Arthur Piper

Fact, the drama of first resort

While documentary makers often consider the restaging of factual events in dramatic form a device of last resort, the Nottingham-based writer Michael Eaton has taken the opposite view.

“When people ask me why I choose drama, it is because these real-life stories are dramatic. And telling them as stories helps us makes sense of the world,” Eaton told attendees at a talk in January at the University of Nottingham’s Year of the Writer Programme.

Eaton, whose docudramas include Shipman, Shoot To Kill and Who Bombed Lockerbie?, explained that while he was happy to put words into some of his characters’ mouths, the script had to remain true to the facts and events that actually happened.

“I have a pact with the audience,” he said. “If they ask ‘did this happen?’, I have to honestly believe it.” He said that in some forms of speculative drama, such as the type made by director Oliver Stone, this pact was broken. In the lively discussion that followed, he said making any documentary involved selection, editorial intervention and adding a personal slant.

While constructing a script out of the real sources available to him, Eaton said it helped for him to focus on one of the five possible facets of the play: character, narrative journey, the world of the story, the theme and genre. “I start with one of those, then it’s up to me to find the other four,” he said.

Regulating nanotechnology

Regulators can't keep up with new developments in technology. That's because scientific and commercial invention always moves at a faster pace than the lawmakers.

This situation is particularly true in nanotechnology, where a wide range of industries have been bringing new products onto the market. 

Environmental protection groups, such as Friends of the Earth, are not happy about some of the uses to which nanotechnology has been put - especially in cosmetics and healthcare. But many lawyers believe that the rules in place are strong enough - until the next wave of nanotechnologies arrives.

Read my feature on the issue here.

TV Mole

"You've written a proposal, or maybe gained some interest in your idea, but most broadcasters, funders, directors and producers will want to see something more before they back your project. There are many ideas around but it takes a lot of work to make the idea into a programme or film - so where do you start?"

via www.tvmole.com

Everything you always wanted to know about getting your film made - soon to be published as a book.

Urban, but not edgy

When the award-winning novelist Jon McGregor wrote If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things in 2002, it was partly as a reaction against the sort of urban sensibility that dominated British literary culture at the time: poverty, drugs and crime - the urban as edgy.  

"I wanted to write about a different urban, about people getting on with their lives," he told attendees at a recent talk hosted by Nottingham University's Arts Graduate Centre as part of its Year of the Writer Programme. If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things engages with the experiences of ordinary people and the events that befall them in the street of a provincial town over the course of a single day.

So it might at first seem surprising that his imminent third novel Even the Dogs starts with a man who is found dead in a flat. Many of the characters in the novel are homeless and take drugs. The novel's structure, which McGregor said was more of a writing aid than an aid to readers, revolves around the scenes played out around the dead body's journey to the grave. 

The remarkable, panoramic extract that McGregor read at the meeting traces the passage of drugs through many hands: from the fields of Afganistan, to the arteries of a provincial UK town and its drug users. While McGregor researched the facts of this aspect of his story - using YouTube and Google, among other sources - the narrative remains rooted firmly in his characters and how those wider themes and issues manifest themselves in their immediate worlds. 

Could this be a change of direction for the author? "Hopefully, it's not written about drugs and crime, but about the people in the book," he said. "It's definitely not edgy. It's not urban in that way." Readers will be able to judge for themselves when the novel is published by Bloomsbury in February 2010. 

To read McGregor's thoughts on writing Even the Dogs click here. 

Reviews of Images: A Reader

Images: A Reader, our book published by Sage in 2006, received favourable reviews in Invisible Culture, Visual Anthropology, and Visual Communications. Here are some excerpts:

Mark Andrews in Invisible Culture: "The editors make two particularly useful contributions to the anthology. At the outset of each section, an introduction effectively summarizes and presents key issues for that section's readings, relates dominant themes to those earlier or later in the anthology, and outlines the significance of the individual excerpts in terms of the editors' proposed field of image studies. Aware of the bias with which they may have compiled the volume, however, the editors also have chosen to include four alternative tables of contents that fall at the end of the book's general introduction ... Accessible and well-organized, these alternative tables go far in exemplifying the extent to which the editors wish to open up the field of inquiry in the study of images."

Zoë Sadokierski in Visual Communications: Images: A Reader is "...a rich, well-considered volume that is bound to become a critical introductory text for students of images and images studies everywhere, as well as an essential resource for academics and practitioners alike. This reader is an invaluable tool for those interested in images and image studies across a vast array of disciplines." 

Keyan G. Tomaselli in Visual Anthropology: "Much theorizing in visual studies, visual anthropology, and visual culture is offered in an a-historical vein, sliding along secondary and tertiary conceptual trajectories, with little sense of interdisciplinary origin. This book recovers the historical grounds of the study of 'images' and provides and contextualizes most of the defining texts, and a lot more besides. A cursory flipping through visual anthropology textbooks will reveal that few cite any of the authors included here.

"One could question the choice of works to reprint in the compilation: one could, with one or two exceptions, discuss the white, Western-centric emphasis of the anthology, and one could query others things besides. For the most part this would be pointless, as the tome offers a comprehensive overview. I can’t do any better than repeating Martin Jay’s blurb on the back cover:

 

"Images, from time immemorial, have generated words, words to describe them, words to interpret them, words to enhance or keep their magic at bay. Many of the most eloquent and insightful of these words, from the Bible to Plato, to contemporary visual culture studies, are gathered together in this remarkable collection, which is surely destined to be a standard reference in its field for many years to come”

 

You’d probably have to pay to read two of the three reviews in full, but, hopefully, you get the gist.

What's an image?

If you had to choose one of the most fraught and fought over questions in the history of ideas, the question of what an image is would have to be a strong contender. 

From the beginning of writing on images, two prevailing views have prevailed - love 'em, or hate 'em. In the Bible, for example, Adam is made in the image of God, but people are warned against worshipping false idols. Similar debates go on today over the value of commercial brands, political images and concerns of style over substance.

A couple of years ago, Sunil Manghani, Jon Simons and I set out to track how these debates had changed and developed over the course of Western history and culture. How had people set out to understand the nature of images, and what role had images played in the nature of understanding?

The result was a book published by Sage in 2006: Images, A Reader, which contains a selection of writings on images from ancient historical sources, right through to modern ideas on the nature of visual culture - plus our own introductions to important issues and periods. 

So did we answer the question? Not really, but hopefully we showed how relevant the question still is today and provided readers with ways of sharpening their own queries and ideas on the subject.  

Click here for a table of contents.

Desperate rhymes for desperate times

Is it still right to use rhyme in poetry, or is that just desperate? Or are certain rhymes desperate, such as love and dove? And when might it be good to use rhyme - in desperate times? And what sort of poetry does it produce?

These were some of the questions posed by the poet and writer Mike Wilson at a recent Year of the Writer workshop at the Arts Graduate Centre at the University of Nottingham. Instead of looking at traditional rhyming schemes, he asked, why not explore the poetry of writers such as Walt Whitman, which relies on repetition and rhythm, or poems that almost rhyme, but not quite? 

One example that Mike suggested is from the beginning of Wilfred Owen's poem Strange meeting.In it, Owen rhymes "escaped" with "scooped," "groined" and "groaned." 

Mike shared some of his own poems, which used different techniques. In one, the word "back" appeared in every line, another had no letter "e" anywhere in the poem. Others had more familiar structures, such as a pantoum in which lines 2 and 4 in the first four-line verse appear word for word as lines 1 and 3 in the next. The students had fun coming up with their own versions: "The point is to play around, see what happens and enjoy the words," he said.

Mike finished by reading something from his recent collection Desperanto. You can read a small selection from book here: Download Smokestack - Desperanto.

Start writing and stay writing

Students at a recent workshop I gave at the University of Nottingham's Year of the Writer programme found that they could easily write over 100 words in five minutes - some managed over 250. So why not write a PhD dissertation, novel, or feature film script in six months?

The problem, it seems, is keeping it going. 

Luckily, there are a few simple things that you can do to improve your chances of success. Find a regular time and place to write, and find out what things knock you off track. I find that keeping a writing diary can help you monitor progress, or lack of it. 

Here are some ideas to keep you on target: Download Start writing and stay writing. If you've got your own tricks or tips, please feel free to share them using the comments section.

The dead founders' club

Some university scientists dream of taking their invention, making it into a viable business and selling it a few years later for millions. That can be possible. But people who invest in so-called university spin-off companies complain that most scientists can't even put a business plan together.

One venture capitalist said: "“I know that this sounds very basic, but in thirty years in the business, I’ve never seen [a business plan] completed by a start-up in a professional manner.”

Still, many companies manage to get the money to launch their businesses. And how easy is it to succeed? Only one in five make it to the big time: “The path to success can be full of broken dreams, heartaches and dead founders,” says the venture capitalist. Fancy joining the club?

For an article I wrote on venture capital and nanotechnology, see Nano Magazine.

Who's afraid?

Being unable to make a living out of writing for magazines is not a new thing. While many pundits claim that the internet has made freelancing uneconomic, it always was, according to Marc Weingarten's bittersweet book Who's Afraid of Tom Wolfe? How New Journalism Rewrote the World.

Only the famous novelist Norman Mailer could command the hefty fee of $3,500 an article in the early 1960s, while well-known journalists, such as Tom Wolfe, were working seven days a week to earn $17,000 a year. 

Wolfe seems to have spent most of his income on travel for the articles he wrote.

These journalists were working for little-known media, for not very much money and well-paid commissions came only after they turned their best work into book form. The parallels between then and now seem obvious, don't they?