Form, Structure and Scouting
“What I love about this,” the director said, “is the form of the piece.”
I locked my expression into ‘polite neutral’ and tried nodding and smiling. We were in a scout hut in Kew, rehearsing a play that I’d written for a reading in a few weeks time, and the director was twiddling a pencil between his fingers in the manner of a repressed creative genius just waiting to strike that rogue comma with the sharpened point of HP.
“I love the way the form and the structure both reflect the cascading nature of the language and narrative as it builds out of control from the prime inciting incident to the moment of character curve completion.”
I kept on smiling. This was, I felt, the most polite thing I could do under the circumstances. I feel I should add that the director on this particular literary project was nothing if not brilliant. A damn good director, a very good bloke and a man I would happily write for again. But, and this was a bit of a sticking point for me, he also knew damn more about writing than I did.
This is not the same as being able to write – he confesses that he can’t write for toffee – but on the other hand, he’d had a lot more training in the area by which he was able to discover this truth. Whereas I have always just… muddled by. Working with him was, therefore, something of a painful reminder of a constant truth… that sometimes being a good writer, is not the same as being a good author.
Talking about your literary works is, I personally think, one of the hardest things a writer has to do. There are a lot of problems stacked against you, of which the first and usually most deadly, is personal bias. As the writer, I naturally know, as no one else can, that my epic, 700 page-long tome – ‘What I Did That Tuesday Afternoon When I Had Gastroenteritis’ – is nothing short of a scintillating work of literary genius. My heart, my soul, and quite possibly other bodily fluids, judging by the title, have been poured into this, along with a great deal of time and a lot of earnest thought. When, therefore, my editor turns round and suggests that it’s a light-hearted romp beside sold alongside ”Funny Jokes For Farting Fathers’, a certain blindness overwhelms my otherwise calm literary judgment. Under these circumstances, answering questions coherently about ‘Tuesday Afternoon’ and why it and it’s puce-coloured cover are sat in the Silly Section of the bookshop, and even the most thoughtful of authors struggle to see through their own bias to a clear and sensible reply. (more…)