Storytelling and Technology: Books, Libraries, Rhythms and Films

In June this year ABC’s The Drum published Once upon a time loving books was easy, my op ed that explored the social experience of books, literacy development and technology. This week Screen Education ran Cutting With Rhythm, my new profile about Ben Joss (pictured), a film and television editor I’ve worked with on short film productions, and the ‘rhythmic programming’ that shapes the way he cuts footage. I’m pleased with how both stories turned out. Since finishing my Post Doctoral Research Fellowship I’m building on my interest in how people use technology for communication, but in media spaces beyond health promotion.

My short term teaching duties in the Arts Industries unit at Victoria University left me with little time and made writing, blogging and participating in social media more difficult. Now that classes and marking have finished, I’ve been able to reflect on these non-fiction pieces. What stands out for me from a writing and research perspective is that the articles consider the factors shaping how technology is used and applied – including where they limit engagement with storytelling, and where they facilitate creativity. Although they are quite different stories, and I did not plan to write them together, this work continues my exploration of the relationship between people and technology, and the context that influences the production of text and audio+visual content across a range of digital media platforms.

“Emerging writers should get ‘working through it’ tattooed on their arms, so they can see it when they’re typing.” (SJ Finn)

On Sunday I was the host of Working through it: first drafts, rewrites, fact checking, punctuation woes and working with editors, a panel at the Emerging Writers Festival. It featured Esther Anatolitis, David Blumenstein, Neil Boyack and SJ Finn, four great writers who reflected on their approach to writing from personal, professional and artistic perspectives. I enjoyed the session. The Yarra room at Melbourne Town Hall was packed by the end, and I think the writers provided a good opportunity for the audience to learn more about the challenges and opportunities of writing for publication.

My favourite parts were about:

• structure
• ‘organic’ flows in writing
• the value of redrafting

Anatolitis’ mind maps and comments about advocacy, artistic and critique pieces and the trajectory of the publication process helped to demonstrate how structure can be really useful for writers to create and give shape to content. Later, Boyack raised an interesting point about writing for a market as opposed to creating a market for your work – which he noted is normally a much longer road. He was speaking in reference to his short stories, powerful pieces that don’t shy away from the often bleak and decaying lives of their characters. It made me think about how structure itself can limit the scope and imagination of a piece, even though it provides a great skeleton to flesh out ideas, and a road map for publishing in spaces with certain conventions, such as features and columns in newspapers and magazines.

I’ve heard debate about structure in academic and practical contexts, but it was refreshing for me to see it played out with different forms of writing. It seems structure is a constant theme in discussion about writing. At the same time, I think this highlights the need for the anarchic, spontaneous and unexpected. I switch between carefully planned outlines and rushes of improvised prose when I’m writing, but I’m still trying to figure out why my non-fiction pieces tend to develop structure more quickly than my fictional work.

Finn spoke about her experience writing her great debut novel, This Too Shall Pass, and redrafting the opening 300 times. It reinforced the importance of redrafting and the sheer amount of work that goes into a piece before its ready for publication. It’s a necessary part of the writing life, which Finn also noted, but in a far more entertaining way:

“emerging writers should get ‘working through it’ tattooed on their arms, so they can see it when they’re typing.” (via @lou1sb)

Blumenstein reflected on early drafts of his web comic Showman? The Brett Braddock Adventures, and we could see in his illustrations (thanks to a handy use of slides) where he changed his work to improve the story. The animator, story board artist and “reluctant organiser of comics-related events around Australia” had an easy going, funny rapport with the audience, and it reinforced for me that humour in the writing process often comes from improvisation and play rather than calculated planning. It also seems that redrafting can be enjoyed for its moments of revelation and new angles to existing material, and is not just a hard slog of corrections and re-writes. Of course, as David argues, you also just have to knock stories out and hold off from being a perfectionist:

“I didn’t set out thinking I’d make it as good as possible, I just set out to get it done.” (via @lou1sb)

I look forward to reading more from these writers and checking out other events at the festival.

Image by Emerging Writers Festival

The Drifters @ Meanjin

A few years ago I began researching ‘creative non-fiction’ as a concept and platform for my writing, and found two fascinating books: From Hipsters to Gonzo: How New Journalism Rewrote the World by Marc Weingarten; and, Tom Wolfe’s collection of essays, The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby. I’m also a fan of Hunter S. Thompson’s work (like many other writers), particularly Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and more recently Andrew Ricketson has written an excellent essay over at Meanjin about ethical issues in Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood. I am keen to learn more about ‘gonzo’ and its relationship to non-fiction writing, and how narrative, subjectivity and fiction writing techniques can be applied to non-fiction stories.

The Drifters is my new essay that has grown from my interests in this field. It is about Billie Anne Baird, a young woman who is one of a small number of female drivers in Victoria that build, modify and drive cars in ‘drifting’ events. Drifting is a lifestyle that involves customizing high performance and other vehicles to increase speed and allow drivers to deliberately oversteer so that on a race track cars lose traction and ‘slide’ around corners. It’s an exhilarating, adrenaline charged sport, but is also very much about the art of car modification and the dedication and learning it takes to get a car safe, on the road and ready to drift.

The essay has been published in the new issue of Meanjin. It is the first time a photo I have taken has been included with one of my stories. I’m pretty stoked. The design team at Meanjin have done a wonderful job in terms of the colour and layout of the image – my aim was to capture Billie’s wide eyes, which are quite pretty in the photo, in relation to the leather of her jacket, the hard metal of the stall’s roof and the heavy black of the steering wheel and dashboard in her Nissan ‘Sil-eighty’. Meanjin’s reproduction of the image nails it. The purple rendering of the image is gorgeous.

I’m unsure how or if this essay contributes to wider theoretical debate and practice in the field of creative non-fiction. My research on the concept has been on the backburner due to other writing and day job projects. Reading the piece now with some distance and in print, it strikes me as fairly straight forward in that it combines personal narrative with a series of interviews and my ‘on the ground’ observations as a writer in the field. I wrote description of actual events in a way that I felt was evocative and using fiction writing techniques, and included the occasional dose of humour to signal generational differences. The Media Alliance Code of Ethics was also an important reference for me when writing the story. When I get my head around the theory, I expect to understand more about the challenges and opportunities of my writing process for telling stories about real people and events.

What I love about the piece is that it tells a story of drifting and car culture from Billie’s perspective. She is passionate, lives life on her terms and is keen to involve more young women in the motorsport. Yesterday, after reading the story for the first time in Meanjin, Billie told me, “It’s really well written, paints the picture perfectly.” I felt pleased when she said this because I was striving for accuracy during the story in terms of what it feels like to be on the race track, and to present a complex representation of a young person involved in car culture and her lifestyle and pre-occupations.

This Is Not A Hobby

The Emerging Writers Festival was held in Melbourne last month. They ran some great sessions about opportunities, challenges, tips and tricks for writing and publishing in Australia. Being a writer is tough. Support networks do exist, however, and it’s refreshing to feel more connected in real world spaces when writing can be such a solitary pursuit. I only went to the festival’s opening night (which was very cool), but I did write an article about writing, rejection and uncertainty as my contribution to dialogue around young people and creativity. The piece was published by Meanjin in this month’s issue:

Meanjin is an important literary journal and it feels great to have my first story for this publication – plus Sophie Cunningham’s editorial about feminism really nailed how I and others feel about negative reactions to women in various cultural spheres:

“I’ll just say this: either women can’t sing, paint, write or think as well as they used to—certainly not well enough to offset their tendency to become less beautiful with age—or we live in a culture that does not like the things women say or does not know how to hear them when they say it.”