Sara Williams and Leila Johnston host a series of interdisciplinary panel chats on storytelling. Questions are encouraged!
We had originally scheduled Storywarp 4: Love Stories for Tuesday 7 February. We’re pushing the event back due to some scheduling issues and a bit of a too-many-conferences-all-at-once situation.
This is definitely a reschedule and not a cancellation: Storywarp is still alive and well and we anticipate rescheduling Love Stories 4 for April or May. Please stay tuned for details.
Some shots from Storywarp 3: Other People’s Stories
We’re pleased to announce the third storywarp, which is due to take place on the evening of Wednesday December 7th, here at our offices in Islington. The theme is ‘Other People’s Stories’, so we’ll be talking about the difficulties and joys of telling the stories of others.
As usual, we’ll kick off the discussion at about 6:45pm – and we have a noisy old door here, so please arrive as close to 6:30 as you can.
Our panel:
Helen Lewis-Hasteley, Assistant Editor at The New Statesman magazine.
Ivor Baddiel, author, professional gagsmith and script writer of The X Factor.
Dee Jarrett-Macauley, Orwell prize-winning author.
John Fleming, biographer of Malcolm Hardee and Huffington Post columnist.
Joanna Woodall, art historian, well known for her extensive work on portraiture.
Space is limited, so please RSVP if you think you’re coming! Hope to see you here on the 7th.
A shared narrative can often lead to totally unreliable individual memories. We are so eager to conform to the collective, to fit our little lives into the arc of history, that we end up misleading ourselves. Consider an investigation of flashbulb memories from September 11, 2001. A few days after the tragic attacks, a team of psychologists led by William Hirst and Elizabeth Phelps began interviewing people about their personal experiences. In the years since, the researchers have tracked the steady decay of these personal stories. They’ve shown, for instance, that subjects have dramatically changed their recollection of how they first learned about the attacks. After one year, 37 percent of the details in their original story had changed. By 2004, that number was approaching 50 percent. The scientists have just begun analyzing their ten year follow-up data, but it will almost certainly show that the majority of details from that day are now inventions. Our 9/11 tales are almost certainly better – more entertaining, more dramatic, more reflective of that awful day – but those improvements have come at the expense of the truth. Stories make sense. Life usually doesn’t.
— http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/10/how-friends-ruin-memory-the-social-conformity-effect/
Friend of Storywarp Duncan alerted us to this excellent article by Charlie Kaufmann, “Storytelling is inherently dangerous. Consider a traumatic event in your life. Think about how you experienced it. Now think about how you told it to someone a year later. Now think about how you told it for the hundredth time. It’s not the same thing. Most people think perspective is a good thing: you can figure out characters arcs, you can apply a moral, you can tell it with understanding and context. But this perspective is a misrepresentation: it’s a reconstruction with meaning, and as such bears little resemblance to the event. The other thing that happens is adjustment. You find out which part of the story works, which part to embellish, which to jettison. You fashion it. Your goal is to be entertaining. This is true for a story told at a dinner party, and it’s true for stories told through movies. Don’t let anyone tell you what a story is, what it needs to include. As an experiment, write a non-story. It will have a chance of being different.”
— http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2011/oct/03/charlie-kaufman-how-to-write
“I went to Storywarp last week, and was struck by something someone said in response to a comment made by Rhianna Pratchett, a scriptwriter for video games. They were surprised she’d referred to something called a “blank-slate character” – so important in first-person video games – and did not think something “blank-slate” could be classified as a “character”. It was as if characters had to be bundled full of meaning, substance, and, well, characteristics, if they were to exist at all. My response was immediate; surely blank-slate characters exist. Look at Nicholas Nickleby – wet as all get out. What does he add to the story named after him? Early novels in the Bildungsroman tradition often had a central character who was important not so much for the things he did, but for the things he didn’t do, the things that happened to him. Rousseau explains his theories of education deliberately using Emile as a blank slate;Wilhelm Meister walks around eighteenth-century Germany in a kind of daze; and Nick Carraway is a witness only to the enigmatic and absent Gatsby. Then I stopped being so pretentious and thought, of course there’s such a thing as a blank-slate character. You walk around with one all the time. It’s you.” — really interesting post from Kat Sommers. Highly recommend those interested in characterisation check out the full thing.
Yes, we have an audio recording of most of second Storywarp event. Click here to hear!
The second Storywarp event took place here in our office, last night. It was similar to the first event (hereafter, Storywarp 1), but this time we focused on one specific aspect of storytelling: characterisation.
Just like the first event, it was a very dense, enlightening and sparky conversation which continued over wine for an hour or so afterwards. Both halves of the night were really valuable: just as it’s great to hear experts’ insights as part of an audience, we felt very privileged to be able to approach them with ideas informally afterwards. It was also an extremely focussed and interesting audience, and it was a joy to see how many people stuck around to chat at the end. We can’t quite believe the level of goodwill involved in pulling off something like this and are really excited by the idea that we can help to make it happen on a regular basis. Needless to say we both thoroughly enjoyed ourselves last night, and going by the tweets and emails we’ve seen, so did a lot of the people who attended. Stand by for many more.
The event kicked off with some discussion about the representation of characters using visual language vs words and soon moved on to the relationship between an author and the reader and the effects of synthesising source material. All of the panelists deal with truth and history in their work in various ways, and it was particularly interesting to hear what happens to the truth when characters go through this kind of process of translation. The panel warmed to many of the audience questions, and the conversation covered everything from internal voices, the practicalities of creature creation in animation and video games, murderers, blank slates, suggestion, assumption, first principles, Dan Brown and The Truman Show.
A few choice quotes…
Sydney said of her quasi-historical cartoon strip: “The comic is a very extended joke about the unknowability of other people’s reality… It’s a bit uncanny valley, some history, they’re trying to do such a level of fidelity with people from history who’ve been dead all this time.”
Sydney: “I work in popular entertainment, the audience is either with the character or against them. There are two ways of thinking about character. You can think like a great Russian novelist, that you’re trying to re-create this very complex internal state. Alternatively there’s the archetype way, that characters aren’t really people but representatives.”
Rhianna: “Especially when you have a blank slate, non-voiced character, having another character that voices what the player might be thinking at a given time is often very useful.”
Rhianna: “I’ve worked on games where literally the entire game has been designed with no narrative in mind. So literally the gameplay has decided that it’s going to take the player from a ship to the sewers to up a skyscraper, and no one’s really thought about why. But they’ve decided that that’s a cool location, or you can do loads of jumping bits, or whatever. And you have to almost work backwards to hammer the narrative around that.”
Ed: “The main constraint is space; character stuff gets squashed. You use a kind of shorthand, but you let the material create its own rhythm. You understand the story, and pick out the material to suit the story.”
Ed: “How do you persuade through character? No adverbs! Show, don’t tell. Don’t trumpet it. I once wrote a story about the aftermath of the Rwandan genocides. I had a dilemma when I was writing this character, who was a murderer. Realistically you know nothing. All you can do it go back to first principles.”
Alex: “Redemptive narratives I find a little bit wearisome now. I think the story of redemption has been played out. It doesn’t seem to be terribly stimulating.”
Alex: “I’ve been dealing with scraps of paper that have been generated by a society that’s been under surveillance. So in the process of writing a book you’re very familiar with how difficult it is to discern what character is, and how perceptions of character are shaped on fairly flimsy evidence.”
Missed the event? Or came, but can’t for the life of you remember something clever that someone said? Fear not! We have an audio recording of the first hour coming up shortly…
We are very happy to announce that Rhianna Pratchett will be joining us for Storywarp 2 on Wednesday 5 October.
Rhianna writes scripts for video games – very successful ones – and is currently writing a screenplay about female vigilantes. She has written extensively about games, movies and books, and in 2007 her work on Heavenly Sword was nominated for a BAFTA.
Alongside writing for videogames, Rhianna authored the 6-part Mirror’s Edge miniseries with DC Comics and has written several of her own short stories. She also works with the IGDA Writers’ Special Interest Group and the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain to help improve games narrative and the lot of games writers everywhere.
We are SO pleased Rhianna will be joining us next week.
Storywarp 2: On Characterisation is happening on Wednesday 5 October.
A few people approached us after Storywarp 1 and said they wish we’d had the time to talk about character development. We agreed – it would have been really interesting. In fact, we wish we could have talked about *a lot* more… which has inspired us to structure future Storywarp events around themes.
Storywarp 2 is about how character development works across various forms of storytelling. Different sorts of storytellers have different freedoms and limitations: a visual artist develops and conveys character in a very different way to, say, the author of a history textbook. But the goals are the same: for the audience to lean closer, to care what happens and ultimately to connect in some way — even empathise — with the protagonist. You’d assume the job is easiest for the novelist who creates characters from scratch, but the journalist makes it happen too. We’re curious about this.
Leila and I have pulled together four very different voices to make for, we hope, a wide-ranging and engaging chat. Our four storytellers are as follows:
Sydney Padua is a character animator. Her CV includes Marmaduke, Clash of the Titans, The Golden Compass, The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian and The Iron Giant. She’s also well-known to internet geeks as the creator of webcomic 2D Goggles, in which Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace are portrayed as a crime-fighting mathematician duo, getting into unlikely scrapes in Victorian London.
Jo Neary is a comedian and actress known for her roles in sitcoms like Ideal and That Mitchell and Webb Look, and her own character-based stage shows, in which she plays a wide range of weird people –- and sometimes animals. One of Jo’s characters (based on Celia Johnson) was made into a TV pilot a couple of years ago.
Jo has had to cancel due to a scheduling conflict… please stand by…
Ed Caesar writes features for magazines. As a regular contributor to the Sunday Times Magazine and a contributing editor to British GQ, he has filed copy from Congo, Iran, Kosovo and Nantwich, and has been asked whether he is “anxious to die” by Kevin Costner. In 2011, Ed won the Amnesty International Media Award for The Lost Boys - an investigation for GQ into jihadist recruitment on the Kenyan/Somali border.
Alex Butterworth is a historian. He is the author of The World That Never Was: A True Story of Dreamers, Schemers, Anarchists and Secret Agents, and Pompeii: The Living City, co-authored with Professor Ray Laurence, which won the Longmans-History Today New Generation Book of the Year in 2006. Alex also writes and presents The Carabinieri Art Squad documentary on Radio 4.
So there you have it: a mightily impressive lineup for what should be a pretty fantastic event.
Feel free to post questions and conversation starters in the comments; RSVP is the usual hello [at] storywarp [dot] com. The event will run 6:30 to 8ish at Made by Many’s offices in Islington.
– Sara
