Tag: writing

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The Unpredictablity of Live Performance

In 2011, the joint premiere of the play White Rabbit, Red Rabbit was held at the Edinburgh Fringe and at the SummerWorks Festival in Toronto. Most playwrights would be left with the difficult decision of which one to attend, but for Nassim Soleimanpour, the decision was made for him.

At the time, he wasn’t allowed to leave Iran, having refused to take part in compulsory military service there. Performing a play usually requires a lot of discussion between the playwright, the director, the actors and the crew, so how was this one staged with one crucial element removed?

In short, the script travelled the world without him, and didn’t require a director nor a set. In front of an audience, the actor takes the script from the envelope and performs a cold reading. Of course, you have only one opportunity to hold a cold reading, so the trade-off with this method is that a different actor is required for every performance, with a 2024 revival attracting some big names.

Soleimanpour was finally granted a passport in 2013, but the format remains untouched.

While I haven’t yet had the opportunity to see White Rabbit, Red Rabbit, I was reminded of the unpredictable energy of live performance after seeing a recent reading of a different kind. This was done by my pal Luca Cockayne at Generator Projects in Dundee. He’s undergoing medical transition, which is baked into some of his work.

After his first poem, the unexpected surprise was to take his regular injection of testosterone live on stage. Furthermore, the vial had been hidden in plain sight under his artwork on the wall, so it was case of walking over to grab it. During the injection, a Bluetooth speaker played a selection of pre-recorded poetry with his voice electronically modulated into different registers.

The audience were, of course, warned in advance. However, nobody left; in fact, nobody even averted their eyes. What can I say? We were an arty audience who thrived on this stuff, however unanticipated.

I’m now rather jaded when it comes to live readings, so it really needs to be something special to stand out, but that performance was definitely in my top unexpected moments. To find an equivalent, I probably have to go back to 2014, when I was invited to perform on a bill at Dundee University Student Association. I wrote a little about that performance at the time, and it produced two highlights.

One former friend performed a piece as if he were a manager showing a new recruit around an office building. There were two microphones on the stage and after each paragraph, he wandered over to the other one. I thought this was a terrific idea to emphasise the wandering nature of the piece. I told him as much later on, although he admitted that was improvised upon seeing two microphones were available.

Another performer walked onto the stage with a rucksack. After his introduction, he ran around the room giving out chocolate bars from the bag. He dubbed my poetry as ‘awesome’, which I held in high regard as I was new to writing verse.

I also have one more lasting impression from that night. The purple mood lighting was so prevalent that it inspired a further poem the following month, although I didn’t have a chance to perform it on that stage under that lighting.

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Three Ways to Proofread in a Hurry

Other than the actual writing, there is another basic skill required from a writer, and that’s to look over back over the words at a later stage to ensure they have the intended meaning.

It can be tempting to edit immediately. With the exception of the most obvious errors, however, I advise against this. Proofreading and subsequent editing is best done cold, as if seeing the text for the first time. It’s also a good idea to keep Track Changes turned on during this time.

But what if you have a piece you need to finish? Below are three tips that have helped me.

1: Leaving enough time

My guideline is to leave the text aside for a minimum of one minute per word, or for 24 hours, whichever is longer. So a villanelle might be left 24 hours on account of its brevity, whereas a 4000-word story might be picked up again in around three days’ time.

I would not be offended if anyone picked up this formula and publicised it as ‘Cameron’s Rule’, or suchlike.

2: Changing the typeface

After reading and reading the same text over again, the words sometimes merge together. One way to counteract this is by changing the text to a completely different typeface and/or the colour of the text. Have a rake through the ones available on your machine and find a legible one in a different style.

If you prefer to make your first draft by hand, you’re already at an advantage when you transfer it to a computer. The same text can look different on a screen. I find I can write what seems like a long paragraph by hand but it seems shorter when viewed in type.

3. Ask someone else to read over it

This method comes with some risk, especially if you’re in a hurry. What if the other person fails to reply? What if it requires a detailed rewrite?

The trade-off is that it’s a often reliable gauge of how readers might view the piece. I’ve sometimes heard back from folks that some content needs to be explained more, or occasionally that they grasped the concept and the words can be cut back.

However, you choose to do it, it’s worth investing the time. You don’t want to find an error once you’ve had 1,000 copies printed.

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Warming Up for the StAnza Festival

As we step into February, the StAnza poetry festival in St Andrews is just six weeks away. This year, it runs for the shortest period I’ve ever known: from Friday 13 to Sunday 15 March. It’s typically four or five days long, with 2022 extending to seven.

Before the pandemic, I would make a weekend of the festival, booking accommodation and attending a wide range of events. The Byre Theatre remains the main hub of activity, but many events are hosted in other venues around the area.

The last time I stayed over was in 2020. Since then, I’ve become more selective, partly due to other weekend commitments and partly because it’s challenging to absorb a lot of intense poetry in one go. Staying over also allowed me to see the poetry slam, which finished after the last bus home, although it’s now held earlier in the day.

One of my other favourite traditions was to start Saturday morning with a panel event that included either a cake or a pie, plus a hot drink. That doesn’t feature this year, so I’ve instead booked a bracing coastal poetry walk, followed by a practical Writing Hour with Fife Writes. The festival atmosphere always nudges me to write a poem or two anyway, so it’s a good start.

These are just the events I have planned so far. There’ll no doubt be others that catch my attention once I’m actually there, and I’ll be sure to tell you all about it.

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Stage Presence and Off-Stage Presence

The other week, I was listening to the BBC radio programme Desert Island Discs from 2018., where Lauren Laverne was interviewing the comedian Alan Carr.

I’ll say upfront that I’m ambivalent about his work. I enjoy watching it if I happen to catch him on TV, but it’s unlikely I would deliberately seek out gig tickets.

Although he’s known for stand-up comedy, he made a remark early in the programme about how he doesn’t watch other comics because he doesn’t enjoy it. He went on to say that if he’s part of a bill, he’ll only show up for his section and then leave. You can listen to the relevant section on BBC Sounds from the 10m 30s mark.

When I hear about a comic with the stature of Alan Carr saying he doesn’t watch his peers, it sounds like Stephen King saying he doesn’t read novels. Frankly, it comes across as dismissive towards the other acts, even if this doesn’t seem to have hurt his career.

For as long as I’ve done spoken-word events, there’s been an expectation that if you’re invited to perform as part of a bill, you arrive before the start and watch the other performers until the end. It feels like a collective experience and, in some cases, helps to gauge the mood of the room. In more elaborate productions, showing up early also gives the crew time to run a technical rehearsal.

I find I always learn something from the other acts: a turn of phrase, a particular delivery, a way of holding the audience, or – every so often – how not to do these things.

In one positive example, I’m reminded of a Josie Giles gig in Birmingham shortly before the pandemic. I knew a little about her work, and next to nothing about Joelle Taylor who was on the same bill. Having watched a lot of poetry, I thought I’d seen it all before. Yet both their performances were so well done that I walked out of that building saying, ‘I didn’t know you could do that with words.’

There are negative examples too, like the amateur actor who thought he would try stand-up comedy. I’ve no idea how he stayed in his theatre group without being able to read a room, but some of his gags were incredibly out of date and offensive, and nearly every one fell flat.

So I’m curious about other people’s experiences. Do you stay for the whole show when you’re performing, or do you dip in and out? Is this just an expectation for some types of gigs but not others? Am I, in fact, in the minority?

That was where the entry was meant to end, and I clicked Save yesternight with a view to redrafting this entry today. I then received a message from a couple of local writers. They’re looking to bring a poetry evening to Dundee in April, and we’ll need to discuss the type of material they want.

Whoever is on the bill with me, I’ll definitely be listening to their performances.

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A Tale of Two Topics

When I update this blog, I aim to stick with one topic throughout. But I hope you’ll indulge me just this once as I follow up last week’s entry about copyright and the public domain, and then follow up with the planned topic.

Copyright caveats

A few days after I posted my entry, the YouTube producer Chris Spargo released a relevant video, exploring a section of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 that I didn’t know about.

In 1929, J M Barrie granted the rights of his play Peter Pan to Great Ormond Street Hospital so they would benefit financially from its every performance. Although the play fell into the public domain in 1987, this arrangement was specifically written into legislation to make sure it continued in perpetuity – or at least until it’s repealed.

For the avoidance of doubt, the hospital has no creative control over the use of the play and can’t prevent performances from going ahead. It can only collect fees from any performance that is staged.

Disconnection doldrums

It was fortunate you were able to see last week’s entry. Where possible, I like to have at least a draft lined up 24 hours in advance. I can then tinker with the text just before publication at 7:30pm on a Tuesday, which coincides with a weekly writing group.

The staff are very accommodating in the pub where we meet. Probably the only criticism is something outside their control. Because the place was a cinema until 1998, it still has thick soundproof walls that also interfere with Wi-Fi and mobile phone reception.

Often we manage a weak but stable connection with a combination of our own hotspots and the pub Wi-Fi. But on Tuesday of last week, we were out of luck, no matter what we tried. So we stopped the in-person session and moved to the house of the other group leader. Once online, we were able to keep the members of our Discord server informed about what had happened.

One of the strengths of the weekly two-hour meeting is having that ringfenced time either to write or to carry out administration. For example, I picked up an overdue task about transferring my Web domain and hosting to a new plan, as the one I used was being phased out.

This then led me down a path of ‘Do I really need [insert feature]?’ and ‘What if I do away with that email address?’ It took a few days, but I’m pleased to report that the transfer was smooth, so this site stayed online.

In fact, the other group leader and I occasionally schedule admin days where we can make desicions about the direction of the group and/or solve ongoing problems. These are always deliberately held on a non-meeting day and in a different location.

This week, I’ve taken extra time to prepare. I drafted this entry on Sunday night, and made amendments yesterday, so it’ll almost certainly be in the can and ready to go at the appointed time.

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The Cultural Value of the Public Domain

When I heard about the recent adaptation of Frankenstein by Guillermo del Toro, I absolutely had to see it at some point.

The novel has been a talking point among my poetry circle, the Wyverns, since we released a released a pamphlet with the theme of Frankenstein in 2018. There is a local connection in that Mary Shelley was living in Dundee when she started writing it.

For literature in the UK and EU, a work remains in copyright for 70 years after the death of the author. Even if that law had been around in 1851, Frankenstein is still squarely into the public domain, so any director is allowed complete artistic freedom. The consensus seems to be that this version is faithful to the spirit of the novel, but not the details.

If Mary Shelley somehow arrived in our time and was able to watch this, I think she would be impressed.

But copyright law varies by juristiction and by type of work. In 1998, the US passed the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act. This extended the copyright of works authored by corporations, meaning they wouldn’t become public domain until 95 years after the date of their creation.

The legislation was named after the late Sonny Bono, who believed that copyright should be in perpetuity. However, the true beneficiary is widely thought to be The Walt Disney Company. Only within the last two years has its first creation – Mickey Mouse – fallen into the public domain, and we can expect to see more following suit over the coming decades.

In the literary world, novels from the middle of the 20th century novels are beginning to fall out of copyright. A prime example is Nineteen Eighty-Four because George Orwell died in 1950, just two years after its publication.

Wikipedia maintains pages about works that will become public domain in 2026, and if you fancy reading some of these, they might be available on the Gutenberg Project website.

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Boulevard of Broken Plans

An artist pal was visiting Dundee from Glasgow this weekend, and he suggested we see a screening of the animé Princess Mononoke. This was newly restored in 4K quality and was showing for a limited time only.

Before and after the screening, we talked about our unrealised projects, and his long-term plan to move to London and make a start on some of these. While I have nothing so dramatic to declare, I do have projects that either need to be started or are now safe to reveal.

It’s a little cliché to do this at New Year, but I promise it’s entirely a coincidence. Here’s a selection of them, not all of which are related to writing.

Unstarted projects

I keep a draft on WordPress with any ideas I think might make for suitable full-length entries. At the time of writing, these comprise:

  • The NoSleep community on Reddit. Members post their own horror stories that might plausibly be true, and other members are invited to share in the world as if it were real.
  • The events of September 11th. With the 25th anniversary happening later this year, this might be the ideal opportunity to explore the aftermath from a literary perspective.
  • Watching animé. I’ve not a frequent film watcher, and the only animé I’ve seen is from Studio Ghibli, so perhaps there’s some room to comment from an outsider’s perspective.

There are also some live events I’d like to start up:

  • Stage confidence classes. Regular readers will know I’ve been bandying this idea about for years. So far, no matter how I’ve approached it, the pieces haven’t yet fallen into place.
  • A dating event. It can be difficult to write a short bio for a dating app and to suss out the other person. So this meet-up event would attempt to solve the problem by inviting a friend to do the talking instead.
  • A spontaneous poetry stall. I would set up my computer and a printer with two-inch wide paper label tape, and improvise poetry for visitors. The templates have been designed and the cost of labels counted out.

Secret plans revealed this year

Roll on January

Every year, I take part in a local project called Fun a Day. This encourages participants to create something during the month, however they wish to define that.

I’d already planned out Roll on January, where I would roll two d6 dice every day for a month and track how many rolls it took to display a double six. I then learnt on New Year’s Eve that there wouldn’t be a Fun a Day in 2026, but I’ve gone ahead with the project anyway.

Double Zero Challenge

The above Roll on January wasn’t the first time I’d experimented with dice-rolling. In fact, I’d been refining the format for more than 12 months.

I tried out a one-off stream on Twitch with two d20 dice, seeing how long it would take to roll a double 20. I then moved to pre-recorded videos on YouTube, with some success, but the videos frequently lasted more than an hour.

As a compromise, I then swapped these for two d10 dice. These still take an unpredictable length of time, but nearly 50 videos in, I think the format has been perfected.

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Dual Lingo

In mid-December, it was reported that the comedian Stanley Baxter had died at the age of 99.

He’s best known for the recurring Parliamo Glasgow sketches, which were a parody of the BBC language learning programme Parliamo Italiano. In each one, he and a co-presenter switch seamlessly from performing an example sketch in the Glasgow dialect to addressing the camera in the dominant Received Pronunciation of the day. Here’s one such example:

When you live in Scotland, it’s unusual even today to encounter your own accent or dialect on TV or radio, other than on dedicated Scots language stations. In this sense, ‘Scots’ refers to the Scottish dialect of English, with its distinct pronunciation, vocabulary and grammar.

The lack of prevalence is particularly true for Gaelic speakers, with only a handful of broadcasts dedicated to the language.

It’s possible that this situation might change in the future. Back in summer, the Scottish Languages Bill 2025 was unanimously passed by the Scottish Parliament, placing Scots and Gaelic on an equal footing with English.

If you’re an English speaker visiting Wales, your eye quickly learns to settle on the lower half of official signs because Welsh legally must be displayed first. Hopping across the sea to the Republic of Ireland, we see a comparable situation with Irish Gaelic, which is written into the constitution as the national language. Note that while Irish Gaelic is related to Scots Gaelic, the two are not mutually intelligible.

Back in Scotland, I don’t foresee change happening very quickly. There are already some dual-language road signs in the north, and at the majority of railway stations. Yet considering the cost of new signs, investment will likely only come to the rest when they reach the end of their life spans.

By that time, it’s possible that Scots and Gaelic education will become more widespread, generating the political momentum for a wider dual-language presence. Maybe one day, Parliamo Gaelic will be the norm.

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Laughs and Larks in London

Every Sunday, the Comedy Store in London hosts an improv evening, and it has done since 1985. I’ve occasionally considered going, but a few weeks ago, I was finally given a good reason to take the trip.

The actor Neil Mullarkey has been part of the Comedy Store Players since its inception. A few weeks ago, he announced his retirement, with his last show set to take place on 4 January 2026. I’ve been casually following his career since discovering him at the Edinburgh Fringe in the early 2000s.

So I made the visit on Sunday, taking a train to London, then the Caledonian Sleeper back to Scotland on the same night. The plan contained a number of variables, any one of which could have ruined the whole intererary, but it all fell nicely into place.

Aside from the aforementioned Mullarkey, the cast of players that night comprised Josie Lawrence, Richard Vranch, Lee Simpson, Rufus Hound, and Steve Edis on piano. The first two also were part of the regular cast for Whose Line is it Anyway?

The first half is all about short sketches, many of which are based on predefined setups. In Freeze Frame, a cast member could freeze the action and take the place of another actor. In Three-Headed Expert, three of them have to answer with just one word each, form a sentence with the others.

The second half follows a more play-like structure. In this case, it was a murder mystery set in the 1920s, with the action taking place in an organ loft. An honourable mention goes to Rufus Hound, who played it as a silent film actor, despite the musical element.

Almost every one of the scenes originates as an suggestion from the audience, who took up most of the 400 seats. It’s clear the players have been honing their skills over many years, drawing on a toolbox of voices, phrases and moves, however ridiculous the premise.

Although Neil Mullarkey’s retirement marks the end of an era, the Comedy Store Players are bigger than any one performer.

In 2024, Ruth Bratt became the first new member to join the core group in three decades, a sign that the troupe continues to evolve and that the Sunday night show will be with us for a long time to come.

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Too Long a Title

In 2002, the rock group Cornershop released two singles from their album Handcream for a Generation. In March, we saw Lessons Learned from Rocky I to Rocky III, while August bought Staging the Plaguing of the Raised Platform.

Before writing this entry, I listened to both tracks. They’re both solid guitar-driven and riff-heavy pieces that should have been hits, yet neither song gained traction. Only the first of these even reached the Top 40.

I think two factors were in play here. Firstly, and most obviously, they found it difficult to escape their massive track Brimful of Asha five years earlier. Secondly, in my experience, the public finds it difficult to overlook a long or unwieldy title.

I was reminded of these songs when I heard about the upcoming science-fiction series The War Between the Land and the Sea. It’s produced by Russell T Davies and is part of the Doctor Who universe, so the BBC is unlikely to encounter much resistance to the nine-syllable title. If they had attempted this title for a new show, by contrast, that hurdle might have been much higher.

There are other instances of media where a long title has been used. Right now, I can think of:

  • The novel Fried Green Tomatoes At The Whistle Stop Cafe by Fannie Flagg (1987).
  • The film The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill but Came Down a Mountain (1995).
  • The Channel 4 comedy The Increasingly Poor Decisions of Todd Margaret (2009).

Like them or not, titles of this length tend to slow the reader or viewer a little. When the first on the list was adapted into a screenplay, it was given the truncated title Fried Green Tomatoes. This reminds me of a point made in the George Orwell novel 1984:

COMINTERN is a word that can be uttered almost without taking thought, whereas COMMUNIST INTERNATIONAL is a phrase over which one is obliged to linger at least momentarily.

Sometimes the gamble does pay off, and the audience successfully beyend behind the title:

  • The film Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998) is known by its fans as simply Lock, Stock.
  • The police procedural show CSI: Crime Scene Investigation (2000) goes so far as to nudge its viewers into abbreviating it.
  • Mark Haddon didn’t lose any readers by calling his novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (2003).

The final two examples, both from the world of music, are each making a definite statement.

For her second studio album in 1999, Fiona Apple chose the following title, with the capitalisation as it appears on the Genius website:

When the pawn hits the conflicts he thinks like a king
What he knows throws the blows when he goes to the fight
And he’ll win the whole thing ‘fore he enters the ring
There’s no body to batter when your mind is your might
So when you go solo, you hold your own hand
And remember that depth is the greatest of heights
And if you know where you stand, then you know where to land
And if you fall it won’t matter, cuz you’ll know that you’re right

It’s a rather twee sentiment, but it’s nonetheless out to make a statement. The cover art makes the first three words legible from a distance, while the rest require a closer look, giving the listener an easy abbreviation.

Apple held the Guinness World Record for the longest album title until Chumbawamba beat it nine years later with the following. The capitalisation has been converted to sentence case:

The boy bands have won, and all the copyists and the tribute bands and the TV talent show producers have won, if we allow our culture to be shaped by mimicry, whether from lack of ideas or from exaggerated respect. You should never try to freeze culture. What you can do is recycle that culture. Take your older brother’s hand-me-down jacket and re-style it, re-fashion it to the point where it becomes your own. But don’t just regurgitate creative history, or hold art and music and literature as fixed, untouchable and kept under glass. The people who try to ‘guard’ any particular form of music are, like the copyists and manufactured bands, doing it the worst disservice, because the only thing that you can do to music that will damage it is not change it, not make it your own. Because then it dies, then it’s over, then it’s done, and the boy bands have won.

In this instance, the last five words are emphasised on the album cover, which echo the first five words and again make an unignorable statement.

In short, a long title certainly makes a statement, but consider carefully whether your audience will look beyond it or not.