i meant to blog earlier than this, forgive me. now i am back at home with both the heater and a load of washing on, i think i'll re-cap the last week or so, with a longer-than-usual post. first up, the byron bay writers festival.
i arrived on wednesday afternoon and met some fellow attendees on the shuttle bus to byron - had some lovely chats and some moments of quiet contemplation. the weather was lovely from the get-go, and we all know how i love gazing out windows when traveling... anyway, was dropped off at accoms, felt immediately alone, so decided to unpack - i actually ironed some stuff and hung it in the wardrobe. i never iron, let alone actually unpack, when traveling - so that tells you what frame of mind i was in. i was a little nervous about what lay ahead, especially with the workshop the next morning... i ended up walking into town with a new-found friend, grabbing some supplies and heading back to my room for a quiet night in.
thursday morning i was picked up by the festival director, jeni caffin, and taken to the workshop venue. there i met my lovely assistant sandra, who took care of registering all the attendees and getting me organised. all in all there were 25 people there to take the workshop - jenni had told me the day before that the session tickets had sold out, so that was exciting. we started the workshop and i think i rushed things to begin with, as i found myself a half hour ahead of my schedule - i slowed it down a bit, and we had a little break before getting back into it. i had decided that the workshop would be very interactive, and that it would be more about doing exercises and discussion than about me talking at the attendees - i took the 'showing, not telling' quite literally. it worked, and everyone seemed to enjoy themselves, and the final group exercise i had envisioned worked really well - though by this stage i was beginning to run out of time and really had to crack the whip. after the workshop was over, one of the attendees came up to me and said she thought i was good at workshops because i could get people to stop writing. basically, little miss bossy. i think i may have found my calling... then, that afternoon i was whisked off to my first panel, a chat about being a writer for the schools programme. here i met the extraordinary alexandra adornetto, author of 'the shadow thief'. she's 15 and already has 2 books behind her, with a third on the way... i think she may have found her calling. she is a beautiful girl and very well-spoken, and her mum grace also lovely. we hung out a fair bit as we were staying at the same hotel, which was nice. that evening all three of us walked in to town for the opening night party, which was great - catching up with deepika, nury and janet, the old ubud crew; finally meeting marieke on the way back from the drinks table with a glass of champagne in each hand (classy look, yes, but i actually was getting one for janet, too);
chatting with the penguin crew and spying jennifer byrne, brian dawes and other recognisable faces from a safe distance; telling a photographer that the writer she'd just snapped was michael buble (for some reason i had his name stuck in my head that night. i wanted to take off my name tag and put his name there instead just to see if anyone would react). all in all lovely night, and seeing as i had the whole of the next day off, i relaxed and enjoyed it.
friday morning i was up early, so hopped on the shuttle bus to the festival site and checked out some panels. i was starting to feel a little lonely as i had no one to wander around with, but there was a lot going on *and* free cookies in the green room, so that feeling soon passed. friday night was the most nerve-wracking experience ever (and i've been in a few of them, let me tell you), waiting to go on stage and perform in a surprise scenario for the 'thank god you're in byron' feature event. i mad the mistake of deciding to sit out the front and watch the first half of the show, and it did nothing for my confidence levels, i tell you. i was on in the second bracket, and my 'costume' consisted of a shirt worn over my regular clothes with a sewn-on patch on the shoulder which said 'northern rivers parks authority', so i got a sense of what i would be doing. this proved more of a hindrance than a help, as my brain went into overdrive trying to come up with witty things i might say once on stage, but i talked myself out of thinking that and tried to blank out everything. it nearly worked. before i knew it i was on stage and i felt like i was always facing the wrong way, and any time i responded to the actor who was 'driving' my performance, i would crouch down and wave my arms about a-la steve irwin (rest his soul). it seemed to work, there was some laughter, though i have no idea how long i was out there for. the whole thing's a bit of a blur. it was fun, though! then, at the end, all us guest star-type people were dressed up as cops and sent back out on stage to try and quell a 'protest' - i was pretty useless in this one - then to cap things off, the rest of the actors tore onto stage minus all their clothes and i don't think any of us were expecting that - i grabbed nury's hat off his head and covered my face with it. i'm glad i did this, it was an absolute rush, and a great challenge.
saturday i had two scheduled events - a panel on comedy in the afternoon, and a comedy performance on saturday night. the panel was supposed to be about 'the serious business of being silly', but ended up rolling right off the tracks and taking everyone on a joyride of laughs that was immensely enjoyable. moya sayer-jones chaired the panel, and my fellow panelists were nury vittachi and charles firth. charles went on first and set the tone, he picked on me a bit but little was he to know i have two older brothers and thus lots of experience with biting back. nury and i ganged up on him a little, we basically sparred our way through the panel, trying to get laughs off each other and bouncing off each other so well, just having an absolute ball. the panel had a pretty chaotic feel to it and we all just went with the flow, at one stage banishing charles into the audience. it was a great mood-setter for the performance to follow, which where charles, nury and i would be joined onstage by brian dawes. nury and i decided to exact our revenge on charles by putting him last in the lineup, and i went on first because there was no way i was going to follow either charles or brian, and as nury was MC-ing, he was cool with that. not having performed stand up for nigh on a year i was a little nervous, but i decided to allow myself to go on stage with notes (for the first time ever, might i add), and i feel i delivered a good set. it was fun being up there, and the crowd was very responsive, which always helps. brian dawes was on after me, and he brought the house down, followed by charles, who was also very good. following the performances we have a q&a session. much of the questions were directed toward charles and brian (which i was expecting), but i was quite happy to listen. saturday was a definite highlight for me, running a very close second with the debate night at the ubud writers festival last year.
sunday i had a reading in the morning alongside james phelan, and it was 'intimate' - i guess 9.30 on a sunday morning is a little early, even for enthusiasts! a merry band of volunteers filled up the front row, which was lovely - and our readings could not have contrasted more, what with my bit on a traditional hindu outdoor celebration in melbourne, full of food and colour, and james' gun-toting, blood-spilling car chase in europe somewhere. we did a q&a at the end just because we felt like it, and it was a lovely, mellow way to start the day. saw some more sessions during the day, and ate some more yummy yum-cha from red ginger (their prawn and spinach dumplings are to die for, i tell you!), then went to my final panel on blogging. got to meet some very interesting people - antony, kate and marieke - and see deepika again. after the book signing tent kate, antony and i gathered our peeps and headed straight for the bar - we deserved a couple of bottles of wine, i tell you! it was time to let the hair down. had a lovely time at the festival site, made a few new friends, then went on to the party at nury, deepika and janet's hotel room - much wine, some spicy pizza, and some singing on the balcony.
yes, i had a hangover the next morning.
yes, it was very much worth it.
thank you, beautiful byron. thank you *theeees* much xox
Monday, August 06, 2007
byron bay re-cap
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4 comments:
Hi Shalini,
Thanks for your contribution at the festival. What's below is a piece I wrote yesterday for 'Writas', the newsletter of the Tasmanian Writers Centre, on your workshop. Thanks again.
Cheers and love
Russell
Stepping Past the First Draft.
Last year I finished the first draft of a novel. Despite rave reviews from my loved ones (even ‘it’s a bit like John Grisham’, I swaggered…), a couple or ‘real’ writers (the type who get published) read it and were a bit more critical (thank God, I guess). And amongst all the notes and pen scrawls was ‘show, don’t tell’.
'I’m Russell. I’m here to sort out this show not tell thing … I’m finding it a bit of a slippery beast.'
That was the first thing I jotted down in my notebook a few weeks ago. It made sense to write our introductions, being a writer’s workshop. I was there because of those little notes ‘show, don’t tell’. In a workshop called… ‘Showing Not Telling’, with Shalini Akhil (author of Bollywood Beauty, Penguin 2005).
My notes from the workshop consist almost entirely of the spunky little exercises we did.
'…mottled greens of light and dark in the shade of big paddock tree - hot chocolate, half way, no longer burning and still plenty to go - cool fresh sheets under a warming doonah - the snoring of the pug at my feet'
This exercise was to take an emotion and evoke it with a brief description of it’s look, taste, feel, and sound. In this case I was showing contentment. The magic of showing is that it generates a depth and naunce of emotion in the reader that is far more real and, ironically, accurate, then simply telling.
'My naked echo surprised me. I scanned the carpet, the indents, the sun-faded centre, the drifts of dust and lint along the walls. Waiting. Shocked.'
We took the room we were in and our task was to show something had happened, without telling what had happened. It was playing with the backstory, how to show it with description, drawing the reader into it. We read out our pieces and then had the others guess what had happened.
'… a large expanse of fluid the colour of the light above, but darker hued. It goes on further than you can see. It covers much of the earth, is full of life.'
I wrote this after Shalini got us to call out twenty or so words that first come to mind when she said ‘ocean’. We then had a minute to write a description of the ocean without using any of those words (like water, wet, wave, fish and blue). Lesson? Don’t rely on the first word or description that comes to mind. Be willing to skip over the first instinct. There can be a lot of cliches and debris to clear out of our heads before we generate good writing. Perhaps Hemmingway alluded to this when he said ‘first drafts are shit.’ It was encouragement to go beyond what I know, what I’ve done before.
Look out manuscript.
Russell Warman attended the workshop, part of the Byron Bay Writers Festival in the last week of July 2007.
hi, russell! thanks for your feedback on the session - i am glad you felt it was worthwhile! and thanks also for sharing this article with me - i might have to use you as a referee the next time i'm looking for a job...
ps we still haven't finished reading harry potter, can you believe it?
I, too, frequently get Michael Buble's name stuck in my head. It makes me want to pronounce the silent 'e' on the ends of words i.e. 'Care for a game of Scrabblay?' etc.
should that not be 'car-ay for a game of scrabbl-ay'? sounds like poor man's pig latin - and by poor man i mean me, cause i can never get my head around it. now, back to the scrabbl-ay. get thee to facebook, young lady. you're on!
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