Monday 1 January 2018

For the past few years, members of North Cumbria Scriptwriters have worked with Radio Cumbria to produce five minute dramas for the week before Christmas. The seasonal offerings this year are on the theme of ghosts. The four plays are to be broadcast on 18th, 19th, 20th and 21st December between 11.00 and 11.30 in the morning, with repeats on Christmas Eve. Be sure to listen in for some unusual entertainment, brought to you by local actors!





A rainbow bloomed over Carlisle Castle on the day we recorded the Christmas plays.



Radio Cumbria's Belinda Artingstoll
listens critically to her recording.












Local actors Charlotte Bryceson, Sophia Atcha and Kelvin Dixon recording in the foyer at Radio Cumbria.

Location recording!


Peter Inglis provides an authentic Scottish voice beside the Cursing Stone








Actor Jenny Pike, watched by director Carole Ferguson and writer Stephanie Robinson and members of North Cumbria Scriptwriters





Wednesday 31 October 2012

... and the dragons are dead?

I sometimes think I write nothing but emails, however I have recently managed to write a short radio play, and I am in the middle of an extra scene for Wigton Theatre Club's panto and a short piece about Kathleen Herbert for my old students' magazine, as well as planning a play for said theatre club's 60th anniversary next year.

While I was looking through some papers I came across a poem I wrote years ago, and I thought I'd give it an airing here- appropriate perhaps for the Eve of All Hallows:

-->
Monster Munch

Early morning mist upon the marsh…

The twisting spirals drawn up by the sun
Took strange forms last night-
Will o' the wisps and marshy monsters.

We live in the morning;
Marshes with their lurking horrors drained,
Or preserved as Heritage.

All is explained
All sanitised
The dragons all are dead
And Grendel's mother nothing but a fairy tale.

We understand the atom and the universe,
And there are no longer more things in heaven and earth
Than thought of in anybody's philosophy.

We've conquered all
We've drained the marsh
We've killed the beasts
Exorcised the ghosts
Explained away the monsters-

But beware-

They still walk in our dreams.

Sunday 22 July 2012

SHARING A PENCIL?

The empty set waits for actors and words
Non writers are always interested in the process of writing; 'where do you get your ideas from?' is the commonest question asked at book signings and author events. Team writing however elicits curiosity from writers and non-writers alike. Whatever odd and varied perceptions people hold about the nature of writing, nearly all believe it to be a solitary, even lonely process. The following piece was written to answer the many questions I received after heading up a team of writers who produced a script for our local theatre group. The production was a sell-out success.


Sharing a pencil?

How do you condense 750 years of history into a two hour play? How do you make it entertaining and celebratory while not forgetting the hardships and tragedies of many of those years? How can you give a sense of the broad sweep of history, while making characters and incidents particular to the place? Above all, how do you target an enthusiastic but conservative local audience without being patronising or over intellectual?

These were some of the questions we asked ourselves as we went through the team-writing process.

"It'll be the death of Wigton, you mark my words"
The Throstle's Nest was performed by Wigton Theatre Club at The John Peel Theatre in Wigton on the 7th, 8th and 9th of June this year. I am still surprised and humbled that between us we managed to produce a play which packed the small theatre three nights in a row, and received nothing but positive comments and thunderous applause from the audience.

Normally the writing process starts with a little inspiration, then generally speaking, we write what we want to write- and go where our passions and interests take us often following where our characters lead us. Despite the need to revise and re-write it seems to be a relatively free and unconstrained process. Often we are then left with a play which has fulfilled our ambitions and satisfied the brief that we set out for ourselves but we have to find actors to act and an audience to watch it. This is often dispiriting.

This was different. This was the other way round- Although we didn't realise it at the outset, we were writing an exactly targeted piece within tight parameters; Our writer's journey was learning and defining those parameters and targets. I now believe that the success of the Throstle's Nest was mainly due to tightly targeted writing, writing which told a coherent story despite a cast who in some cases were totally inexperienced.

Liz Bell, Martin Chambers, Connie Jensen, Heather Larkin-Jones, Julia Newsome and Rick Thomas- all members of North Cumbria Scriptwriters- met initially for some brainstorming sessions to consider the overall form of the play. After our first session, we went away to research the history. The amount of detail available in books and online for the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries was as expected, overwhelming; while the information about ordinary folks' doings from the early years was scant.

Achieving a balance between national and local history as well as between early and later years was an additional challenge. We also had to include the current concerns of the townsfolk, and link them to those of its past.

We decided on an episodic structure: a series of cameos or sketches set in or around the market place, each illustrating a particular period and the external events which would have impinged on Wigton people. An early decision was to have the same characters in every era, expressing similar views, and illustrating recurring themes.

"No men, no beasts, no children, no food ... no hope"    
The early stages were both fun and crucial. As well as the problems and pleasures of working with each other, we worked with the actors and director from the outset. When I sent a few early draft scenes to the director, his comments meant that some of our characters had a quick sex change. As with most amateur theatre groups, Wigton's had more female than male members! This suited those early turbulent years on the border- years of warfare between Scots and English when most men were away fighting or dead, and it was left to the women to keep the community going. Meeting with the players also meant that both sides were reassured- they knew they weren't going to get an unworkable script and we were reassured that our ideas would come over when the actors read them and started to bring the words to life.

As well as characters, we wanted themes to run through the play; the major one of these being that change is a constant in our lives, and that it always causes stress, but is eventually assimilated. The way we incorporate new things into our life gives our society a sort of dynamic continuity.

We clearly needed some sort of narration between scenes to help the audience orientate themselves in time. We worked our way through comic monks, and members of the cast carrying billboards across the stage, to characters traditional to Wigton- the Lamp and the Pump. These evolved into a pair of old gossips, who would be on stage all the time, commenting as well as narrating. As is often the case with any project we ended up with the simplest possible solution: a rhyming couplet at the start of each section, ending in the year.

Of course, discussion, argument and brainstorming are enjoyable and creative, but then words have to be hammered out and midnight oil has to be burnt in lonely garrets.  Meetings were to decide general structure and trends, and to allocate writers to scenes and sections. Emails flew back and forth and each time we met, we would read scenes, comment and criticise, then go away to write individually again.

Accommodations had to be made and, as with all writing, some favourite bits had to go. The main difference is that in this case someone else told you that such and such a line, scene or precious idea didn't work- and sometimes that was hard. Interestingly, we often ended up writing additions and amendments to each other's scenes, and looking back now, I sometimes find it hard to put a finger on who wrote what.


Individual contributions


"Six acres for a l'all railway!"
Martin is a prolific and witty writer and after our initial discussions went away and produced several scenes from the 18th and 19th centuries, about the impact of new communications- roads and railways- on a conservative community. This is where our main character- Seth, emerged. In Martin's mind, and then for the rest of us, Seth became the character who represented Wigton- a bit grumpy, and very resistant to change, but good hearted. Seth grumbles a lot, but then gets on with his life, eventually accepting change and incorporating it into the fabric of his life. This character helped the rest of us build our own stories. I wanted Seth's stoicism to be reflected in other equally representative characters; and so the three market women were born. In the early scenes these characters were archetypes. Their roles in different situations and times added to our understanding of them so that they became real people for the actors and I hope for the audience.

"It's been in our family for hundreds of years"
Not all of us managed to get to every meeting, and so we all made different contributions. Heather could only manage a few early general meetings but felt that we should have a Romeo and Juliet theme- a pair of lovers who were thwarted by circumstances and families, and who only finally came together in the 21st century. During our discussions it emerged that they would need  a symbol- a ring or piece of jewellery to pledge their love and hand on down through the generations. I believe this was one of Rick's ideas, and it proved to be an important and unifying theme in what would have been a disjointed story otherwise. In folk stories and traditional song the lover always gives his lass a token to remember him by when he goes off to the wars. Our token is a heavy silver brooch, the design loosely based on the penannular (broken circle) Viking brooches found in the Penrith Hoard, but with the addition of a stylised thrush and her eggs to symbolise Wigton.

Julia was to be absent for large chunks of time, so took a discrete chapter of Wigton's history- the Civil War, and wrote our second young lovers' episode. With a Puritan girl from Wigton (which was known as "a nest of Roundheads") falling in love with a wounded Cavalier officer, Julia created our most touching love story.

Liz and Martin visited an old folk's care home in Wigton and basing their characters on some of the people they met, evolved a story of a wartime love affair between a local lad, and the teacher who came with the huge number of evacuees who landed in Wigton in 1939. This could have developed into a full length play in itself, as the characters were more developed than in shorter and earlier sequences. Because the material was more familiar and close to us in time,  we knew this would capture the  audience's imagination. Liz worked particularly hard on these scenes, working closely with Martin whose character Seth was central to them. Gradually though, other characters emerged- Jeannie's brother John, seen as a young lad and as an older, saddened and wounded war veteran, grown up evacuee Michael and his feisty but bitter wife, John's unknown daughter.

I began to see it as my job to balance the alluring and often funny scenes of the second half, with some drama and comedy in the early part of the play, periods which were least familiar to the audience, and about which very little was written. This was in addition to my primary role, which was to liaise with the players, drive the project along and coordinate the scenes into one script with consistent formatting throughout to make it readable.

In the early stages, Rick mainly kept us on course and added ideas such as the brooch theme We had some heated discussions, for example about whether to run the whole play in strict chronological order or to get dramatic and comic effects through playing with time and having anachronistic elements. In this as in other areas, Rick's clear sighted and incisive judgements kept some of our more fanciful ideas in check. As with the linking/narration we fixed on the simplest structure in the interest of helping the audience stay with us over our 750 year trip, and then Rick was able to write parts of the early scenes and our two last ones.

Previously he had written some dialogue for the two old gossips, Lu and Flu (short for Lumen and Flumen- Light and water- from the lamp and pump) and we regretfully abandoned these as they were very funny. Fortunately some of their dialogue was recycled to other characters.


I had thought the job would be done when we handed the script over, and beyond attending the odd rehearsal out of interest that might well have been it. But, having mustered the writers (the whole thing was my idea) and coordinated what turned out to be a lot of effort and hard work, I could not abandon script and players when it looked as if it would be impossible to cast all the parts, despite the fact that the core players of the club loved it. A change of date meant that people who would not have been able to act in it could be involved, but the director would need to be away for that last week. I offered to oversee rehearsals during that last week and that was it- I was then involved to the hilt and spent time and energy trying to recruit actors and source props, making the throstle brooch and even painting scenery, and, as I was at every rehearsal, being consulted by actors about what we meant or could we change this or that wording. Other writers attended rehearsals from time to time- especially Liz, but Rick's visit, along with Liz's,  the week before the dress rehearsal was crucial: he identified a real dramatic weakness in two scenes in the World War Two sequence. Like it or not- they had to be beefed up. Although this caused me huge distress and worry- I felt it was a terrible imposition on the actors concerned to change and add lines at this stage, I acknowledged the weakness of the scenes, as did Liz who had written them after discussion with Martin.


"Life was hard after you'd gone- no lads left to work the land"
There was no time to be lost, so we short-circuited our usual methods: Liz and I met the next morning, and sat with our computers side by side. It was almost as if we were sharing a pencil. We hammered out some changes and added a small amount of extra dialogue, acting the scenes out as we went. Then the same evening, I had to present the actors with a partially new script, and take them through the new dialogue.

"Why did you do it lad- run off without saying anything? Jeannie cried for days"
The guilt I felt at putting them through this was only assuaged by the real improvement. They were amazingly good-natured about it, but it was not what they were used to. In fact the acting became easier for them, as the emotions rang truer, so I suppose this compensated for having to learn some extra lines.

However, we realised that this was our fault as writers- we had worked too quickly, and in a somewhat haphazard way. We should have been more efficient and ruthless with the text, and perhaps we should have asked Rick to do even more thorough read-throughs than he did. When the actors asked me if we could swap the order of the last two scenes, I reluctantly agreed to try it - and this was the night before the first performance! But they were right, and we had been wrong- an illustration of how theatre is so much more than the script, and how, as writers, we can't afford to be too precious about our work. Ultimately it's the actors who deliver our ideas to the audience, and we need to listen to them!

Lessons learned? Probably fewer writers would have been better. Some were more committed to the idea of team- writing than others and there were genuine, though not insurmountable difficulties, which led to inconsistencies. Would I do it again? Oh yes- in fact the club have asked me for a play to celebrate their 60th anniversary next year. I/we have learnt by our mistakes, and I can't wait to get stuck in!
"Fiona lass- if this throstle could sing, she'd have some tales to tell!"

Monday 23 April 2012

FARMER TED AND BALLS IN THE AIR

I haven't written anything on this blog for a very long while. Not that I haven't been writing- I have been involved in the very interesting and challenging process of group writing a play- but I have been trying to keep all my activities going and of course, I have not always succeeded.

Some time ago, I wrote this little story for my grandson Ted. The story is of course about myself. It seems particularly appropriate today, when I am contemplating going out to buy a pump for our new water feature, phoning people about the above mentioned play, starting work on a major piece of jewellery, doing the Fountain Gallery stewarding rota for May, continuing to work on the Kindle version of The Boy with Two Heads, sorting out the mess of paperwork in my office,  or writing updates for my various blogs. The point is they all need doing! Will I keep them all in the air, or will I drop one? Did I mention that the oven needs cleaning? Better not!

Available as a free ebook on Smashwords, but published here as well for those of you without Kindles, Kobos or ipads.

For free upload click here: Farmer Ted's Easy Day 


 “Great!” thought Ted as he woke up that morning, “- an easy day! Nothing to do at all really.
 “I’ll just go and look at my sheep before I have breakfast.”
 So he did.
 And noticed that the bit of string which held the gate shut was frayed.
 “Oh dear!” he said, “better fix that”.
 So he went to the kitchen drawer for another bit of string.
 And noticed that the tap was dripping.
 “Oh bother!” he said, “better fix that”.
 So he left the string beside the kitchen sink, and went out to the barn for a spanner.
 And noticed that there was a loose screw in one of the barn door hinges.
 “Oh no!” he said, “Better fix that.”
 So he left the spanner in the barn and went to the tractor shed for a screwdriver.
 And noticed that one of the bricks in the path was sticking up.
 So he left the screwdriver by the path and went to the garden shed for a spade.
 And noticed that the sheep had got out of the field because the string on the gate had broken!
 So he shouted for the dog, ran back up the path and tripped over the raised brick.
 “Knickers!” he said.
 As he lay there, rubbing his head, he stared at the screwdriver and said “What on earth is that doing there?”
 At which point, one of the sheep ran into the barn door. The door fell off, and hit Ted on the head.
 “Oh bother!” he said, “better fix that”.
 So he went into the kitchen to find a sticking plaster in the drawer.
 And noticed that the tap was dripping-
 “Oh dear, better fix … What on earth is that doing there?” he said as he saw the string beside the sink.

And then he remembered- this was supposed to be his easy day!
 “Oh well”, he said a “I suppose a farmer’s work is never done” 

So…
 he whistled up the dog,
 rounded up the sheep,
 tied up the gate,
 screwed up the barn door,
 dug up the sticking out brick,
 tightened up the tap,
 and made himself a cup of tea.

He sat down to drink his tea and think about what he was going to eat for breakfast.
 And noticed that the kitchen clock said five thirty.
 “Great!” thought Ted, “- an easy evening! Nothing to do at all really.”
 So he put a sticking plaster on his sore head, cooked himself egg and bacon for tea, and settled down to a nice easy evening.

And thought about all the jobs he had to do tomorrow.


Wednesday 12 October 2011

Travel Blog

A small crack, only just audible above the pec pec pec of the outboard, sent the two guys dozing on the narrow benches at the front scrabbling on the mucky floor of the boat, using their mobile phones to pierce the thick dark. A grunt and a splash and the small fish who had made an unfortunate leap in the dark, was pitched back into the river. These guys, employees and freelancers of the Amazon Rainforest Lodge are relatively affluent: I sense their forefathers would have seen it as a gift from the river gods.

We set out in total dark from the lodge at 4.00 am, after a night of spectacular crashing thunder, rain and an amazing light show, but the river was still dangerously low, so the trip that would have taken about an hour in the metal speedboat with its big butch 70 HP Johnson outboard had to be done in a little wooden pec pec. These boats, mostly open, but a few with palm thatched roofs, have small and highly manouverable outboards with very long prop-shafts like cake whisks. They form most of the traffic on the Amazon and its tributaries and you see families pec pec pec-ing their way down river in the early morning to sell their goods in Iquitos: charcoal and bananas forming the main cargo, with boats loaded to an inch or two of freeboard. Often the whole family will go, to enjoy the day out and mix business with pleasure. Kids wave at passing boats and grannies shelter under multi coloured umbrellas and makeshift shelters: odd mixture of traditional and modern as palm leaves vie with plastic. (Plastic water bottles act as net floats and bouys, warning of sand bars and sunken logs. Little is wasted)

Our particular pec pec of this morning was covered with blue plastic which dripped condensation on us, but was a bit special, as the driver was a professional. Our personal guide, Jimy, stood in the prow with a flashlight, playing it across the surface of the water from one bank to the other, trying to pick out the standing ripples that warn of a sand bar just beneath the surface. We could occasionally make out a night bird´s call above the engine, and once or twice Jimy caught a white bird in his torch beam. It was an eery and tense experience, and I was thinking of it as a bit of jolly adventure, in a sort of Boys´ Own kind of way,with a nice feeling of peril, without any real danger, when we hit a sand bar hard, and the boat slewed round and tilted; the freeboard on my side reduced to about 2 centimetres. Then I really was frightened: were we going to be tipped into the muddy and probably freezing cold water? Were the piranas we failed to catch the day before waiting to turn the tables on us?

There was much rocking of the boat, plenty of prodding and shoving and lots of noise from the labouring cake whisk, as the driver put it into reverse, stirred  the muddy river up even more, and finally got us afloat again. Then I felt foolish- there really was nothing to worry about- these guys live on the river, and getting stuck on a sand bank was certanly no worse than us getting a flat, or needing a jump start.

Later that day, we emerged from the Rio Momon- "our" tributary onto the mighty Amazon itself, where our heroes of the dark night turned into our personal David Attenboroughs, and whistled up a couple of pink river dolphins for us.

Sunday 12 June 2011

The Smell of Chlorine


I have started writing my book! It is to be a memoir of my old headmistress and my East End childhood and education. This may or may not be included, but I will also post it on the site I set up for gathering and sharing stories about my school years, where I have written about one or two other memories.

It’s a truth universally acknowledged that the sense of smell is more evocative than the other four put together, so it is no wonder that, as I get older, I am continually hooked back into my distant past. It is also universally acknowledged that as one gets older, one’s long term memory increases, as the short term one decreases. In fact it’s a standard senility test-“what did you have for lunch yesterday dear?.... Can’t remember? Never mind we’ve got some nice pictures here for you to match”  Well- can you remember what you had for lunch yesterday, or can’t you be bothered, in a busy life, to even think about it? Still, senile or not, I still have senior moments, and they seem to be coming along ever more frequently, like the times when the past clutches me by the nose and pulls me back….

And I am there, in the huge municipal swimming pool in East Ham: shouts and echoes, slimy tiles, weird wire baskets for your clothes, communal changing- oh the teenage blushes when your boobs were too small and your bottom too big! And what has brought me here? A whiff of chlorine when I cleaned the sink. It’s no use me peeling off my Marigolds and trying to chase away the memories with the smell of fresh coffee; I am there. Why today? It’s not as if cleaning the sink is that rare ( I may not do it every day, but I do do it) then I realise- it’s because I burnt the toast this morning, and the smell still lingers, and combines with the chlorine to make that unique smell which snares me and draws me into the past, bringing with it sounds and sights and the feeling of being a spotty, insignificant kid.

It wasn’t just the chlorine, eye stinging and almost visible- us east end kids used to pee in the water you know-, it was the toast- mountains of thin white sliced bread- (do I really remember that a loaf of it was eight pence three farthings when I used to be sent to buy it at the corner shop, in the days when there was a corner shop?) Big ladies with comfortable bingo wings made these mountains of toast and scraped cheap margarine and fish paste onto them.

-‘Ere, you got any ends missis?
(Ends were cheaper)
-There y’are love
-Put a bit a paste on it Missis
-Oh go on wiv yer then

On flush days when we didn’t have to rely on the good will of the ladies we would stuff ourselves with five or six dripping smelly slices. No slot machines full of choc bars and crisps, just bingo wings, white tiles, crumbs and chlorine. No health and safety inspectors to tell the ladies they couldn’t slap on the marge by hand and pass the greasy things straight into our chlorine scented hands.

Tuesday 31 May 2011

I hope you're teaching Quality


I have discussed genre elsewhere, and have always said, what matters is quality. Now how do you define Quality?

Sarah … came trotting by with her watering pot between those two doors, going from the corridor to her office, and she said, "I hope you are teaching Quality to your students.". ..
Quality . . . you know what it is, yet you don't know what it is. But that's self-contradictory. But some things are better than others, that is, they have more quality. But when you try to say what the quality is, apart from the things that have it, it all goes poof! There's nothing to talk about. But if you can't say what Quality is, how do you know what it is, or how do you know that it even exists? If no one knows what it is, then for all practical purposes it doesn't exist at all. But for all practical purposes it really does exist. What else are the grades based on? Why else would people pay fortunes for some things and throw others in the trash pile? Obviously some things are better than others . . . but what's the betterness? . . . So round and round you go, spinning mental wheels and nowhere finding anyplace to get traction. What the hell is Quality? What is it?
Robert M Persig Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

I now have an easy definition which works for me as far as books are concerned- do I want to put it on my bookshelf beside Dickens, Austen and Gaskell? I am at the age where I can no longer be bothered with stuff I don't want- ornaments, kitchen gadgets, saggy socks- and books that I am unlikely to read again. They don't get as far as a shelf: an unwanted book moves straight from the bedside table to the hall-stand. In other words, it's on its way out!

Our reading group, attached to our local Library, has just finished reading My Sister's Keeper by Jodi Picoult. Now, although I read it quickly and with enjoyment ("It slipped down easily" said our librarian) it will not have a permanent place on my shelves. It's well written, it's a bit of a page-turner, the characters are interesting. So why? The twist at the end is satisfying in terms of story telling- in other words it's unforeseen and quite clever- but morally, it's a complete cop-out. I get the feeling that JP has engineered it to twist our heart strings! The issues raised by the book however, are important and suck any reader in- designer babies, sibling rivalry and love, possessive and controlling mothers, and filial love. It engendered lively and long discussion. One reader summed it up as "A pot-boiler about serious issues".

Coincidentally, I have just finished reading Sister by Rosamund Lupton, which shares some of the same themes- although not the central one. I found this book more emotionally engaging and true while still wanting to find out what happens next. And yes, I will read it again- it's earned its place!