From Nothing to Something: Melbourne City of Literature Virtual Residency

Throughout November, I had the great pleasure of being one of the Virtual Writers-in-Residence with Melbourne City of Literature, working specifically with Story Studios Australia. As noted in the previous post, this was a residency focused on engaging with writing communities, rather than producing my own work per se, but in the end I managed to do a bit of both. I led two initiatives: a two-part workshop series called 'The Worldbuilder', in which participants created islands under my direction and populated them with people and stories, and then a Live Stream Story Craft event where I wrote a short story from prompts generated by viewers. The main idea was to explore one of the fundamental concepts of creative writing: that notion of going from having nothing to having something. From the blank page, to an actual story; from an empty mind to a head full of wonders.

Along the way, I was able to test and evolve some of my favourite collaborative-creative activities. I've led a version of the Worldbuilder before, but here was a chance to see if it could sustain itself across two meetings rather than just one. The essential idea is very simple: grab a piece of paper, the larger the better, and draw an outline of an island. Then go step-by-step to add details: geographical elements, flora and fauna, settlements, houses, societies etc. With care taken over each step, participants are free to envisage their own developing worlds. They might go in a realist or non-realist direction, but I ask them to really believe in their islands and its inhabitants, and to monitor the synergies of what's taking place as the details emerge. Would your people, for example, live at the bend of the river, or in the crook of the mountain range? Or perhaps its safer on the coast, away from the dense forest where the giant bats live? Each decision informs another decision and soon enough the island is an organic whole, and stories start to naturally emerge. Once we get to a point where the island richly populated, we turn to notepads and start to write stories. Tales of festivals, revolutions, histories, disasters, trades, wars, and peace. With multiple participants, you can bring islands together to form an archipelago, and a whole bunch of new stories soon emerge.

The prompts I offered seemed to engage the participants well, and those few who had seen the mini-course through to the end expressed real satisfaction in their creations. I think I detected a renewed desire in them to let their imaginations flow, and hopefully I helped unlock a bit of creative verve. For my part, I started to glimpse the potential to this format; I could see it as a four or five part series, the worlds growing ever more elaborate, ever more precious. I could see the polyphony of stories that could arise from these places: ballads, manifestos, propaganda, sea shanties, folklore, creeds, or just classic tales of love and longing. There's rich potential here, and I'm starting to think I may have the gumption to roll it out to wider audiences. Watch this space.

The live stream story crafting event was an entirely different beast, but one with the same root; this interest in exploring exactly how the imagination works as it crafts together a story. I set up a Zoom Webinar so that it was just my face on the screen, shared my Scrivener document, and asked the viewing audience to help me generate some prompts. We pulled random lines out of various books, and a random picture from Underworlds by Stephen Ellcock. I also asked everyone watching to post random words in the chat that I would try to incorporate into the story. This is what we ended up with:

'The message will say that I must have patience.' (from The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood)

'The only one who’d reached out when everything fell apart.' (from Out of the Darkness edited by Dan Coxon)

'Your shoes are getting wet.' (from Wide Open by Nicola Barker)

Incense

Misty

Ambivalent

Jalopy

Car Battery

Bullseye

Crisp air

This delightful picture from Underworlds is an image of the sewers of London, illustrating the concept of the fatberg. I really didn't want to be writing about fatbergs but that's the hand fate dealt me, and so my mind had to turn towards sewers, dirt, filth and all that juicy stuff. From the words, I was interested in the fact that 'Jalopy' and 'Car Battery' had come up from two different people. A jalopy (I discovered when I googled it) is a beat-up old car, so that was an element I couldn't ignore. The first thought that arrived was: what if there was a whole car stuck inside a fatberg? That meant we had to get to the fatberg, so our main characters had to be the people charged with investigating and clearing out the mess. 'My shoes are getting wet' provided an excellent opening line, and an even more lively character popped into existence: Steve, a moody teenager on work experience. He needed a guide, and so we found Fern, a more experienced member of the sewerage team, a woman lumbered with the work experience kid. And so there we had it; we had characters, a location, an incident, an object. Time to get writing.

It is a curious feeling writing when you know people are watching. I don't find it particularly nerve-wracking. I'm in control and I know that the words I'm writing are largely inconsequential to me, ultimately. As I repeatedly said on the stream, I'm not expecting to write a masterpiece in that moment, and the audience, I think, enter into the same contract; they know they'll witness mistakes, plot holes, stumbles, misspellings, bad grammar and so on. Part of the joy of doing this is to slightly pop the bubble that surrounds 'the author' as a mysterious genius. It exposes the reality of the false starts and the missteps, and the eternal editorial process you undergo even while splurging out a first draft. I also like it as a stab in the eye to AI. Here I am, the actual real human being, taking the 'inputs' of your 'commands' and 'processing' that into a narrative. I'm also scraping my mind for the influences of those who have come before me, but the difference is that I'm organically creating something genuinely new - and this makes me inclined to go as weird as possible. Ironically, I think AI is going to make us more creative, because our only resistance to the wired is to go weird.

I've included the story below for your perusal. It's a bit of a wonky tale and I'm not sure quite what it's point is, nor even if it's actually finished, but there's no denying that it's a thing. The element I'm happiest with is the diamond ring. It appears in the early part of the story as a bit of conversation between the main characters and then, later, when I was struggling to move towards an ending, I suddenly remembered it. That's when I thought: if she's found a ring in previous fatberg and now she wears it, then who is she engaged to? If I was to rewrite or extend this (maybe I will one day!), that would be the main focus. There's a tale to tell about Fern, who may be lonely & unmarried, or in some way grieving the loss of a partner. She wears a ring found in a fatberg and that has, in effect, married her to the sewers. A creature from the sewers comes to claim her as his wife - and blam, suddenly we're re-writing the Persephone myth and that opens a ready-made template of story to play around with.

Hmm, the more I spin this out, the more I'm interested in taking this further. And to think; at 8am on that Wednesday morning as I was setting up the Webinar I had absolutely zero inkling of this. And now I'm wondering if Steve the sullen teenager is some kind of Hermes or Adonis or Orpheus who takes it upon himself to go deeper into the sewers to rescue her and.. and... and... the blank page is filling up nicely. From nothing to something. That's all it is.

*

Special thanks to Matt Kazacos at Story Studios Australia for all his brilliant assistance in setting this up. Couldn't have asked for a nicer guy as a liaison. Big thanks too to David Ryding, Panda Wong, and Nathan Curnow. A special mention to participants Tasha Guss and Chris van Langenberg who drew the islands you can see on this post. Thanks all!

For further insights from this down under residency, you can also read 'A Letter from David Hartley' posted on the Melbourne City of Literature Facebook page. It goes through some of my influences, particularly Alan Garner, and talks a little about Manchester, it's importance to me & my writing, and my new writing shed.

*

Here's the full text of what I wrote during that live stream. Highlighted bits in yellow are where I've directly used the prompts. Enjoy!

The Jalopy

“My shoes are getting wet.”

“Yeah,” said Fern, “That’ll happen down here.”

“It’s gross.”

“Sorry to ask, Steve, but did you wear your best trainers for this?”

He was trying to keep his feet on the brick shelves alongside the gutter, but it had rained hard last night and the sewer waters were flowing fast. 

“No,” he said, petulant. “Not my best trainers. Third best.”

He was the kind of kid that takes way too much pride in his appearance, Fern thought. No, that’s unfair. He’s just a teenager, trying to put his stamp on the world. She was like that once. She had to give him a break; he was on work experience and somehow he’d pulled the shortest of short straws. Sewer duty.

There was a fatberg. Again. Beneath the streets of Whitechapel. Fern was leading the team who had been charged with taking it apart. Normally there’s a whole gang of them, stomping through the tunnels with a Blitz spirit, joking and whistling, but today she’s only got Steve because this is more of a recon mission than the actual work. Plus she’s been lumbered with the work experience kid, so she might as well get him to do something. This was the best thing she could think of, given the short notice.

“You have to do this all the time?” he asks.

“No,” says Fern. “Every few years or so. It’s not that bad really. Sometimes we find stuff.”

“Like what?”

“Valuable things. Treasures.”

“Really?”

“Last time,” she says, embellishing the truth somewhat, “I found a diamond ring.”

“Seriously?”

“Sure. People chuck jewellery away all the time. When they’re done with whoever gave it to them.”

“Right,” he says, but she’s pricked his intrigue now. “How much did you get for it?”

“Oh I haven’t sold it,” she says with a smirk. “I’m wearing it.”

“What?”

“Sure.”

They’re both wearing gloves, of course, so she can’t show him, and he doesn’t ask to see, although she notice he looks at her hands. He goes quiet then, embarrassed maybe. Fern’s not sure. She’s never quite understood teenagers. She’s good with kids, and with young adults, but teenagers have always been a bit of mystery.

“Where is this thing?” he says eventually.

“Not far now.”

They troop on through the East Chapel tunnel, a main artery of the sewer system, high ceilings, a string of dim lights. It’s oddly misty in here, like the haze of the city is resting below the surface, biding its time. Steve is clutching his face mask against his nose, desperate not to breath any of the air. Fern doesn’t mind it. She’s always thought it smells almost like incense if you trick you brain enough.

Soon, they turn into the WC45-I tunnel which is the one that always blocks. The berg will be just down here, a couple hundred meters. They have to duck now, and there are the gloopy strings of white hanging from the roof.

“For fuck’s sake,” mutters Steve, ducking as if he wasn’t wearing a helmet.

“Lovely isn’t it?” says Fern.

“Whatever.” He clicks on his torch and shines it down the tunnel. The light hits the telltale block of grey. “Is that it then?”

“Yep, that’ll be it.”

They trudge down to it and already Fern can sense that something’s different this time. It’s the way her torch light glints off the mass. She’s never seen it do that before.

“Is that… glass?” says Steve.

He’s right. The light is bouncing off shiny, glassy surfaces, right there in the middle. There’s a smooth panel of some kind, and a large sheet of cracked glass. At first her brain can’t quite make sense of it, even though it’s a very familiar shape. It takes Steve’s voice to break through the murk.

“A car?” he says.

“A car,” she says.

It’s true. There’s a car in the middle of the fatberg. Two headlamps, a grill, a splinted windscreen, crackling paint job. A licence plate, old fashioned. 

“What the hell?” says Steve.

“Hmm,” says Fern. “I’ve… never seen this before.”

She steps to it, touches the hood, the headlamps. She half expected her hand to go through it, a mirage, but it’s there, it’s solid, and somehow, in some way, there’s a full car in the sewer of London. Steve, his concerns around his shoes forgotten, moves closer and points the torch beam into the windscreen. 

“There’s a guy,” he says.

Fern’s chest tightens. She looks. There, behind the glass, gripping the steering wheel, is a man. Long beard, wild eyes, a tattered flat cap on his head, tufts of hair sticking out at all angles. He’s alive.

“You alright mate?” says Steve.

Fern pulls the boy back, puts herself between him and the car. She’s surprised at her instincts to protect the kid, but she can’t think about that right now. The man in the car puts his hand to the windscreen. It’s sort of a wave, maybe a warning, but it’s feeble and strange. He opens his mouth but says nothing. His lips are cracked, his skin grey, and she’s sure she hasn’t yet seen him blink.

“Hello?” Fern says.

The mouth closes. A little smile forms.

Fern glances at Steve. He’s got his phone out, filming it all. 

“Don’t do that,” she says. “Put it away.”

“But dude,” says Steve. “This is… wild.”

“Just… don’t,” she says. 

He stops filming. Clicks his phone off. He steps closer again, really training the light into the man’s red eyes. Still no blinks.

His hand is still up. He balls it into a fist, leans forward and knocks three times on the windscreen. Then he punches it, and the fragile glass shatters, sparks scattering and finding new homes in the flesh of the fatberg around him.

“Oh my god,” says Fern.

Steve is laughing. “Hello mate,” he says. “What’s going on, how did you get here?”

Ferns shrinks into herself. How is he talking to this guy? How is any of this happening?

The man looks from Fern to Steve then back to her. It almost feels to Fern like this guy knows her somehow.

He coughs a little as he tries to speak. And then his voice catches and he has it.

“I’ve been patient,” he says. “You’re the only one who reached out when everything fell apart.”

Steve’s torch light comes to her.

“Do you know this guy?”

Fern shakes her head. Her whole body is shaking. The torch goes back to the man. He’s starting to climb out of the windscreen.

“Woah,” Steve says. “Careful mate!”

His hands are in fingerless gloves. He’s wearing a waistcoat of some kind, tattered old trousers, a neckerchief around his throat. He doesn’t seem to have much strength, just enough to slowly pull himself out of the car.

Fern takes a step back. And then another, until she’s backed up against the wall. 

Does she know him? Is there a glimmer of recognition there?

“I’ve been patient,” says the man, as he reaches the end of the hood of the car. “So patient.”

He flops off and splashes into the gutter.

He holds up his hand, takes off a glove, and shows a white gold wedding band on his ring finger.

“My love for you knows no bounds,” he says.

The only thing she can do is take off her glove. Steve’s light travels from the man’s ring to hers.

“Oh shit,” he says.