word of Mouth at Mayhem, but my first where I did the reading.  I wrote The Good Books specifically for Mayhem - taking all my memories of watching Hammer House of Horror behind a cushion on a Friday night, and rolls them up into a tale that creeps up on you like an odd smell...

Two (A5) pages in to The Good Books at
Mayhem (pic: Robin Vaughan-Williams)

It's a nerve racking thing, standing up in front of an audience and reading your work, but when you don't have Tom Baker's telephone number, you've got to do it.  It's part of being a writer, talking through your work, and getting immediate feedback from people during and after the performance.  It was lovely to chat about how I wrote the story, what parts people enjoyed, and watch other writers perform their work.


If you're thinking about doing it yourself, there's loads of advice on the interweb telling you how to do it, but here's my one tip-top tip:


A5 printouts.  No, really.

When you've finished writing, change the document page size to A5 on your word processor, and print it two pages at a time on your A4 printer.  Cut in half, staple into paperpack-sized notes, and never worry about your story wilting over half way through - you've got enough to concentrate on when you're presenting a chunk of your soul.

Hope that makes sense:  if it doesn't, I'll show you what I mean when I perform at the next Word of Mouth in November - more details later...

If you're still in need of a chill, Mayhem runs until the 4th November - for more info, take a look here.

Telling

Show don’t tell, show don’t tell, show don’t tell.


Every time I write, I work hard to do the former and not the latter; it’s more satisfying for the reader to work out the clues that lead them to discover that X has an unresolved past with Y, than it is for someone to say it (Mike Myers made ‘telling’ rather than showing a character in itself, which is why some parts of my first drafts were a ‘bit too Basil Exposition’- but hey, it’s a first draft – better to see Basil than a blank page).  It's harder work, but important work; when I read or hear dialogue which tells rather than shows, at best it takes me out of the story; at worst, I start rewriting in my head while the story's still progressing (bad habit, but at least I don’t say what I’m rewriting anymore- usually).

It wasn’t always this way – exposition prologues have been around for as long as people have stood in front of crowds and told stories, told to the audience before a single player has crossed the stage.  As audiences became more savvy and sophisticated, they fell out of fashion, leaving us to discover what happens at the same time as the characters, or perhaps a little ahead if the writer leaves us a trail to follow.  Which is why I’m so impressed with The Shadow Line on BBC2. 

Hugo Blick’s script brilliantly shows rather than tells – the story of a drug baron’s murder simultaneously investigated by the police, and the criminal fraternity around him.  The characters are complex and engaging,  and imagery is superb (the juxtapositon between Detective Jonah Gabriel’s brand new, high-spec Audi and smuggler Joseph Bede’s older, scruffier model of the same car says buckets about how both sides feel they have to portray themselves without saying a word).

So far, so great – but the thing that impressed me the most is the opening sequence where two uniformed officers discover the victim.  The story could have competently started with the news of the murder reported in a phone call to smuggler Joseph Bede, and the arrival of Detective Gabriel at the crime scene; but Blick has brilliantly fused the ancient tradition of prologue with noir filmaking, and a multi-layered storyline – and I know it’s good because I wished I’d thought of it.


Can’t wait until the next episode.  If I’ve enthused enough to make you want to see the first part, get it on BBC iPlayer while you can: http://www.bbc.co.uk/i/b0110msr/