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For sale: baby shoes, never worn.
Ernest Hemingway. For a $10 bet to write the shortest short story. He won.
We were discussing this in the car yesterday on the way to lunch in Marseilles. And it reminded me of a Guardian article where writers were asked to come up with 6 word stories. And the BBC did something similar on the Today programme Apparently this fits into a genre of literature called ‘flash fiction’ – stories of 1000 words or less.
I like it as a development of ideas around postcards, somehow mashed up with springboard stories, and as a move away from the structuring of springboard stories. Writing world suggests the following.
Then ask yourself these three questions:
This all seems useful rigour to me. I also like the chapter in Twyla Tharp’s book, The Creative Habit, about having a Spine.
I once made the mistake of announcing that a new ballet was based on Euripides ‘The Bacchae’. It was a mistake…the spine was an essential preparatory step in the ballet’s creation. Without it, there would be no starting point, no coherence, no North Star to guide me – and ultimately no dance. My only mistake was that I should have kept it to myself.
She gives an example of ‘The Natural’ a film about an aging baseball star. The story was a simple baseball yarn. The spine was the myth of the search for the holy Grail.
What sound advice Tharp offers on both counts. I nearly always have a spine for the commissions I want Spark to take on. And I should always, always keep it to myself. Her need to find one is compounded by the fact that ‘dance is preverbal, so she needs something in the form of an idea, a memory, an image to articulate her intentions to herself so that they stay as a strong enough guiding principle through the creation of the work.
I’m going to do more work around both the flash fiction and the Work Spine.
Which is different from the Story Spine which Anecdote write about here as a useful sense-making device.
These are all about having a good underpinning, a way to skin things down, and way to look at how things unfold. I’m also carrying with me a recent client encounter about putting narrative to work. The client said:
We’re terrible at endings. We have plenty of good beginnings, but very few good endings.
I feel there’s an exercise there, not Story Spines, or Spines or Flash Fiction of Future Story or whatever, but like that game you can play with starter and ender sentences. I’ve been wondering what the ‘reader, I married him’ endings might be that we could play with in organisational settings.
And over lunch (with a lovely colleague from LIFFE, where we worked together in the late 80’s, early 90’s) I was reminded of the gorgeous ‘Exercices de style’ written in 1947 by the French writer, Raymond Queneau, who rewrote the same paragraph in 99 different ways. The basic story is that the narrator gets on a bus, sees an argument between a man with a long neck and a funny hat and another passenger, then see the same person 2 hours later at the Gare St. Lazare getting advice on adding a button to his overcoat. I have a copy somewhere which I must look out. Interestingly the French wikipedia entry gives a list of the styles. The English does not. A small, but interesting fieldnote to self there about not just googling in one direction.
This must be susceptible to some marvellous workshop games. I expect it’s been done, just not by me.
I’m looking at how to use all these approaches in the Defra toolkit in a way that they won’t get policy makers reaching for the off switch.
