OTHER WRITING

The other stuff I write has to take its place in this corner, away from the main things. Which is wrong because I’ve written it with the same care and the same degree of pleasure I get from most of the things I write.

Just Write

Just Write is based on workshops I’ve given for students at universities in my role as a Royal Literary Fund Writing Fellow. I co-wrote it with Kathleen McMillan, an excellent, amazingly dedicated lecturer at Dundee University. It’s aimed principally at helping students to cope with the demands of academic writing but our intention was to give it much wider scope and, most of all, to make it easy to read. When I started my first writing fellowship, I had to stop and think about the actual process of writing. I’d always written, but never stopped to ask what I was actually doing or how I went about it. Just Write breaks the process down into phases and, we think, could be useful for anyone who has to write something in any context.

Radio plays

I love writing dialogue and, back in the 70s, the BBC was a wonderful patron of aspiring writers. I sent them scripts which (I realise now because I still have some of them) were unadulterated crap. But, instead of throwing the stuff back at me with a ‘Stop wasting our time’ rejection slip, they always found something positive to say about my dialogue, humour, characterisation or whatever. And that was enough to encourage me to have another go. Today, you have to promise them your firstborn or something just to get through the first of many filters. But radio drama is still a wonderful medium and the BBC is still a terrific patron.

As I list the titles, I remember the impulse behind each but also realise how far back in my past they belong. It’s about time I returned to the medium.

An Old Man and Some People (Radio 3 and Radio 4) March 1971
Poor Tom, Poor Martha (Radio 4) May 1972
Shapes in Another Day (Radio 4 and the Australian Broadcasting Commission) April 1975
The Land of Nod (Radio 4) May 1979
Inside Stories (Radio 4) April 1987

Around the same time, I wrote lots of stage plays, which were performed in Scotland and the USA (because of my connection with the Theater Department of the University of Rhode Island). I also wrote plays for children, some of which were commissioned by Aberdeen Children’s Theatre and gave me great pleasure as I watched the energy and creativity of the performers give them really exuberant life.

Revue sketches & songs

Almost as far back as the plays are my sketches and songs. I wrote them for several revues which my wife and I took to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Our revues were called ARC (for Aberdeen Revue Company) with 1, 2 and 3 added to indicate the progression. It’s impossible to convey the spread of the subjects we covered but the love song Supergalwithbaggylipsandsexyhalitosis and Joseph’s reaction to Mary’s announcement that she’s pregnant might give you an idea of it. The shows were successful and both the writing and the performing were very enjoyable. However you do it, making people laugh gives you a great buzz. Luckily we got friends to record them so, while it makes it easy to spot the mistakes, it’s also a great reminder of some wonderful evenings. Oh, and the subjects of some of the sketches are also embarrassing proofs of how politically incorrect we were then.

Stories for children

Lately, I’ve been writing stories for children. Kids are a great audience and willing to go along with whatever your fevered imagination comes up with. Surprisingly perhaps, the characters you create begin to take on the same reality as those in the crime novels. There is, for example, a male fairy called Stanley who lives in the washbasin in my bedroom. His choice of residence is based on the fact that he’s a miserable git who’s always moaning and therefore chooses to live under a dripping tap so that he can constantly confirm that life is bloody awful. In due course, I’ll start working with an illustrator but, for the moment, the only illustration I have is from my grandson, Arran. It depicts the critical moment when Princess Daisy leaps from the tower in which she’s been imprisoned by Rory the dragon.

Translation

I don’t really want to stress this because it’s too much like hard work. I have, though, translated a few things from French, the most successful probably being three one-act plays by Molière which I was commissioned to produce by the Theater Department of the University of Rhode Island. One of them, Sganarelle, which I translated into rhyming couplets, won a British Comparative Literature Association prize and, in order to impress you, I’ll point out that it was published in Comparative Criticism Volume 23 Humanist Traditions in the Twentieth Century.

Classy, eh?

Experiments

Perhaps the question most frequently asked is 'Where do you get your ideas from?' There are as many answers as there are writers, genres and literary forms. One technique I've used more recently is to take an audio track and write a story based on the mood it generates. A friend of mine, Anneke, is very skilful at creating little soundscapes. She recently sent me three of them. I listened to each and wrote three stories which seemed to fit their structures and moods. I recorded the stories and sent them back for Anneke to dub the voice over the sound track. Finally, I added some abstract visuals. If you’re interested, we’ve posted it on YouTube.