Rainy City Stories: Writing About Place

A creative writing workshop with David Gaffney

It would be appropriate to begin by writing about the place, but I feel this may mislead you. The weather was dull and wet, appropriate as it was a Rainy City Stories event, the venue itself, Friends Meeting House, was a little bland, white walls, brown carpet, a cluster of tables formed into one large one. None of this reflects the mood of the event. Torn-out pages from a Manchester road atlas lay scattered across the table for no other purpose than to add a bit of ambiance. Pretty soon we were all sat around the cluster of tables and people became the walls, people from a multitude of backgrounds - journalists, screen writers, wannabe novelists, academic writers, self publishers.

Writer David Gaffney, largely associated with the ‘flash fiction’ genre, sat at the head of the table with a check list of points for this flash course in writing about place. Our first exercise was to write down three things we noticed on our journey to the Friends Meeting House, and share our observations. A variety of things were mentioned: big issue sellers, filmy street pavements, the old disused Odeon, the hat shop opposite Albert Square. Most were somehow personal to the person; the places associated with memories or with things that interested them. We learned that in order to write convincingly about place we need to separate ourselves from the environment and put a character in our place. What would they see on that same journey?

Gaffney then proceeded to tell us an anecdote regarding a lady who sadly lost her sight. She asked her husband to describe the streets, what was happening on them, what could he see? He began “Well there’s a sign over there 10 to 1 on United vs Liverpool game. That pub has an offer, two main courses for a fiver,” and so on. She stopped him and said, “Now start again, only this time tell me what I would see.”

Gaffney spoke comprehensively on the subject, mentioning how other authors approached writing about place. How authors such as Ballard and Will Self would use psychogeography and algorithmic walking. He also showed a few examples of how not to write about place. Much to my personal pleasure one example was taken from Dan Brown’s The De Vinci Code . We discussed a passage and decided it was too heavy in information, it didn't tell us anything about the story or how the protagonist was seeing the surrounding section of Paris. Gaffney then informed us that it was what is known as a ‘research dump.’ It doesn’t really have a place in the text, but it does show that the author has researched.

Another ‘how not to...’ came from Bill Bryson. We all scowled when Gaffney spoke of how he dismissed our beloved city in print. His point was that everyone perceives things differently, so when writing about place try to explore the place yourself, do not rely on the words and opinions of a (unreliable and very very incredibly wrong) travel writer.

Our final task was to write a few sentences about a character and their mood within a place. Gaffney handed us a list of variables which we then selected and swapped with our neighbours. I was handed this combination of variables: a 20-year-old girl, who is an art student, situated in a snowy church yard, feeling happy. I had it easy, I was a 20-year-old art student not so long ago. Others found themselves writing about divorced 40-year-old taxi drivers in an art gallery or an unhappily married man on a Sunday afternoon in Eccles. We shared our flash fictions. It was great to see that in the space of ten minutes everyone had managed to conjure up a glimpse of a story and the beginnings of a character.

If you want to know how to write, well, I am afraid nobody can answer that. If you want to know how to write about place, David Gaffney can take you halfway there. There are no rules, but there are devices, tools and methods that can help you. The best way to write about place is to experience the place yourself and view it through another's eyes. That, and this little equation I wrote down: Story + Character + Place = Whole.

Now I am off to write a short fiction which I will the submit to rainycitystories.com

___

Mandi Goodier is a graphic designer and artist bookmaker.
www.stickittothemand.blogspot.com
www.mandgoodier.co.uk

Destroy Powerpoint

Destroy Powerpoint @ Manchester Art Gallery | 17th October | 1pm

When life gives you lemons, the hackneyed saying goes, you make lemonade. When management inflicts Powerpoint on you, you subvert and contort it into joyful literature...

David Gaffney’s wonderful hour of storytelling does not do what it promises, it does not destroy powerpoint. Rather, it strangely invigorates the forms. It reveals, with brilliant, luminous use of text and picture, a minor urban folk art, germinating out of the mundane soil of office life. Anyone who has served their sentence as a temp knows that the office work place is always rife with currents of sexual tension and emotional, professional and intellectual frustration.

Powerpoint is an art form with rules, most of which David Gaffney instantly points out he has broken. All the text of his stories eventually end up on the screen, revealed in various sequential methods. In seeking to subsume powerpoint, it seems that David Gaffney has become its master. The result is that the hour spent in the conference room in the back of Manchester Art Gallery is, like those interminable, powerpoint centred training days, actually a pleasant communal reading experience.

The first is a trip down memory lane for most of us, in which Gaffney subverts the form of powerpoint . In The King of Powerpoint he first adopts and mimics the old style of over head projectors, acetate and those smudgy green, blue and red felt tip pens, reserve of the maths and science teachers. As the story progresses he moves through early powerpoint style, through clip art and templates, giving us a visual potted history of the development of presentation technology.

The stories that David Gaffney tells us are all quite familiar, belying his previous career as a debt counsellor. They are grimy with petty discontent and tawdry hopes for romance, but always seem to end with a promise of action. They occur within lonely moments, of queuing, of plotting, promising a future in which dazzling, mad, disjointed steps are made away from the everyday, towards the objects of happiness and freedom.

He ends with Is your thought really necessary, commissioned for Wigan Words Festival, it is a twisted vision of a world where thoughts have a palpable, excretory existence. Therefore, as “thought-fill sites” fill up, need to be discouraged. Wigan, as one of the most thoughtful places in Britain, needs swift action. A civil servant, instructed to create a presentation to be given to a board, must find answers to problems without promoting any original thought. Naturally this illogical task pushes him into a downward spiral of tail biting, circular thinking, of which imagination, memory and unnecessary thought can be the only result.

David Gaffney is the author of Never Never published this year, as well as Sawn-Off Tales.

City Life does a better job of reviewing this event. However, more nonsensical writing by Ella Wredenfors on topics such as Art, Culture and all round geekery about Manchester can be found at runpaintrunrun.net.

Review: David Gaffney and Urban Myths retold

David Gaffney

David Gaffney presented a lunchtime reading performance of new work written in homage to the 1857 'Art Treasures in Manchester' exhibition, now recreated at Manchester City Art Gallery. My company published David repeatedly in the-phone-book.com, as well as commissioning him for The Burgess Project; his wit and talent shine through and it's always a real treat to see the world through his eyes.

The readings at MCAG ranged from a Victorian Child bought from a website, to Pete Doherty split in half and immersed in formaldehyde having left his remains to "Art". There was no geek in sight here, but David's stories are succinct in length and vast in imagination and his reading style is certainly a considered, rehearsed performance. They're posting all his stories on the gallery website soon, I'll add the link when they do. Oh, and go buy his book.

Urban Myths Retold

The premise: through an open submission process, ten short-short stories were chosen to form the basis for Interactive Arts retelling. The young students had just three weeks to read and respond to the stories, resulting in a one hour live art & installation performance through the often unknown nooks & crannies of the Urbis building.

I was impressed by the original stories (being an obvious fan of the short-short narrative format), but the diverse and innovative responses from each artist really blew me away. My favourite was most definitely the response to "The Clubber" by Hetty Malcolm-Smith, a realistic flash-back to heady rave culture days (or rather, nights). The narrative was delivered via a series of flyers handed out sequentially as you walked down the long, postered staircase. It could really have been The Academy, circa 1995.

One minor complaint I have was the use of the word 'interactive' in one piece, the re-telling of "Jenny Greenteeth" by Steve Jackson. I have a real issue with the way the word 'interactive' is used. Purely from my point of view, if you do not affect the work in a way that changes another participant's experience of that piece, it isn't interactive. Call it an installation and I'll be happy (and I loved the home-made lollipops so it certainly wasn't all bad).

Our narrator wore a back-pack throughout, which instantly made me wonder, why? You don't wear a backpack in a performance unless you need to carry something, so at the end I grabbed the young man, applauded his performance, and questioned it's purpose... "backpackcam" was revealed and I'm now looking forwards to seeing further remixes of re-tellings through the MMU.

Congratulations to all for a truly successful experiment. This type of project is exactly the right approach for MLF's "Freeplay" strand, where Literature, Technology and Media collide.I look forwards to more of the same from all concerned.

- Fee Plumley
(posted simultaneously at her blog, Geekinetics)