Faith and Will – Carl Shuker

Posted on September 23, 2013 by modernletters

INTERVIEWER
So, how do you write, exactly?

BALLARD
Actually, there’s no secret. One simply pulls the cork out of the bottle, waits three minutes, and two thousand or more years of Scottish craftsmanship does the rest.

Obviously the Ballard here is J.G., in his Paris Review interview. Here is the author of, at his death in 2009, 18 novels and by my count 22 assorted collections of short fiction. In 1984, when he said this, James Graham was 54 and had published 10 novels and 15 of those collections. What lies behind this perfect little quote is an enormous lived treatise on the faith and will of writing.

J.G. is turning irritably in his grave right now, but hear me out.

In 1964, three novels into his career, Ballard’s wife died of pneumonia. In his joyous, playful The Kindness of Women he rewrote his own biography such that she dies after a fall at a Spanish beach resort. He is forced to drive his three children home to their dusty semi in Shepperton, TW17. Imagine that drive.

J.G. Ballard outside his house in Shepperton.

Shepperton, to his readers, is an otherwise banal London commuter circuit suburb luminous with his fiction: its reservoirs clasping drowned light aircraft in their waving weeds; its leafy green über-English foliage poised trembling ready to explode into a precisely and passionately observed tropical rainforest; its residents walking as if lost in a dream, ready for their deviating sexualities to emerge and find their fullest expression on church pews and dashboards.

What he did, just three novels in, his wife dead, age thirty-four, was to drive home to Shepperton with his three bereaved children, and commence the unimaginable task of bringing them up alone and writing his life’s work. And though Miriam died of pneumonia, not of a mysterious concussion in the back of a Catalan ambulance, whether or not he verifiably drove those children home doesn’t matter. Because that is what he did. He drove them home from the place of their mother’s death, and then he drove them to school in the morning, every morning, and came home, poured himself a large Teacher’s at (I like to imagine) about 9:15 (elsewhere in a very generous and humanising admission he talks of it calming his nerves), and commenced on the next 500 to 1000 words of some of the most devastating, numinous, repetitive, terrifying, sad, monotonous, prophetic, hilarious fiction we keep from the latter half of the twentieth century. (Martin Amis called Ballard’s fiction “at once totally humourless and entirely unserious”: his persistently strange work always rewards the paradoxical juxtaposition, and like all the biggies, he always reveals his reviewer.)

This is an act, behind his—and any big writer’s—apparent bravado, Godlikeness, unassailability (I don’t ever think of McCarthy sitting down to Blood Meridian and murmuring “Oh, I just can’t enter into this imaginatively today”): an act of faith, and of will. Because the weird catch-22 or ouroboros of novel writing is that to do the creative, imaginative work of making a piece of prose ring in a reader’s imagination, to raise and fire an undoubted world with bounce and blood and passion such that the reader has total faith in it, you must have faith in yourself. It’s a requirement.

It may sound trite. But consider this: out of nowhere, you’re say 24 and haven’t hardly finished a proper emotion let alone a thing we might call a book, you’re required to have faith that this tiny two-inch corner you’re painting right now will form an inevitable, essential, closely examinable and yet seemingly seamless and unremarkable part of a huge, huge canvas (you know only it’s really big) that you don’t know the exact dimensions of yet. (There’s a not-small element of bluff.) Because if you don’t have that faith then the brushstrokes, the mark making, will be incongruous; tiny, perfect details here; broad evocative strokes out there when you got confident but ran out of time/material/story/whatever. Pacing all wrong. Result: “Patchy”—L. Patchett, Listener. “Uneven”—Michiko Kakutani, NYT.

So because it’s me and not, well, you, I’m actually talking about, back to the first person: the catch: in order to do what I need to do and what I know I can’t do, or certainly have no prior evidence I can do, I must have faith in myself that I can indeed do this miraculous thing. Faith is a synonym here for love of self. But also, over time, as the fiction progresses, for me, faith in the people of the fiction. Faith in the world as it is transformed into the fiction. Faith as synonym for love of world. (Of course what also works is support of community, of family etc., apposite energies or obsessions like anger, loss, love, big passions which can be channelled, etc., Scotch.) Will is the element of getting myself into the position to have faith. “I will, every day, be here at this time doing this thing and if you think I won’t and that I will fuck this up like I fucked those other things up you’re about to get a lesson in will.” Or something equally self-exhortatory, vociferous, not to say strident. This is our only time and our only time in the sun; bitching about publishing and about debt and stress and hard work and tiredness and failure and dumbing down of this and that are just ways of not doing what I really have to do.

Don DeLillo has a lovely bit about will, in Underworld:
“Have you come across the word velleity? A nice Thomistic ring to it. Volition at its lowest ebb. A small thing, a wish, a tendency. If you’re low-willed, you see, you end up living in the shallowest turns and bends of your own preoccupations.”

It’s a Jesuit talking to a young man. And I can see it’s kind of scary in isolation from the big sepia warmth of that book. It’s not just about set teeth and application of trouser seat to chair, as Kingsley Amis has it. Here’s Ballard, at his desk every morning in his, let’s face it, filthy house, his three children (three children) off at school, with his glass of Scotch, commencing on the next page of the novel, of his alternative affirmation of the psychosexual horror-comedy of the twentieth century.

And before I tell you what he does next, looking down at what he’s written, there’s another thing I might mention, apart from writing, and books, that is the result of this exercise of faith and will. Bill Manhire reports on always feeling like the youngest person in the room. And it’s written all over his face. Seamus Heaney said, “All poets are young poets really, that’s the beauty of it.” It was written all over his face too.

There are writers out there, and unhappy, frantic-seeming people with intense inner lives who haven’t found their work, who only calm under the weight of a task. I think of them like certain teenagers, all power and energy and no direction. Give them a task, give them a weight to bear, precisely calibrated just above their expectations of themselves. And they may bitch and moan, but the weight must be such they are forced to concentrate, and calm. There is a peace.

And there’s more. Because here’s Ballard, 34, with his three children, his debts, no doubt, and his memories of murder, atrocity, torture and starvation. His lost wife. He looks down at what he’s just written and chuckles.

Carl Shuker is the 2013 Writer in Residence at Victoria University of Wellington. His books include The Lazy Boys and The Method Actors. His latest novel is Anti Lebanon. Asked to recommend Ballard titles, Carl writes: ‘For new readers I’d say definitely start with the canonical Crash, or for those more squeamish, The Drowned World. And for the wonderful transmogrification of Shepperton: The Unlimited Dream Company.’

Carl is representing the MA year 2001 at the IIML Alumni Reading on Sunday 29 September from 7.30pm at Circa Theatre, Wellington.

Research and Improvisation – Amy Head

Posted on June 26, 2013 by modernletters

For the first time in a while, recently, while I was packing up to move, I put my hands on the folders and clear files relating to each of the stories in Tough (a collection set in the past and present on the West Coast). I’m far less likely to happen on digital files in the same way, and it was the first time I’d looked at this material together as one record. Each story had its own spiral-bound notepad. There were photocopies from library visits and pamphlets from tiny museums in the middle of nowhere (more like sheds, some of them, supervised by no-one). I found an exhibition catalogue and a promo DVD from Solid Energy.

The folders were filled out with print-outs of past drafts – three or four per story. Flicking through the old versions reminded me of entire sections of stories that had been scrapped, like the deleted scenes in DVD extras. It reminded me how unexpectedly modular the stories had been, allowing me to shift paragraphs around when I’d finished the first draft and could see more clearly what the story was about. It was all there: characters whose names had changed, the story I had to rewrite after being burgled.

I especially enjoy the research and discovery phase of developing an idea for a story. At its most ‘method’, this has meant persuading a friend of a friend, a textile historian, to let me try on her collection of hoop skirts. At its most leisurely it meant tracking down and watching old goldrush movies.

Sometimes these diversions were justified. After all, I have to inject the language with my own energy and commitment. I have to make the first draft sparkle enough to keep me interested in all the subsequent drafts, when I’ve switched the paragraph order and changed my mind about tense and point of view, and it’s all an unpacked mess that has to be put back together somehow.

But often, when I’ve forced myself to stay at my desk and write past the point at which the day’s writing began to feel stale, I’ve eventually arrived at an idea or image I’ve liked. I’m not sure that all of the preamble, my holistic approach, which I hoped was building up a unique world, attitude and tone for each story, was actually necessary. Although it may have given the stories the occasional sentence or image, the language and style is far more likely to have been enriched by what I was reading. On my MA year in particular, I was reading more, and more widely, than usual, and being encouraged to try new things.

During an interview for ‘In the Actor’s Studio’, Robert de Niro said he often found he got to the same place in his characterisations by skipping most of the fastidious preparation, instead starting to improvise and rehearse as soon as possible. I wonder if, when I start out in my next project, I’ll find a better balance between preparing and doing from the outset. If I start writing earlier, my subconscious can continue the work while I’m skiving off watching YouTube footage of the world’s highest waterfall, a demonstration of how to put my hair in victory rolls, or Roberto Begnini performing his one-man show about Dante, in Italian, in front of the Duomo.

Amy Head’s first book of stories Tough is published by Victoria University Press. She appears in the Writers on Mondays lunchtime series at Te Papa on 29 July.

Dear Me – Emma Martin

Posted on April 25, 2013 by modernletters

Writing exercises often focus on the initial act of creation: here is the blank page, what will you write on it? But let’s assume that you have a piece of fiction with a start, a middle and an end. What do you do now?

Two things are helpful at this point. Firstly, critical acuity: the ability to see into a piece of fiction, under it, through it; to understand what it is doing, and also how it is doing what is doing. Secondly – this is the tricky bit – the ability to apply this acuity to our own writing. Otherwise, it can be hard to know if a story is finished. Or what to do with it if it is not.

Reading helps develop our critical abilities, of course; but it did strike me, as I made my first forays into writing fiction, that whatever I had been doing with books had left me curiously ignorant of what was required in order to write one. Well-crafted fiction presents itself with a kind of inevitability. It answers its own questions. It paints over its own steps. It pulls its ladder up behind itself, folds its arms tightly across its chest and deflects our tiny arrows.

As we learn the craft of writing, then, there can also be value in reading the work of peers – work that is imperfect, unfinished, still taking shape on the page. What is the impact of the point of view the writer has chosen? What would happen to the work if it began or ended at some different point? If the narrative was condensed or stretched (is this a novel cramped awkwardly into the frame of a short story, or a story that has lost focus and become too novelistic?) Were there points at which the writer seemed to try too hard? Were there particular images that resonated? Did the story touch you? How did the writer achieve that? There are a thousand questions we can ask of a piece of fiction; our first task is to formulate the right ones.

This sharing of work is best done in an environment of trust. When I did the MA at the IIML, prior to each workshop we wrote individual feedback to our classmates in the form of letters. This, we were told, would help us find the right tone: respectful, truthful, intimate. We were instructed always to include something positive (“if you can’t see something positive, read the work again until you see something positive”). At first I thought this was merely a matter of diplomacy, but later concluded it was not. We were being taught look for the energy that is driving a piece of fiction. The possibility in it.

We learnt, too, what to do with feedback on our own work: to hear it well, but hear it in silence. The impact of the story on the reader wasn’t for the writer to debate. We did not need to justify our work to anyone – only (only!) to let ourselves be open to seeing it afresh. Which is not to say that being workshopped did not sometimes feel like having your skin peeled off and being dipped in a salt bath. But I found that I was less flayed by the judgement of others as my confidence as a writer increased. Tellingly, some of the most useful feedback I received mirrored things I knew deep down myself, or was on the cusp of recognising. The aim of the process is not to create a dependence on the opinions of others, but actually quite the reverse. It is to close the circle between giving and receiving feedback, so that – unlike in old-fashioned games of hunt the thimble – we begin to sense for ourselves when we are cold, and when we are warm.

So, the exercise: take a story you have not looked at for several months. Read it and walk around with it in your head for a few days. Read it again. Then write yourself a letter. You are not writing it for an audience: whatever you say is between yourself and yourself. When you have finished, read your story again.

Now rewrite it.

Emma Martin grew up in Dunedin and has lived in Melbourne, Manchester, Edinburgh and London. She lives in Wellington with her partner and two children. In 2012 she won the Commonwealth Short Story Prize for the title story of Two Girls In A Boat, her first collection. The book is launched at Unity Books, Wellington, on 2 May.

Emma will appear at Bats Theatre, Wellington, in The Exercise Book Live on 14 June.

Word Stabbing with Therese Lloyd

Posted on February 11, 2013 by modernletters

I remember doing this exercise when I was a little girl; back then I didn’t know it was a kind of writing exercise of course, I was just having fun with words. But I figure a sense of play is still the essential component of any writing exercise even if I am a grownup now.

So before we begin, just to clarify, this exercise is completely lacking in sophistication; it’s the sort of thing that you can do prone and with one eye half open. But if you want to get something down on that glowering piece of paper (‘the piano crouched in the corner of the room with all its teeth bare’ as Nick Cave says), this’ll do it.

Instructions:

• Chose a collection of poems by a single poet (no anthologies)

• Open the book at any page

• Close your eyes

• With one hand, index finger pointed, make grand-ish gesticulations* in the air

• Then with your eyes still closed bring that finger down onto the open page

• Open your eyes … there is a word under that finger! Write down the word

• Repeat this twenty times, each time opening the book at any page

• Once you have your twenty words start writing a poem that uses all of those words as the structural foundation

Things to note:

If your finger hits a blank space on the page or an article, conjunction or preposition just chose the nearest interesting looking word (whatever you deem that to be) or flick open the book and repeat the process. Try to be as loose as possible though and don’t be put off by a word that you find ugly or out of your ken, and similarly don’t seek a word that you think might ‘fit’.

You can use the words in any order and as many times as you like and you can change the tense to fit.

The great thing about this exercise is once you start composing your poem you can shoot off in any direction you like, in fact, the more open you are to the possibilities the better; after-all, at this stage these are just twenty lone words with no meaning attached to them.

Although we’ve probably all done exercises like this at some point, what’s fun about this one is that you can still get the satisfaction of having written a poem but without dredging your soul for themes or images—the subject tends to emerge as you go along.

The other good thing about this exercise is the marvelous happy accidents that can occur. From Paterson by William Carlos Williams amongst the list of twenty words I picked was this little cluster; ‘old, unoccupied, clouds’, how lovely!

While it’s not essential that you use a single poet’s collection, I encourage it because it’s a novel way to get a sense of a specific poet’s lexicon. Doing this exercise with Wallace Stevens for example may yield a lot of shape, pink, voice, high, concentric etc, with Lyn Heijinian, burlap, bounded, realized, brick etc.

Have fun and remember, no one’s watching.

*not strictly necessary but lends a certain mysticism to the exercise; writers are part magician after-all.

Therese Lloyd’s poems have appeared in a number of print and online publications including Sport, Landfall, Hue & Cry, the AUP series New Zealand Poets in Performance, Jacket2 and Turbine. In 2007 she was awarded the Schaeffer Fellowship to spend a year attending the acclaimed Iowa Writer’s Workshop. Several cities later, she now lives in Paekakariki with her husband. Her debut collection Other Animals is published in March.

How to Silence the Fear

Posted on October 28, 2012 by modernletters

When I get struck by the Fear (you know – the fear that when you’re not writing, you’re wasting time; the fear that when you are writing, you’re wasting time), I need to do something practical, something physical, to fend it off. It’s similar to putting my contact lenses before making toast instead of pawing blindly through the kitchen. So I use the Pomodoro Technique [PDF], which I came across through Oliver Burkeman’s excellent Guardian series This Column Will Change Your Life. It’s the most unmiraculous way of tricking yourself into doing stuff. as a Bill Manhire simulacrum wrote here: “I am not an innovator, I will take my tricks from anywhere.” And the Pomodoro Technique is really just a slightly silly trick.

All you do is pick a task – any task, but in our case, writing, any writing – and set a timer for 25 minutes. It has to be 25 minutes. (The guy who came up with this idea in the 80s, an Italian named Francesco Cirillo, uses a kitchen timer that looks like a tomato, hence “pomodoro”.) Anyway, write until the timer rings. Stop for five minutes. Five minutes, no more, no less. Then repeat three more times. After that, you can have a longer break. Stretch, scratch, bring in the washing, or, my favourite, do a bit of vacant staring.

And, well – that’s it. This simple structuring of time creates the illusion of obligation. You must do the time. And the kitchen timer provides objective validation that you’ve done it. As Burkeman says, it’s almost embarrassing how easy it is to fool yourself. (Cirillo himself says that the first time he tried it was both helpful and humiliating.) “The ticking clock takes an internal desire to get something done and fools some part of the brain into thinking it’s external, that the clock must be obeyed,” says Burkeman. “Even the hokey language – Cirillo calls each 25-minute period a ‘pomodoro’ – helps, by making the time blocks seem like ‘things’, out in the world.” This appeals to me because before any piece of work becomes a poem, a story, a novel – at first, always, it is just a thing.

The other option, I guess, is to stop fluffing around with tomatoes and Just Do It. But setting yourself a small, specific task – something that involves the use of your limbs – is an oddly powerful way to silence the Fear. It is more manageable than making bloodless plans to “finish an essay, finish that editing job, write an application for money, write three poems”. We are so good at tricking ourselves out of doing things, we can respond with trickery to get ourselves to do them.

Ashleigh Young’s first collection of poetry, Magnificent Moon, will be launched at Unity Books, Wellington, this Thursday at 6pm. Ashleigh grew up in Te Kuiti and Wellington and has recently returned from two years in London where she was an editor at the Institute of Ismaili Studies. Her poems and essays have appeared in many print and online literary magazines, including Best New Zealand Poems, Booknotes, Hue & Cry,Metro, Sport and Turbine. She won the Adam Foundation Prize in 2009 for her manuscript essay collection Can You Tolerate This?, and her essay ‘Wolf Man’ won the Landfall Essay Competition the same year. She blogs at eyelashroaming.wordpress.com.

Photograph and poem – Kerry Hines

Posted on October 3, 2012 by modernletters

Choose a photograph to work with – one which is unfamiliar to you, and which interests you and piques your curiosity in some way. There are no constraints on what kind of photograph you choose, but it must have been taken before you were born, and must have no direct personal associations for you – so you can’t, for example, choose something from a family album.

Look closely at the photograph for at least 5-10 minutes. Consider what you know and don’t know about the image, and what it is that attracts you to it. Stay curious, and be attentive. Hypothesise, speculate, notice. Set the photograph aside for a few days, then repeat this process. Feel free to make notes and to search out contextualising information about the photograph, but in addition to looking, not instead of it.

Then write a poem in response to the photograph that builds on (but does not make explicit) this experience of it. Your aim should be to write a poem that would surprise and interest the photograph, rather than telling it what it already knows. In particular:

avoid describing or paraphrasing the photograph, or otherwise trying to translate it into words;
steer clear of any reference to photographs or photography in the poem;
take care to avoid clichés and easy conclusions about the past.

Kerry Hines was the IIML’s first PhD student, and was recently awarded her doctorate for her thesis After the fact: poems, photographs, and regenerating histories. Kerry will present work from her project at the last Writers on Mondays session for the year at 12.15pm, Monday 8 October at the City Gallery, Wellington (note venue).

Working with an archive of nineteenth-centure photographs, Kerry Hines has written a compelling collection of poems that bring together text and image, fact and imagination; raising the question of how we look at and imagine our history. Kerry will discuss the archive and its creator, outline the origins and development of the work, and present a selection of the poems and photographs which form part of her creative writing PhD thesis. Chaired by Roger Blackley.

Snowstorm – Ken Duncum

Posted on September 18, 2012 by modernletters

I do this at the first class of every year. It’s a good ice-breaker in itself, and leads to homework which is then the first writing read in class.
I cut up lots of strips of paper – and label three boxes CHARACTERS, LOCATIONS, CONVERSATIONS.
I then dump 200 strips of paper on the table and tell my (10) class members to write an invented character on each strip and put it in the CHARACTER box while saying it out loud.
Characters are briefly named rather than described at length – e.g. lovestruck teenager, seasick pirate, the last woman in the world . . .
When 200 characters have been invented, declaimed aloud and stowed in their box, I dump another 100 strips on the table and we set about inventing locations in the same way – heaven, a treehouse, a sleazy bar . . .
When that’s done, it’s on to ‘things a conversation could be about’. These might be subjects like ‘the existence of God’ or ‘the price of fish’, or could be snippets of lines such as ‘Why don’t you love me?’ or ‘That’s the stupidest haircut I’ve ever seen’ (though that last one probably wouldn’t fit on a strip).
Once that’s done, I give the contents of each box a stir, then each writer has to pick (without looking) two characters out of the CHARACTER box, a location from the LOCATION box and a conversation topic out of the CONVERSATION box.
They read out what they’ve got – e.g. a lovestruck teenager and the last woman in the world in a treehouse talking about that’s the stupidest haircut I’ve ever seen.

Homework is then to write that scene as a script – could be film or theatre – of about three minutes’ duration (no longer) and bring copies for everyone to the next week’s class.
The following week we read them out loud in class.
It’s a good way to start that process because it’s an arbitrary (and kind of silly) exercise, rather than a piece of writing dear to the writer’s heart. Very often the inventiveness of how the writer tackles their task is truly admirable – and sometimes writers have gone on to develop their short homework script into something ‘real’.

Extract from The Exercise Book from VUP.

Ken Duncum is The Michael Hirschfeld Director of Scriptwriting at the IIML. Ken will be at the next Writers on Mondays with the Masters scriptwriting students at Circa Theatre, September 24th 12.15pm, introducing the latest crop of emerging talent. Full WOM programme details here.

True Stories as told by Damien Wilkins

Posted on September 12, 2012 by modernletters

Damien Wilkins, photo by Greta Wilkins

I use this exercise in the first few weeks of the MA workshop. By this time we might have done a few exercises which centre around autobiographical writing. This one frees us from the burden of confession and asks us to enter and create other lives. Newspaper photographs, which are often stagey and awkward, can be great prompts for story. Once you have a face and a few facts, it’s addictive to start reading and writing against the grain. Lawrence Patchett’s wonderful stories about 19th Century NZ are a form of this kind of approach – alternate histories made from real sources.

The other reason I like using the exercise is to remind people about the great Mavis Gallant. Her Collected Stories is almost 900 pages and essential. ‘The Moslem Wife’ is a favourite but once you have that one in your system, there’s nothing to do but push on.

True Stories
‘A journalism student in Germany once told me she was bothered by the fact that the most plain and simple and ordinary news stories could conceal an important falsehood. She gave me an example, say, a couple celebrating their seventieth wedding anniversary. They will sit holding hands for the photographer and they’ve had their ups and downs over the years, but the marriage has been a happy one. The reporter can only repeat what they say. But what if the truth is that they positively hate each other? In that case the whole interview is a lie. I told her that if she wanted to publish the lie perceived behind the interview, she had to write fiction.’
– Mavis Gallant, Paris Review, Winter 1999
Choose a photograph from the newspaper and write a piece of fiction that imagines the lie behind the official truth.

Extract from The Exercise Book from VUP.

In 2013 Damien became the Director of the IIML, having taught in the Masters programme since 2004. He’s the author of numerous books, including six novels. His latest novel Max Gate is published this October.

Using Another Person’s Words in Poetry

Posted on September 4, 2012 by modernletters

I notice that writers do it all the time. Sometimes it will be song lyrics, or a quote by a famous person. I also do it all the time. Other people have such interesting things to say.

A few years ago, after finding a website that featured the last words and criminal reports of death row inmates, I wrote a series of poems about executions in Texas. In some of the poems I quoted the inmate’s last words. What a tricky business. While writing I asked myself some questions. Should I edit the inmates last words? Did my poems exploit the inmates? Was this a form of plagiarism? More recently I’ve used other real words such as a saying from my mother, a report on bird attacks, and lines from a book on geography. These are the tips that I would give to someone who wants to use someone else’s words in a poem.

1. Chop and Change

My biggest decision when using another person’s words is whether or not they need to be verbatim, or if I can chop and change them to suit the poem. For instance, I felt comfortable changing the location and season of an online report of a bird attacks. Who would care? With the death row poems, it was a little different. It felt unethical to change the inmate’s last words—spoken at possibly one of the most vulnerable moments of their life—for the sake of sound or rhythm. So before writing, decide where that line is for you.

2. Give It To Me Straight

When using another person’s words, especially if they’re verbatim, I feel it’s necessary to make sure a reader can tell they’re not mine, but not in a footnote kind of way. Actually I did try out the footnote idea, but it made the poem feel a bit stiff. The best ways that I have seen are:

italicise the other person’s words
attribute the words in the notes section at the end of the book
use spacing or line breaks on the page to indicate a change in voice
use a different tense to indicate a change in voice
make it into dialogue and attribute it that way

For instance, in my death row poem Dennis Dowthitt, I tabbed Dowthitt’s words into three columns so they stand out as being different from the rest of the poem (and also make them sound a little crazy). As his last words are in the first person, I wrote the rest of the poem in the third person so a reader could tell where my voice ended and his began.

3. Last Words

My last word on using another person’s words is to make sure you have permission. This is a really boring tip. But if you suddenly become sold all over the world (the dream!), and happen to have a quote by The Beatles in your poem, you might find yourself in court. Or if you use a funny thing your mother tends to say, and then publish a book, you might get a brusque “I never said that!”

—-

Sarah Jane Barnett’s first collection of poems, A Man Runs into a Woman, was launched by Hue & Cry Press in August 2012. You can find out more about it on the Hue & Cry Press website. Sarah has a Masters from the IIML, and is currently completing a PhD at Massey University in the field of ecopoetics. You can listen to some of the current MA students from the IIML Writing for the Page workshops read next Monday, September 10th at Te Papa, to get a preview of the latest crop of emerging talent. Full WOM programme details here.

Performance Tips

Posted on August 29, 2012 by modernletters

There are many tricks that I have used repeatedly throughout my career to date, and others that I have done only really as one-offs. I am happy in a show to perform effects from either category, in fact I like to mix them up a little. Generally I prefer to use the term ‘effects’ in preference to a word like ‘tricks’, but in the following I will use them interchangeably. A lot of what I say will also apply to most psychic routines and how we lead our lives in general.

• Let me start with this which will seem odd advice, but it comes from many years on the road and I will offer it anyway: Never let sailors tie knots. Think about that statement and you will soon see that I am right.

• It is good to make up a programme which has opening, closing, and intermediate effects. Variety is generally a good thing, and order and selection can always be varied for different occasions and conditions. Five well-executed tricks may be better than 25 ordinary ones and could well stay in the audience’s mind a lot longer.

• Sometimes people will come up after a show or a single trick and say, ‘How did you do it?’ It is no help either to you or them to tell them – they will be disappointed while you will just lose their respect and perhaps an opportunity of future work. In such circumstances it is best to say something like, ‘Can you keep a secret?’ and if they say yes, reply, ‘So can I!’

• If a trick fails. If a trick fails, just say, ‘The real magician will be here shortly.’ This usually produces a laugh, and a degree of goodwill which can actually be quite helpful to the rest of your performance.

• Levitation without apparatus. You cannot go past the Balducci Levitation which if you hunt around you can just get off the net.

• Misdirection is the only way forward. (This is a thought you can revisit many times.)

• Of course a whole book could be written about misdirection. Another way of making this point is to say that sleight-of-hand is important but is not the be-all and end-all. Work on your patter.

• You may sometimes find yourself performing in strange venues, such as bare, draughty halls. I once found myself performing at a Lotto outlet, another time at an RSA. You may also have to eat unusual meals with members of community fundraising committees.

• A sense of vocation. Of course you will make very little money compared to dentists and others. But that is a choice you must make. You do this work because you love it.

• Even so, I am still sometimes asked: Why do it? Well, if you are lucky, you are creating memories. These are precious. You will be remembered for the overall magic you have brought into people’s lives. Magic is the poetry of the stage. Be on your guard, however, as there can also be a lot of alcohol and drug addiction in this business.

• After a while, some magicians start to ‘walk through’ their performances, so you must find ways of maintaining your enthusiasm for what you do. Remember, there may be a young boy out there in the audience who himself aspires to be a magician. That boy could have been you once or me.

• Volunteers. If you get a volunteer up on stage, start by saying, ‘What’s your name, sir?’ If they answer, for example, ‘Bob,’ you then say, ‘Sorry?’ They will say, ‘Bob,’ again, at which point you say, ‘No I heard you, I’m just sorry.’

• ‘Horses for courses’. What works well in a place like Christchurch will not necessarily go down in Masterton. That said, The Severed Head of Patrick D. Evans is a popular effect which needs little preparation and has made money for me in recent years.

• Sometimes magicians divide along a line as to whether they belong to the apparatus school or the non-apparatus school. I myself am happy with both. I am not an innovator, I will take my tricks from anywhere. Nevertheless I have always put in the hard yards beforehand.

• Once I was approached after a show by a beautiful woman who said she wanted to learn my secrets. We talked excitedly all through the night and spent many subsequent weeks and months together. In my heart I dedicate each new show to her. When I am developing new tricks, I often wonder, would she be fooled by this one.

• Television. Magic on television is not magic. There is no substitute for a live performance of Satan’s Scissors or The Floating Arab. Mostly I prefer the conversational style of presentation, but a more dramatic routine is not without its advantages.

• Magical ‘teams’. These are a contradiction in terms. A magician works alone, or with an assistant.

• Likewise feminist magicians. I once sat through a whole show by Fat Girls Walking Slowly and, if I can deal with the subject by putting it this way, I have to admit I was distinctly unimpressed. My note on ‘magical teams’ above is also relevant here.

• It is important to be neatly dressed, but it is not a good idea to overdo it, especially if you are working with children. For a few years I tried wearing raven’s wings but they were not a great success and I would not recommend them.

• Of course you need a good name. Blitz the Magician was a good one, likewise Houdini and The Great Benyon. Dave the Wizard I would rule out, but something like Alakazam would be fine. That said, David Blaine could hardly be more famous, so it is hard to give the best advice in this area.

• While I am on this subject here is a timely quote from David Blaine for all aspiring magicians. ‘Don’t let anybody tell you what to do. When you are doing something you love, it’s easier to succeed at it than doing something you don’t.’

• This will sound old-fashioned, but a wand is very useful and most audience members expect one.

• Remember, a good magician is always more than a mere publicity hound. Constant practice and hard work and personal sacrifice are necessary. Sometimes, though, everything will just come together without you even thinking about it and then there is nothing like it. It is truly magical.

• Finally remember there is always a next level. Getting to the next level inevitably involves more hard work but I think you can do it. In fact, I will be there, in my white cape, waiting for you.

This extract, written by Bill Manhire, is from from The Exercise Book, available in all good book stores or online from VUP.
Bill will be appearing next week, September 3rd, at Writers On Mondays in the event Songs of My Life. The publication of his career-view Selected Poems is the perfect opportunity to profile this major figure in our literature. In his retirement year from Victoria University, it might also be time to lay to rest rumours of warm slippers and the fireside chair. The five-time winner of the New Zealand Book Award for Poetry will read and discuss his work with Damien Wilkins. Full WOM programme details here.

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