by Dave Fargnoli
Everyone can tell a story. Most of us can recognise without any conscious effort the difference between a statement, like:
“I missed a bus”
Or an anecdote:
“...Come round the corner and the bus is idling at the stop. I go running for it – it pulls away at the last second – gah! – and I shake my fist at the driver in the rear-view mirror. Which is when he sees I’m there, stops a wee bit ahead of me, and opens up the doors.
And I get on. Very awkwardly.
‘Single up town please.’”
When we tell a story, we’re crafting a sequence of statements into a narrative, communicating information – real or imaginary – to our listener, or our reader. That’s true whether you’re writing a play or a research paper, a best-man’s speech or a eulogy. The only difference is the style – and maybe the number of jokes you want to include.
When Jo and Amy from Braw Fox Theatre invited me to join CreateWorks as Writer-in-Residence, I got excited. Cross-disciplinary work has a steep learning curve on both sides. It opens up new perspectives, it allows you to consider your own methods from unexpected angles. Guiding our expert engineers through the process of crafting their own audio dramas – for some of them the first literary writing they’ve attempted since their schooldays – felt like a great opportunity to nurture a creative response to cutting-edge scientific discoveries. To reach new audiences. And even to remind myself of the foundational skills that make the writing process run smoother – in my experience, it can be an awkward, exhausting, repetitive slog sometimes!
So, I got excited. And I wrote dozens of pages of notes and rehearsed them, out loud, in front of a mirror, which is the only way to tell if a performance text really works. I laid out, as I understood them, the key points I always bear in mind when I’m working on a writing project:
- What am I trying to say here?
- What am I actually saying here?
And most importantly:
- What’s my audience going to get from this?
The thing that separates performance text from everyday conversation is intention. Everything that passes through a play is crafted (also edited, re-edited, cut, then often pasted back in) to communicate an idea to the audience. It is a story, not a statement.
Working closely together, Jo, Amy and I defined a clear, concise method for the project’s participants to follow, step by step. Steps to help define their subjects. Steps for finding characters who offer compelling perspectives on those subjects. Steps that would generate conflict, push those conflicts, find the drama. And steps for editing and polishing their stories into finished pieces.
The results blew me away. Our participants were so generous with their time, so open to the process, so free with their creativity. It was an intense programme, with skills exercises, group discussions, and writing time packed into four, dense sessions. We went methodically but swiftly from the absolute basics – what makes a story? What makes a story interesting? – through details of character, setting, and sensation. We discussed stakes and pacing and genre, and watched, delighted as each participant took these building blocks and built their very own, very different, very diverse plays.
And so, we have stories about climate change and corporate influence, stories of rogue robots, rebellions, and Friday nights down the pub. We zoom in to the microscopic scale and zoom out to take in vistas of some of the world’s remotest landscapes. There’s grim futures and there’s optimism, and there’s a fierce determination to be heard, to find solutions, to make the world work better. In that instinct, a playwright and an engineer are not so far apart.
I’m proud of what our cohort of participants have achieved, and I’m excited for them to share their stories – and the research behind them – in a new way. With a new audience.
