SHOW ME THE LUTE
May 16th, 2010 by Adrian ReynoldsEvery project needs its own vocabulary, its own rhythm. By ‘vocabulary’ here I don’t mean the lexicon of words you use, though that can be part of what I’m getting at. Instead it’s to do with working out what goes into your story. Some of that will be clear if you’re working in a particular genre. Staccato sentences work well with thrillers, for instance. A touch of humour in a comedy helps remind you and readers that this is meant to be funny. And so on.
But what about when you’re not writing something that’s clearly one genre or another? Some people will raise their arms in horror at this point. But stories that cross over genres are increasingly popular, and for all the effort of people like Phil Parker in defining how genre splicing works, that kind of thinking tends to be based on perceiving the pattern in what someone else has already done. What if you’re doing something new?
You could argue that The Full Monty is just another personal drama with comic touches. And sure enough, there’ve been plenty of attempts to capture the lightning that went into that particular bottle. How many British films have been made in its wake that tread a similar path? From Billy Elliot to Kinky Boots, Calendar Girls and Brassed Off there’s been no shortage of films that attempt to pluck heartstrings with peculiarly British tales of ordinary people with a commitment to a very personal path in life.
Thing is, it’s uniqueness that matters, distinctiveness that truly makes an impact on audiences. If that wasn’t the case, then sequels would put as many bums on seats as their forebears. If people really valued consistency to that extent, they’d stay home and find it on the telly. If you coax an audience into venturing out to spend money on a cinema ticket, the least you can do for them is give them some kind of surprise.
Which isn’t to say that anything goes. This isn’t a plea to abandon narrative and play William Burroughs cut-up games with text. Though, that said…
I went to an extraordinary concert the other night. A Dutch lute player called Jozef Van Wissem, playing to just twenty or so people. He deserved an arena. There was nothing obscure about what he was doing except that he was doing it on an instrument that time has forgotten, though if you do think of the lute it’s probably because Sting recently got into them and did an album of tunes with one.
Anyway, Jozef is a very contemporary kind of lute player, who in looking for new repertoire to play uses the cut-up methods that Burroughs was known for to create new pieces based on the elements of old ones. Which all sounds very academic and mechanistic — except the effect is anything but. His playing is elegant, delicate, touching. Methods that seem calculated turn out to shed new light on old material. And that’s just as true with some of what Burroughs did, by the way — ‘experimental’ conjures up whitecoated scientists, whereas these experiments are all about connecting with creativity in new ways.
That attitude of experimentation is important. Yes, there are doubtless times that three act structure is the best way to express your story — it certainly is for some of mine. But on other occasions you have to reach for something that truly suits your concept, rather than trying to bang it into a readymade template simply because that’s what seems to be available. It’s not. As stories differ, so do structures. For every similarity there is between your tale and one out there already, there’ll be a difference that’s worth thinking about just as much. Oasis might have got the hang of some of what The Beatles did, but there is no possible way that Liam and Noel could have come up with what Lennon and McCartney created at their height.
Grateful readers are invited to support my caffeine habit through PayPal donations