Learning from the other arts - Alex English

I'm a sucker for writing books and like many other ABBA bloggers (Rowena springs to mind!) I have shelves full of guides. Recently, I've tried looking further afield to other art forms to see what I can learn and whether I can apply it to writing. Here's what I've found:

Photo by Jake Hills on Unsplash

Screenwriting

There are multitudes of screenwriting books that many novelists use already. Screenwriters are by necessity very strong on structure due to the huge budgets and fixed time-constraints of the screen. In this sense, a screenplay is very similar to a picture book. You can't overrun an episode of EastEnders by ten minutes any more than you can stretch out a picture book story to 17 spreads.

Key takeaways: read about screenwriting if you want to get your head around plot and structure

Recommended reads: Story by Robert McKee, Into the Woods by John Yorke, Save the Cat by Blake Snyder (just to get you started, there are many, many more).

Photo by Nick Karvounis on Unsplash

Songwriting

I somehow stumbled upon reading Pat Pattison's songwriting tips, and I've found them very helpful for writing rhyming picture books. While poetry books often focus on blank verse, songwriting looks more closely at rhyme and rhythm, which is just what's needed for a picture book. I've never really learned how to write in rhyme, and most picture book writing guides don't cover it thoroughly.

Key takeaways: Chapter 4 has a guide to building a 'worksheet' – in brief a sort of brainstorm-on-paper of ideas and rhymes associated with the themes of the song you are writing. I tend to write my story in prose before turning it into rhyme, and now I'm going to try including a rhyme worksheet as a middle step in my process.


Recommended reads: Writing Better Lyrics by Pat Pattison

Photo by Doug Maloney on Unsplash

Cartooning
I recently took a cartooning course with Neil Kerber, which has been great fun to practise with the kids. Drawing was supposed to be a hobby, but it's actually proved incredibly handy to be able to sketch characters and props for my work in progress. It also saves hours searching around Pinterest for that elusive image in my head.

Key takeaways: Keep it loose. Draw and see what comes out. It doesn't have to be perfect. Have fun!


Recommended reads: Comics: Easy as ABC! by Ivan Brunetti

Photo by Ahmad Odeh on Unsplash

Dance

I know nothing about dance, but I recently read The Creative Habit by Twyla Tharp, an acclaimed choreographer. She talks about her creative process, how she researches a dance piece (fascinating!) and how she actively develops her career. She talks about the importance of teaching/mentoring others to solidify your own knowledge. What would you teach yourself six months ago?

Key takeaways: There's a lot in this book, but I love the way Tharp uses a big box to gather her project material. I've started keeping a dedicated notebook for each project (previously I had a trillion notebooks with notes from different things scattered throughout), but a file box might work even better to collate random scraps of information and objects related to a book.

Recommended reads: The Creative Habit by Twyla Tharp   

Photo by Mika Korhonen on Unsplash

Fashion design

On a whim, I borrowed a book about fashion design research and found it a surprisingly enlightening read. Nobody really tells you how to get ideas for a novel, but fashion designers at college have to document a proper research process and show how their ideas came about.

Key takeaways: "Fashion doesn't come from fashion" (i.e. don't take your inspiration from the catwalk). Books don't (just) come from books either. It's easy to feel you have to keep completely up-to-date with reading every new book release, but as long as you have a feel for what a current book is, it can be more useful to look more widely and take creative inspiration from elsewhere, art galleries, museums and maybe even real life!

Recommended reads: Fashion Design Research by Ezinma Mbonu


How about you? Have you ever taken inspiration for your creative process from another art form?


Alex English is a graduate of Bath Spa University's MA Writing for Young People. Her new middle-grade series SKY PIRATES launches in July 2020 with Simon & Schuster. 

Her picture books Yuck said the Yak, Pirates Don't Drive Diggers and Mine Mine Mine said the Porcupine are published by Maverick Arts Publishing. More of her picture books are forthcoming in 2021/2022.
 
www.alexenglish.co.uk

1 - Gillian Philip on the filming of children's books

Thanks to a great big ladleful of serendipidity, number one in our list of most-viewed posts includes a connection with both ABBA birthdays and lists!

To celebrate our second birthday, we decided to have a theme for the month, and contributors who wanted to were invited to present their top five of... well, anything to do with children's books. Gillian went for her top five films based on children's books, and accompanied her list with a concise but captivating musing on what makes a good adaptation:

Five Barnstorming Books-to-Movies: Gillian Philip

You'll find more suggestions of great adaptations in the comments, but please feel free to add your own favourites - or any other thoughts - in the comments below this post.

And there we come to the end of our list of most-viewed entries on An Awfully Big Blog Adventure - but not quite to the end of our birthday celebrations. Join us at 7.00pm for one last stop along Memory Lane!

I protest!

I was having tea in Gloucestershire with a friend, and we got to talking about protesting. I don't mean complaining about bad service, or curly sandwiches, I mean real protesting, the sort that stops councils from closing libraries.

"I've written so many emails, I can't do it any more," said he. "I'm exhausted. It never stops. If it's not libraries it's the unemployed being made to work for nothing, or whales being harpooned, forests uprooted or our health service being wrecked. And really, in the end, what does it all achieve? Once they've worn us out, governments just go back to doing what they want. Protesting never does any good in the end."

I remonstrated with him, but maybe not very much, because I was feeling pretty discouraged myself. Then something

happened that made me think again.

I went to Texas.

I'd never been to Texas before, and no doubt my idea of the place was fairly similar to many another Englishwoman who has never visited. Cowboy hats and boots, tumbleweed, twangy accents and cattle. Of course I knew that there were cities in Texas, and skyscrapers, freeways and shopping malls, but I'm a child of the fifties, and was brought up on Dick West and the Lone Ranger. So of course I looked for signs of cowboys. They were easy enough to find. And along with the whites, in cowboy hats or not, there were of course Blacks, Hispanics, Chinese, the whole rainbow of peoples that makes a place vibrant.

The first evening we were in a packed restaurant. "Years ago that wouldn't have been possible," said my companion, as a young black family came in and was shown to the last empty table. I engaged my mouth before my brain. "Why not?" I said. And then I remembered. Being a child of the fifties wasn't just cowboy films. It was also segregation. So we started talking about protest. We weren't drinking tea. She had watermelon juice and I had rice milk with cinnamon. We were a long way from Gloucestershire and I had a lot to learn.

"It was 1960," said Jo Ann. "I was a student at the University of Texas in Austin. My friend and I were looking for things to join, as students do, and we noticed a poster inviting people to a meeting, so we went."

The meeting was about the civil rights movement. Things were happening. The first black student had been admitted to the university (after a court case) in 1954, but there were still only a few black students by 1960. Martin Luther King was speaking, arguments raging, and people were getting hurt.

It took a lot of courage to be black and to protest, but it happened. Black people staged sit-ins, where they entered segregated drugstores and stubbornly sat there, asking to be served. There were beatings, and attacks by police dogs to endure. Jo Ann is white, but she and her friend saw these things happening, and decided to get involved.

There were a couple of film theatres on Guadaloupe, well patronised by students. The films were good, but no blacks were allowed. And so, at the meeting another sort of protest was devised. Stand-ins. The idea was simple. White and black students would queue up together. When they got to the ticket office the white student would ask for a ticket "So long as my friend can have one too." Of course they were refused, but instead of going away they simply rejoined the end of the queue and asked again. As more people joined the protest and clogged the foyer it became difficult for anyone to buy a ticket. Here is one of the theatres, The Texas. It's not a film theatre any more, but you can see that it used to be one.

Throughout that Spring and Summer the student protest went on. They didn't give up, although the film theatres refused to review their policy. After a while it must have been so tempting to give in. I wonder how many times I would have rejoined the queue, night after night. It can hardly have been a rewarding experience. But the students were determined, and as time went by they were joined by some faculty members, as well as some local churchmen. The students were targeting chain theatres, and in other cities sympathy stand-ins occurred. In Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio protests were promised, and even Boston and New York joined in.

In spite of all this action nothing happened. At the end of the summer term the students went home, having achieved precisely nothing. The theatres were still segregated. Their peaceful protests had failed. But in the Autumn when they returned they had a surprise. Quietly, over the summer there had been a change of heart. Instead of the protesters having been worn down, the theatre owners had given way. Now, everyone was welcome to buy a ticket. Maybe the owners had seen which way the civil rights movement was going, or maybe it was just because they had been hit hard in their pockets. What was important was that the protesters had won.

"I wasn't an organiser," said Jo Ann. "I was just one warm body among many, but I'm prouder of that protest than anything else I've done."

We talked about marches we had been on, Jo Ann against the Vietnam war in Washington, me against Cruise missiles in London. By then neither of us was a student any more, and our efforts weren't always successful. But somehow, it had always seemed worthwhile making the effort.

Students in Austin are still moved to protest about all sorts of things, and that is the way it should be. There can be few things more worth fighting for than fairness, which is one reason I have on World Book Night opted to give away copies of Andrea Levy's excellent novel, Small Island. Her book reminds us on the other side of the Atlantic that we don't have much reason to be complacent about our past.

I came home feeling very glad that I had met Jo Ann. "It matters to speak out," she said. I could see by the tears in her eyes how strongly she felt.

So here's to Jo Ann. Protests may not always be as important as the civil rights movement, but it does matter to speak out on issues we care about. We won't often win. But sometimes, just sometimes we will, and surely that makes it all worthwhile?

Set Texts - Andrew Strong

Without exception, all of the set texts I studied at school put me off reading literature for a very long time.

Dickens, Austen and Shakespeare: ‘Hard Times’, ‘Pride and Prejudice’ and ‘Hamlet’. Each of them rinsed, squeezed, hung up to dry, until there was nothing left but questions on the text, model answers, the dreary farce that is English literature for most school pupils.

As a child I read superhero comics. I loved all that stuff; the flawed hero, the ridiculous costumes: a perfect preparation for Jane Austen. After comics I read nothing at all. I don’t think I picked up a book for years.

Luckily, I found literature for myself through a curious route: pop music. Every evening, once I’d escaped school, raided the fridge, had a fight with my brother, kicked a ball against a wall for twenty minutes, I would retreat to my bedroom and lose myself in sound.

Music was more noise than anything else, a beautiful aural slush that obliterated the horrors of the day. When things were particularly unpleasant just a song title could whisk me off into a distant realm: John Cale’s ‘Paris 1919’; Nico’s ‘The Marble Index’.

And now and again a single phrase transported me from suburban south Wales into a parallel universe. There are lines from David Bowie’s songs that summoned up images that now, decades later, are still with me.

Millions weep a fountain, just in case of sunrise (‘Aladdin Sane’)

With snorting head he gazes to the shore
Where once had raged a sea that raged no more (‘Drive-In Saturday’)

This isn’t Keats, but I’d had enough of Keats by the time I was fourteen. I needed to create my own world, and I couldn’t do that in the sweat and plimsoll stench of the classroom. At home, with Bowie, a few words would capture a thought and I’d be gone, lost.

These handful of images were a lifeline. I began writing songs, three or four chord constructions vamped on an old Bluthner in the front room. I grew to love the smell of that piano, the polish, the musty waft of the mechanism when I pulled off the panels to make the sound brighter.

And then, when all the exam revision was behind us, pupils were asked if we’d like to contribute something to the school magazine. I submitted some of my song lyrics, rewritten on Basildon Bond with an ancient fountain pen so my words looked like proper poetry, and every one of my efforts was selected for publication. To this day, it felt like the beginning of a new era. Someone was taking my writing seriously.

The meaningful texts of my youth were pop song lyrics. I don’t think of them as literature, but they did more to lead me to writing than ‘Pride and Prejudice’ or ‘Hamlet’. Decades later I’ve grown to love Austen and adore Shakespeare. I’d like to be able to say I’m fond of Dickens too. But two out of three isn’t bad.

A Dream Imprisoned: Sue Purkiss

Five years ago, I wrote a book called The Willow Man. It was about three children who were 'stuck' in different ways, and it told the story of how they became unstuck. The catalyst in this process was the Willow Man: a figure forty feet tall, woven out of willow.

I knew children who were stuck in the ways I describe in the book. And I knew the Willow Man. Ever since the year 2000, he had stood beside the M5, just outside Bridgwater. Thousands of people drove past every day, and like me, they gazed at him and marvelled. This is how I described him at the beginning of the book:

His powerful torso was twisted at a slight angle to his massive thighs, so that his small head gazed with a mixture of defiance and contempt across the concrete ribbon of the motorway. He seemed to be perfectly balanced on one leg: the other was bent, as if at any moment he might choose to complete the step and take his freedom...

He was created by Serena de la Hey as part of the millenium celebrations. She knew he wouldn't last forever: how could he, when he was made out of living willow? I don't think she guessed what an iconic figure he would become: the north of England had the great metal figure, the Angel of the North - but now we had our own angel, the Angel of the South. He stood outlined against the sky, emblematic of the power of life and nature.

About a year later, I was driving down the M5 and I saw that something terrible had happened. All that was left of the Willow Man was a steel skeleton. Vandals had set fire to him, and all that careful craft, all that artistry which had been woven in with the willow - all of this was turned to ashes. There was a public outcry, a positive howl of sadness and outrage: the Willow Man must be rebuilt. And he was.

He became an emblem of Somerset; his picture has appeared on leaflets, on posters, on the sides of trains. He was a part of the landscape - an expression of the landscape. But now the Willow Man is under threat from another direction. Well - from all directions. In fact he's not just under threat: it seems as if the battle is already lost. Developers have succeeded where vandals failed. On one side of him is a massive complex of warehouses, belonging to the supermarket, Morrisons: on the other, a housing estate. Instead of a proud figure silhouetted against the sky, a focus for wonder and imagination, he's hemmed in and imprisoned - you can scarcely see him. Look at the pictures: look at him as he was, and as he is.

It seems like the death of a dream.

Houses matter: new jobs matter. But something that makes thousands and thousands of people pause, and reflect, and experience the power of the imagination, every single day - that matters too. Would it be beyond possiblity to set the Willow Man free and rebuild him somewhere else? He cost in the region of £15,000 the first time round. Surely, even in these times perhaps especially in these times - that's not such a great sum for something that delivers so much?

DO YOU DRAW? - Dianne Hofmeyr

The best gift I ever received as a child was a box of Faber Castell coloured pencil crayons from my father. It was a tin box and if you pressed the back corners the lid popped open to reveal a layer of crinkly tissue paper and 24 crayons each sharpened to perfection, laid out in a rainbow that gave me my first introduction to names like rose madder, cadmium yellow, burnt ochre, raw umber and burnt sienna… the last two, long before I’d ever heard of the colours of Italian earth. They all had numbers and were faceted with sides of gold that alternated with the colour of the pencil. I know this because I still have the white one… least used and was kept because I read somewhere as a teenager that I should whiten the underside of my nails with a white crayon!

So why the digitally enhanced artwork heading up a writer’s blog on drawing? Firstly it’s the cover of a book I co-authored with Louisa Sherman on Print-making at GCSE level and secondly because there’s been a lot of right and left brain talk recently. Most say pencil and paper wins over digital but with technology so superb that can enable Richard Hamilton to produce this intense portrait of fellow artist Dieter Roth, then all is not lost.

As a former art teacher, pencil and paper are still for me the most direct form of story telling. That’s all any child is doing when they’re drawing. With those very first ‘head-feet’ representations, they’re telling: This is me with my large head and big smiling mouth with teeth and eyes, I eat and I see and (probably no nose…) I don’t care about smell just yet. I’ve arms and lots of fingers (possibly even looking like overgrown tarantulas) because I’m a tactile being and I'm so dexterous I can pick up the tiniest speck. I stand on my own legs (though they’re probably still floating aimlessly on the page or they might just look like one leg to you) because there’s nothing more important than me— its just me, me, ME in this world.

All this the child tells us in a few random but amazing marks he makes on paper. It's his first story.

Cavemen knew something when they were drawing their stories. Not only did they use the cave walls as story boards but they turned story telling into a multi-sound-visual event with dance, music and drumming with firelight and the odd lightning bolt too, adding atmospheric lighting affects. True story-telling and showmanship! In fact they were far closer to the idea of visual story-telling as in film or video than a lot of civilizations who came after them.

After Celia put a post up on notebooks, I went back to mine at random to see if I was trying to tell a story while I drew. I didn’t find any of my really early ‘head-feet’ representations but I found a conte crayon self-portrait done a few weeks before my twentieth birthday. The others are from more recent notebooks.

The giraffe page became my story of Zeraffa. The date on the page in this notebook is 1999. The book will be come out in 2013. Some stories take longer to infuse than others! But from the notebooks I discovered why I’m a writer rather than an illustrator. I’m an observer. Critical observation is the worst form of editor. It takes away the playfulness and stifles the way I want the story to grow and be ‘more’ than what I see. It seems easier to evoke this magic with words. It doesn’t mean to say I won’t be sitting with scissors and coloured paper like Matissse one day and telling stories of snails and blue dancing ladies when I’m ancient and can’t see too well.

So where is this blog meandering? Do you draw? is the question I began with and how I’ll end. Matisse has been quoted as saying later in life when he took up paper collage... Freedom is really the impossibility of following the same road as everybody else: freedom means taking the path your talents make you take.

Whether you draw with words, or with Faber Castell crayons, or through the lens of a camera, or through digital wizardry, its still story and as long as you do, is all that matters… if we lose the power to use our imagination and to create story we’ll lose what it means to be human. Let’s use all we have… digital and paper, bells and whistles, drums and dance!

www.diannehofmeyr.com

I have often walked down this street before - Elen Caldecott

This isn't going to be about writing, I'm afraid.

Instead, I thought I would tell you about the affect that art is having in Bristol.

Like London, Birmingham and other UK cities, Bristol has had its share of trouble lately. Young people have felt an appaling disconnect between themselves and the city that is their home - with ugly consequences.
But two weeks after the riots, a different kind of ugly has taken hold and it has changed the way that Bristolians see their streets, well, one street anyway.

Nelson Street in central Bristol was always rough as a badger's brillos. It has high-rise buildings, many deserted; overhead walkways that smelled of tramp's undercrackers and alleys that may as well have had 'get mugged here' written in neon above them.

But last weekend, a group of international street artists reclaimed the walls. The graffiti they produced is breathtaking in scale. Everyone who walks down Nelson Street now is affected by it.

The most noticable thing is the change of pace, no-one hurries anymore. People stop to stare, take pictures, point out things they want others to notice. Complete strangers smile at each other.

It isn't confined to the usual suspects either, urban hipsters and trustafarians are outnumbered by families, tourists, older folks and children. I saw one older lady being helped up steps to get a better view - steps that two weeks earlier would have needed a bleach enema before anyone could walk on them.

I don't pretend that this will cure all Bristols ills. But I do think that anything that makes us feel more connected, less afraid, can only be a good thing.

Here, with apologies to those using dial-up, are some pictures:

The building my husband works in

Steps and walkways

Slowing for a look

My favourite - these columns are wearing knitted jerseys. And check out the new sign.

Adding greenery to the cityscape

Find out more about Elen on Facebook or at www.elencaldecott.com

The Power of Fiction by Lynda Waterhouse

Last Saturday Frugal Husband (FH for short ) and I went on one of our art forays to The Piccadilly Community Centre.
Several years ago FH invented this pastime. You gather a group of friends and spend a Saturday wandering around a variety of weird and wonderful locations in South London. You have no idea what you will find and the chances are you will be the only people at these venues which are free to enter.
I have found myself in a series of locations; former jam or biscuit factories, a defunct gin distillery, railway arches, a former workhouse, a bear garden and even people’s living rooms. All places worth a snoop around in their own right.
I have experienced an amazing range of emotions from suppressed rage as I tackled a four page manifesto to help me understand the artist’s decision to display a pair of rubber gloves, despair at the sight of yet another impenetrable video installation, extreme self consciousness at coming face to face with a man dressed as a crow in a railway arch or a woman balancing butter on her head. I have laughed like a drain as I watched someone knit jumpers for crustaceans.




I have walked into a deserted council flat to find it transformed by copper sulphate crystals.


I have been genuinely scared by being made to don a white mask and sent off alone into a scary and frightening unknown. In a darkened corridor I started with terror at the sight of a white faced stranger only to realise that it was my husband. (We all knew then that this Punchdrunk Theatre Co was something special)


Back to the Piccadilly Community Centre. What was it? Art masquerading as life or vice versa? This former Lutyens designed bank and up market art gallery had been transformed by Christoph Buchel into a shabby community centre complete with charity shop, WI run café and a bar. In one room a group of war gamers assured me that they weren’t actors that they really did this. I grinned back at them feeling like an extra in some downmarket Westworld style movie.
In another room a group of people were dancing intensely. Someone waved me inside I shied away. The prayer room was empty. I sat in there for a while. We climbed into the attic which had been transformed into a squat. Opposite was a roof complete with sleeping bags, soggy mattresses, fag ends, chicken bones and cans of Special Brew.
By the time I turned the handle of a heavy door that was marked ‘Private’ my heart was pounding. The room was an unnerving cross between a caretaker’s den and a squat. FH disappeared down a narrow cellar like corridor and I fled the room. He seemed to take ages to come back. Back upstairs to buy a book in the charity shop and to watch a Conservative Party video about the Big Society which was unsettling.
Then back to the ground floor for a snoop in an office and to stand behind the counter of the bank. Someone came in and smiled at me. I wanted to say ‘I’m not an actor’ then a reassuring cup of tea and cake.
I had experienced the power that fiction has to convey a greater truth.

Writing in the Sand - Dianne Hofmeyr

Once as I was strolling through the gardens of the People’s Culture Park just outside the Forbidden City in Beijing, I was stopped in my tracks by a man writing on the pathway. He used large sweeping movements across the stone with a brush dipped in nothing more than water. As fast as he wrote so the characters evaporated and disappeared like an invisible memory of the city. The temporality of the water writing took my breath away… it seemed as futile and at the same time as purposeful as shouting words on the wind.

There’s a similar concept in the work of Andrew van der Merwe who catches ephemeral moments, not in water but in wet sand. He uses the wide open vistas of the sea – sand, sky and rocks – to inform his work. The script appears totally at one with the landscape. The marks are as mysterious as runic or cuneiform inscriptions and seem to echo and almost emphasize the ripples left by waves and like mirror mosaics they catch glimpses of the sky in the water that collects in the hollows and grooves. The patterns and marks are precise. He has devised special tools to make them and he leaves no trace of footprints or upturned sand.

The work focuses on the fleeting moment as we wait for the wind to dry and blur the script, or waves to come and wash it away. Remember doing this with sandcastles? Rushing down to the beach the next day to see what had happened? It’s an ever-changing process –in his case, a tactile merging of words with the physical. To me the marks themselves together with the idea of being transitory – that sense of temporariness and ephemerality – seem to focus and accentuate glimpses of atmospheres, memories, sounds and movements that go unnoticed and sometimes even unseen.

So since it’s August and some of us are at our desks and not at the sea… here we are then…

Dianne Hofmeyr: www.diannehofmeyr.com

For a review of the 2011 Kate Greenaway:

http://awfullybigreviews.blogspot.com/2011/07/grahame-baker-smiths-farther-flies-off.html

For those interested in historical writing: http://the-history-girls.blogspot.com/

For more on Andrew van der Merwe: http://www.behance.net/beachscriber

An Awfully Creative Adventure - Meg Harper

I’m laughing this morning over Andrew’s 6 monthly skips! So that’s why our garage is stuffed to the gunnels! I’ve missed a trick there! I’m also taking a welcome break from the huge task of getting a house that has been ‘lived in’ (ehem) by 4 teenagers ready for the market. Anyone wanting a large family house in Warwick, step this way! It has new carpets throughout except, of course, in my study – another place stuffed to the gunnels and impossible to empty for the day. So my new study carpet is – guess where? In the garage!
Today, however, I really want to write about a school project that I’ve been engaged in intermittently all academic year. This was at Limehurst High School, a middle school in Loughborough which is definitely the pleasantest, happiest secondary school I have ever encountered and where it was a privilege to be the visiting author. There are times when I question the value of author visits. If it’s a case of the ‘author talk’ delivered to every class in the school, I wonder what lasting benefit there will be. I am far more excited by being invited in to run workshops or, as in this case, to be a partner in a long-term project.
The brief at Limehurst was to run a workshop with a small group of year 8s, teaching them the nuts and bolts of story writing so that they could teach a slightly larger group of year 7s, who would then write a story suitable to be turned into an animation for year 2s from a local primary school. Nothing too complicated then! As so often, I found myself deconstructing what I do myself (principally by instinct in my case) in order to make the vital elements clear enough for young people to absorb and cascade down to their juniors. Fortunately, I often write short stories, not simply novels, and I also have some very limited experience of writing animations – so I felt competent enough to know where to start. As so often, however, I learned as we went on. I was there as consultant when the years 8s taught the year 7s and was alongside them as they thrashed out their plots and wrote and edited their stories. I sometimes think I don’t know very much about creating story but as we worked, I appreciated that I really do know what I’m doing. I know where to cut and prune, I know what’s needed to lift a plot and to keep the pace. I know how to create the crisis and how to satisfactorily resolve. And I realised what a mammoth task the young people were facing – and yet again, how ludicrous it is that year 6s are expected to write short stories for their SATS in a mere 45 minutes. Grrrrrrr!
In the end, the year 7s had the barebones of two workable stories so we asked if they could animate both. Fortunately, the lovely Leo and Theo of Lunchbox Films were ready to give it a whirl and the school was confident they could provide funding – so the year 7s set out on the laborious task of animating their stories. A couple of weeks ago the big moment arrived. The year 2s from the local primary school arrived for the premiere – and so did I! You can see the results below. (Well - maybe not - I've tried to post the links and they're showing on the dashboard version but not on the blog - but here are none hot links if you're interested!


http://www.lunchboxfilms.co.uk/project.php?url=goldilocks_baldilocks

http://www.lunchboxfilms.co.uk/project.php?url=tanes_tremendous_trumpet)

My next task is to see if my agent’s interested in submitting the original stories to publishers. I’ve edited them in conference with the young people and have kept as much of their original wording as I can. I was thrilled by how engaged they were with that process – but then, we were doing what I wish schools could do more. A real task for a real purpose. There were lots of really memorable moments but it all felt very worthwhile when one of the participants said, ‘I used to think I was no good at English but doing this project has made me realise that I really am.

www.megharper.co.uk

Harry Potter and the Celluloid of Terror: Gillian Philip

I took my ten-year-olds to see Harry Potter the other day. There were three of us in that front row, trying to make sense of the slightly distorted soundtrack, and only one of us had read the book.

To the ten-year-olds, it didn't matter that for a good deal of the running time, they couldn't quite follow what was going on. It was, as Girl Child announced within five seconds of the credits rolling, the best movie they had ever seen. And with mother giving whispered side-of-the-mouth explanations of the tricky bits, the plot was perfectly comprehensible.

The cinema - an old-fashioned, sticky-floored, numb-bum relic of the golden age, and one of my favourite places in the world - was teeming with three- to ten-year olds who hadn't read the books, along with a lot of teenagers and young adults who had clearly grown up with them. I had high hopes that my two would ask to read all seven books afterwards, and when they didn't volunteer, I offered.

No takers. It's the films they've grown up with, and the Xbox games. Boy Child has spent the summer-holiday days since then watching and rewatching the earlier movies, and begging for the Xbox game. Girl Child has preferred more and more and different movies (and books) involving death, sacrifice, love, hate, good and evil.

I'm not sure they'll ever read the books, now. And I have wildly mixed feelings about that.

My strongest reaction is that these are my kids, dammit. MY KIDS, for whom the purchase of books by readers is the wellspring of the finance that buys them DVDs and Xbox games. What are they THINKING?

A subsidiary, guilty feeling, is that I'm probably even more of a movie addict than I am a book addict, and that's saying something. I'm not sure I'll read The Lord of the Rings again, however many times I've read it in the past, because the movies distilled the best of the books, while holding onto respect for them, and the pictures I made in my head weren't ever quite as good as the pictures made since 2001 by Peter Jackson.

At school talks, I torment myself and the audience with the question 'Books or Movies?' And while we all tear at our scalps shouting 'BOTH', I always advocate BOOKS with the argument that however many girls in the room love Edward Cullen, only around half think he truly looks like Robert Pattinson. For the others, he'll always be the perfect sparkly beauty they formed in their own heads, and R-Pattz will be no more than - well, not an impostor: just someone who once played the part.

I feel quite sad that my kids are unlikely to read Harry Potter as he was originally wrote - or not for a few years, anyway. They won't grow up, as so many young adults did, with a boy who grew up, slowly, on the page, along with them.

But the movies have created another part of the myth, and one of their own. My kids have grown up with Daniel Radcliffe as Harry Potter, and when I really think about it, that's fine. There are so many other books now - in great part thanks to the Potter phenomenon - that they can film for themselves, inside their heads, just like I do with my own characters while I'm writing. For them, Harry can be a movie.

Films make their own mythology. The story of the Lions of Tsavo is a true one, while the film version - The Ghost & The Darkness - follows to a great extent the template of Jaws. I honestly don't think that destroys its validity as a story. I remember being terribly upset and angry when I first saw James Cameron's Titanic, because why would anyone want to add fiction to a truth that had its own perfect tragic narrative and human pathos? Since then I've watched it often, and always cry - because I never believe in Jack and Rose, but they symbolise the real people dying in fractions of screen moments in the background.

Maybe it's distance that lends both enchantment and forgiveness - recent lies and distortions are less forgiveable; but is Troy, if it ever existed, diminished by being relegated to myth and a bloody good story? A seriously bad movie certainly didn't hurt that immortal myth.

We're humans, and we love a narrative arc. The best of them will survive in any form, and many. They start, and end, in our heads.

www.gillianphilip.com

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What is on your playlist? Celia Rees

I was listening to Radio 4 the other day when I heard the author, David Nicholls, talking about his novel, One Day. Now, I haven't read the book, although my daughter has and recommends it highly, but I'm always interested in writers talking about their writing, especially ones who are selling shed loads. For those, like me, who have not read the book, it follows the lives of two people from their student days in 1988 to near present day. As I understand it, the device that Nicholls uses is to have them meet every year on St Swithin's Day. In this way we can follow their lives and changes, kind of When Harry Met Sally, but more organised and British. Do Americans know about St Swithin's Day? Anyway, what interested me was the way he described going back to these past years. He used the music, what he and everyone else was listening to in 1988, say, 0r 1992. He found this one of the best ways of getting into the feel of the time. Songs are like scents, they bring back detail, the kind of detail a writer needs to make a time come alive.

I have always used songs and music in my writing, not just to evoke different times, but also moods and states of mind. My first novel took its title from a song: Every Step You Take. I was listening to it in the car one day and remember thinking how creepy it was, the perfect way to get into the head of an obsessive stalker. Another early novel, Midnight Hour, also owes its title to song lyrics, Wilson Pickett singing, I'm going to take you girl and hold you, do everything I told you, in the midnight hour. 'Do everything I told you...' that was the line that chilled me. And it doesn't even matter if it is not the right words, that's what I heard, so it is what my killer heard, too.

I first heard the Ballad of Sovay, sung by Pentangle, more years ago than I care to remember. I had no idea then that I would ever become a writer, much less that this song would provide me with the title and main character for a novel. But the haunting melody stayed with me, as did the story of the daring young woman who dressed as a highwayman to test the fidelity of her lover. Many years after that first hearing, I was having a conversation with fellow novelist, Susan Price, about folk ballads and Sovay came up. We both said how much we loved the song, and the girl. By the end of the conversation it was more or less decided that I would make Sovay the heroine of my next novel.

Songs do not just provide titles, characters, basic plots and starting points. When I'm writing historical fiction, they give me a powerful way into the world that I am trying to create. When I was writing Sovay I listened to John Gay's The Beggar's Opera over and over again, not just for the beauty of the lyrics and the music, but for the moods and emotions that they evoked and the deeply subversive, satirical view of a corrupt society where the heroes and heroines are thieves, murderers and prostitutes. John Gay gives us a view into an 18th Century underworld that he knew well. At the same time, he is letting us know that respectable society was also under scrutiny by those who would seek to change it.

You cannot beat contemporary sources for insight into any past time. Popular songs and street ballads are often the only way we have to see into the lives and minds of ordinary men and women, allow us to hear the words that they used, the cadences of everyday speech. For me, they help to 'raise the spirits of the age', to evoke a sense of love, loss, danger and excitement. When I was writing Pirates! , I listened to songs of the sea, of dark eyed sailors and female sailors bold. When I was writing The Fool's Girl, I listened to Elizabethan street songs, jigs and bawdy ballads, as well as Shakespeare's own songs and court music. Each of my books has its own soundtrack,. Sometimes the music gets mentioned in the text, sometimes it doesn't. That is not important. Neither is exact authenticity. What is important is how this music, these songs have sustained and fed my imagination and freed my creativity.

Anyone else care to share their playlist?

The Baghdad Book Collection : Miriam Halahmy

"Where they burn books they will also burn people." Heinrich Heine

In 2003 when the Allies invaded Iraq, Qasim Sabti, an artist and lecturer at the Academy of Fine Arts in Baghdad, found to his dismay that the University Library had been looted. The library shelves had been ransacked and the books set on fire. "I felt like a fireman desperately in need of finding survivors," writes Sabti. Rummaging through the mess he found some books still intact but one of them collapsed when he picked it up and he was left just holding the cloth cover. Inside the cover were some Arabic verses scribbled in pencil and some notes from the librarian. "I was filled with a new sense of life and hope... Like the fireman realizing that some victims were still breathing, I began to gather together more covers..."

 Sabti took the covers back to his studio and created an amazing series of collages, "bringing back to life books whose texts had been completely destroyed."  Sabti's series of collages, Ashes to Art : The Iraqi Phoenix, can be seen in The Pomegranate Gallery in New York, owned by my brother-in-law, Oded Halahmy. The collages are a testament to the resilience of the Iraqi people and as Sabti writes, "They are also my attempt to gain victory over the destruction surrounding us in Baghdad."

One of the collages hangs on our living room wall in Golders Green, on loan from the gallery, a piece of Old Baghdad where my children's father was born.
As a child growing up in England reading books was the most important thing I did. My weekly visit to the library, through darkened streets, all by myself as a little girl, was almost a holy time. It would have been totally beyond my imagination to think that someone might burn a book.

So I wrote a poem about it.

Untitled, 2008
Qasim Sabti
Mixed Media Collage
8 by 12 inches


Eight years old I walk through softly lit
November streets, our little London suburb,
to the silence of the library and reading,


which came before everything
was the reason to be. Lost all day
with the Little Women, Dickon


at my side in our Secret Garden,
I sailed with Moonfleet to Treasure Island
lost in the fictional dream.


My mother and I sat reading
as coals burned red in the old living room.
Not even the tick of a clock


penetrated our reader silence.
I could not imagine burning,
stealing, destroying - books.

*

Qasim Sabti, artist, in agony as they looted

the Library, Baghdad, 2003.

books violated in the bewilderment of war,

collected broken spines,

shattered bodies, healed and repaired,

a book cover here, a torn page there,

made them into poems on canvas

painted  blue, red, white.

We have one hanging on our wall,

a piece of Old Baghdad in our London home.

It reaches a long blue finger all the way back

to your father's father's house beside the Tigris.

near the Shorja market and the pomegranates,

all the way to the room where you were born;

this broken book, this word, this blue.

www.miriamhalahmy.com