Selling Lilies of the Valley (1958)
Johan van der Keuken

This couple, selling lilies of the valley in a Parisian street on May Day sometime in the late 1950s, do not look quite like street traders. Both might be dreaming of a career in films, or of better times on the Riviera - if conclusions are to be drawn from his medallion and her wealth of jewellery.

While he looks out along the street, she is altogether more aware of the camera. Both, by the look of them, have histories, secrets and aspirations still to be met. Either could, without too much difficulty, be imagined in the movies of the period, as participants in some desperate and fatal romance.

Through portrayals of this kind, van der Keuken provides evidence of depth of character and proposes that even ordinary lives are imbued with drama.

Bondi (1939)
Max Dupain

The man and woman standing on Bondi Beach represent something approximating to physical perfection, but to stop them becoming mere emblems the photographer has actualised both: the man’s thumb puckers the small of his back, and the woman is reaching to empty sand from her bathing costume.

Thus this photograph can be seen as the epitome of a ‘modern’ picture for the way in which it relates ideas to the senses. Both figures appear to be reflecting on the ocean, but at the same time they might just be absorbed in whatever their neighbours are doing, in line with the figure on the right looking across the picture.

Bondi, which was one of several notable beach pictures taken by Dupain in the 1930s, was sufficiently admired to be reproduced on a forty-three-cent Australian postage stamp in the 1990s.

At 12.05 p.m., she buys a magazine at the news-stand, located at the corner of the rue de Rivoli
and de l'Amiral Coligny, Paris, 1st arrondissement. She is wearing a hat.

SOPHIE CALLE
b. France 1953.
Lives and works in Paris

Sophie Calle is a French artist who works with photographs and performances, placing herself in situations almost as if she and the people she encounters were fictional. She also imposes elements of her own life onto public places creating a personal narrative where she is both author and character. She has been called a detective and a voyeur and her pieces involve serious investigations as well as natural curiosity.

In 1980 Calle made a piece called 'Suite Vénitienne' in which she followed a man she had met at a party to Venice and continued to follow and photograph him there for two weeks.

The Hotel

A year later she returned to Venice where she got a temporary job as a chambermaid. She made a piece of work about her imagined ideas of who the hotel guests were, based on their personal belongings.

"For each room there was a photograph of the bed undone, of other objects in the room, and a description day by day of what I found there."

Sophie Calle's work inhabits a space between fact and fiction. She crosses private boundaries to explore the meanings which might be hidden there and exploits public spaces, investing them with a sense of intimacy.

* What could you make or do, inspired by Sophie Calle's work?

* Look around you and describe what you see as if you were seeing it for the first time. What do you notice first? Look again and begin to see the more complex relationships between spaces and people. Look at the habits and rituals people go through as they go about their daily lives, working, playing, shopping etc. Perhaps you could make a video diary for people from a completely different society. It could be a record for people in the future, of life on earth as you see it, at the end of the 20th century.

* Take a bus journey and notice your fellow passengers. Who do you think they are? If you were to keep a diary of everything you saw and everyone you encountered for 24 hours, including snatches of conversation, what would you write. Imagine how that description might read a year later...

Revision Tips:

These tips come from the US novelist Elmore Leonard.

There are ten. Some will be more relevant than others to what you have written. But go through them all carefully, one after the other.


Elmore Leonard’s Tips

Never start with the weather.
If you’re using weather to create atmosphere, it’s easy to go on too long. Don’t.

Avoid prologues.
99% of the time, a piece of writing can be improved immediately and sharpened up significantly just by cutting the first paragraph.

Never use a verb other than ‘said’ to carry the dialogue.
Other teachers may have done whole lessons on words like ‘exclaimed’ and ‘shouted’. Good for them. But the verb is the writer sticking his nose in. the reader wants the drama of the dialogue, not the author’s nose.

Never use an adverb to modify the word ‘said’,
he admonished gravely. To use an adverb in this way is a mortal sin. This is sticking your nose in and then wiggling it.

Keep your exclamation marks under control.
You are allowed two exclamation marks per 100,000 words.

Never use the word ‘suddenly’.
It’s amazing how often in pieces of writing how often something ‘suddenly’ happens which can only happen in one way, anyway. ‘Suddenly the phone rang.’

Use regional dialect sparingly.
It can work, but it can get in the way. Word selection, lexical control is the best way to suggest dialect, not spelling words in a way meant to suggest how they were pronounced.

Avoid the detailed description of characters.
Let us see the characters through their tones of voice and through what they do - and don’t do. Don’t give us a full paragraph of background information before they open their mouths.

Don’t go into great detail describing places and things.
Even if you’re good at it, you don’t want descriptions that bring the action, the flow of a story, to a standstill.

Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.
You know, the thoughtful, wistful stuff where you spell it all out; the poetic bits; the philosophy. Think about the bits you hate reading. Don;t write them.

And why not read some Elmore Leonard for yourself?
You might also like Raymond Carver’s short stories,
or Steinbeck’s books, or Ernest Hemingway.
Nothing helps writing better than reading good models.
Ask at the library.

YEAR 10 ‘ORIGINAL WRITING’ COURSE

three: inform, explain, describe

writing a commentary

Writing to ‘inform, explain and describe’ relies on clear paragraphing. Each paragraph should have one clear point, usually expressed in one, clear topic sentence, which is then expanded with explanations and examples.

In clear, informative writing, you start a new paragraph strictly for each new point.

You’re going to write a commentary on your last, creative piece. You’re going to describe the process of composition - the photographs, including their analysis; your first draft; your revision process; an analysis of the final piece and its successes and (maybe) limitations.

You can see a kind of paragraphing implicit in just that list, can’t you?

Here are some reviews, some extracts and some comments by the author, Alice Oswald, about her recently published poem, Dart.

Which sections of this are most like the kind of commentary you’re being asked to write?

Start your commentary by writing six or seven clear sentences which trace your work from preparation and conception to revision and writing.

Think about: ideas, pace, beginning and ending, word choice, sentence and paragraph control, revision procedures. how do you want your audience to respond to your final piece?

Review of Dart from ‘The Times’

Dart is a poem about the river where Alice Oswald lives. She trained as a Classicist and now she works as a gardener on the Dartington Estate in Devon. Her note to the book tells us that for the past two years she has been recording conversations with people who live and work on the river, to make what she calls 'a sound map'.

Dart is a long poem - 48 pages - and it uses prose as well as poetry for its effects. This collision of writing has no slackness or jumble in it; it is a determination to use whatever is to hand to make the shape she wants - 'The estuary's my merchant. I go pretty much the length and breath of it scrudging stuff for some tiny stretch of wall. Looking for the fault lines and the scabs of crystals and the natural coigns which are right-angled stones for corners.'

Her quick descriptions are accurate and beautiful - 'I knew a heron once, when it got up/Its wings were the width of the river.' Eels are 'bright whips of flow'. She finds ' duck's nest in the leat with four blue eggs.'

This moving, changing poem, as fast-flowing as the river and as deep, is a celebration of difference - the great variety of the natural world, and the escapes of the human spirit. Tamed by industrialisation and information, a part of us is still uncatchable as water.

Oswald stands in the flow of humanity, sieving us through language - 'all names, all voices, Slip-Shape, this is Proteus, whoever that is, the shepherd of the seals,/driving my many selves from cave to cave.'

Jeanette Winterson

Review of Dart from ‘The Guardian’

Dart opens with a scene of primal beginnings. An old man of the river lumbers into the poem like Edward Thomas's Lob, and Oswald's constantly shifting metrics take one of their sudden forward surges:

What I love is one foot in front of another. South-south-west and down the contours. I go slipping between Black Ridge and White Horse Hill into a bowl of the moor where echoes can't get out

listen
a
lark
spinning
around
one
note
splitting
and
mending
it
and I find you in the reeds, a trickle coming out of a bark, a foal of a river

Oswald prefaces Dart with a list of people she's spoken to about the river, but despite this and marginal notes telling us who says what, "all voices should be read as the river's mutterings". Among the local deities muttering with the river's tongue is the King of the Oakwoods, "who had to be sacrificed to a goddess", a pattern the river repeats on later victims like local bogeyman, Jan Coo, and an unfortunate canoeist. Dart is "old Devonian for oak", and Oswald underlines its sacred associations by mutating "Flamen Dialis", the priest of Zeus, into "Flumen Dialis", his river. The substratum of mythic violence is very Hughesian, and like the river of Ted Hughes's 1983 sequence, River, the Dart can "wash itself of all deaths", though after a drowning Oswald follows the dead man's last thoughts with a respectfully blank page ("silence").

David Wheatley

Reflections on Dart by Alice Oswald, the author

This project is inspired by work I've been doing with local schools, in which I provide one strand of a long poem and get the children to provide the rest. I now want to create a huge poem about the River Dart, using the voices of all the people who live and work alongside it. One of the aims of this poem would be to reconnect the Local Imagination to its environment - in particular, in these years of water shortages and floods, to increase people's awareness of water as a natural resource. But I'm also interested, for its own sake, in the idea of a many-voiced poem, a poem that benefits from the freshness and expertise of ordinary people.

I'm hoping to work with some of the following groups: Dartmoor prisoners, monks from Buckfastleigh, plumbers and water-purifiers at Dartington and students at the College of Arts, sewage workers, conservationists, workers at the Unigate milk factory and the Totnes industrial estate, railway employees, pleasure-boat drivers, foresters and special needs children from Sharpham, farmers, canoers and swimmers, bell-ringers at Stoke Gabriel, coarse fishers, crab fishers, South West Water Authority, shop-workers, boat-repairers, coastguards and cadets at the Naval College and foreign workers on factory ships in the bay. I'd like school children to speak on behalf of the animals and insects of the Dart, and the thousands of oak trees which give the river its name.

Last year, I applied for money to write a poem about the River Dart. My idea was to orchestrate it like a kind of jazz, with various river-workers and river-dwellers composing their own parts. The result was to be a river's story, from source to mouth, written by the whole Dart community.

After working at this for a couple of months, I began to think it was people's living, unselfconscious voices, not their poems, that were most awake to the river. At any rate, some people were overflowing with poetry and some people had a beautiful, technical way of talking about the river; but the two didn't often coincide.

So I decided to take along a tape-recorder. At the moment, my method is to tape a conversation with someone who works on the Dart, then go home and write it down from memory. I then work with these two kinds of record - one precise, one distorted by the mind - to generate the poem's language. It's experimental and very against my grain, this mixture of journalism and imagination, but the results are exciting. Above all, it preserves the idea of the poem's voice being everyone's, not just the poet's.

I've spoken to a huge amount of people. Only a selection of these have found their way into the poem; forester, boat-builder, ecologist, stone-waller, sewage area-manager, canoe-instructor, seal watcher, fisheries officer, salmon fisher, archaeologist .... All are 'working' voices. This reflects my preoccupation with Work as a power-line for language. When a sewage worker talks of liquid being 'clarified', when a fisheries officer talks of the water 'riffling' or a stone-waller says 'scrudging', those words have never had such flare.
Over the past six months, I've concentrated on people in the Totnes area, because of having a small child and no car. I now have two small children and no car, but am beginning to move downriver to talk to people between Sharpham and Dartmouth. These places are relatively well served by buses. The upper stretches of the river are hard both to research and to reach. I've begun putting out requests for information in two Dartmoor journals, but I shan't be able to follow these up till next year.

I'm now at a point where I can see the shape of what's emerging - a river-map of voices, like an aboriginal songline. The oral nature of the work is very important to me. I'd like the end-result to be performed, not necessarily published. But I certainly can't predict when that will be.

Alice Oswald, May 1999


one step-width water
of linked stones
trills in the stones
glides in the trills
eels in the glides
in each eel a fingerwidth of sea

in walking boots, with twenty pounds on my back: spare socks, compass, map, water purifier so I
can drink from streams, seeing the cold floating spread out above the morning,

tent, torch, chocolate not much else.

Which'll make it longish, almost unbearable between my evening meal and sleeping, when I've
got as far as stopping, sitting in the tent door with no book, no saucepan, not so much as a stick
to support the loneliness

he sits clasping his knees, holding his face low down between them,
he watches black slugs,
he makes a little den of his smells and small thoughts
he thinks up a figure far away on the tors
waving, so if something does happen,
if night comes down and he has to leave the path
then we've seen each other, somebody knows where we are.

YEAR 10 ‘ORIGINAL WRITING’ COURSE

four: persuade, argue, advise

recommend reading and recommend a book

One more thing to do. Then we’ll have looked in some way at each of the four ‘writing triplets’ the GCSE is so keen on. Good thing.

This time, we’re going to persuade some-one (who knows, maybe another year 10 pupil) to read a book.

First, you’ll need to come up with an argument for reading. Four or five good points.

Secondly, you need to anticipate opposition. What might someone say who doesn’t want to read a book. Get your answers in first!

Thirdly, you need to adopt an appropriate tone for this kind of persuasion. People don’t like to be talked down to. You must write as an adult to another adult. No sarcasm, no funny business.

If you really want to go for persuasion, there are three dimensions to consider. First, you use logic: there are good reasons for following this course of action. Then you appeal to character: this kind of thing is what good people do. Finally, you go for emotion: people will like you more if you do this. That sort of thing.

Persuasive writing usually employs two key language tricks. It does that sequencing thing I’ve used here. ‘Firstly’ and ‘secondly’ and so on. All those ‘connectives’ come in useful here: ‘what’s more’, ‘however’, ‘on the one hand’ (and its big sister ‘on the other hand) and so on.

The second trick is the modal verb. Those funny little verbs which make fierce points a little gentler. Can, may, must, might, could, would, will, shall. Not: read a book and sound clever! But, if you do read a book, you may be able to join in more conversations later.

(Not that that is a brilliant point about reading, mind you.)

Persuade your audience to read, but also persuade your reader to choose a particular book, one you’ve read and can recommend.