The written word - short short stories

As a performer and artist the written word is of great importance to me. As I am studying Creative Writing in combination with Dance, I would like to bring these disciplines together in my final year dissertation.

Here are some of the writers and styles of work which inspire me not only as a writer, but as a maker of dance theatre.

Dave Eggers

You have done him and his friends harm, in a way, and you jeopardised their health, and now you are so close you feel like you share a heart. He knows your name and you know his, and you almost killed him and, because you got so close to doing so but didn't, you want to fall on him, weeping, because you are so lonely, so lonely always, and all contact is contact, and all contact makes us so grateful we want to cry and dance and cry and cry.

Dave Eggers - Excerpt from The Accident

In his short stories Dave Eggers offers a glance into a characters life, and these moments provide more information and depth into those characters than many longer pieces of text. They leave me with a resounding feeling of loss, or elation, or a smile, or contemplation. They are complete stories despite their short length and the simple style is, for me, incredibly pure and beautiful. No more is needed but a brief snapshot.

These short short stories fill my appetite for character and this sense is something I would like to evoke in my physical theatre solo. I would like to enter into a moment of a character's life and leave the audience satisfied. I want there to be an open end and yet a feeling of conclusion, which is something Dave Eggers achieves in so many of his stories.

Eggers also has a brilliant sense of humour which completely appeals to me. In his memoir, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, his writing is often completely (by his own admittance) self-conscious and in this way, completely honest.

I would like to incorporate elements of humour into the monologue in my solo as I think a character is more realistic and accessible to an audience if they do not take themselves too seriously. However, humour is not a strong point of my writing, so unless I find a way to develop it naturally, I could look at ways of incorporating physical humour and humour through movement (avoiding any slapstick.)

"If this sounds like the story of a life, okay."

Raymond Carver

Raymond Carver is another writer who I admire for his short stories and characterisation.

In the kitchen, he poured another drink and looked at the bedroom suite in his front yard. The mattress was stripped and the candy-striped sheets lay beside two pillows on the chiffonier. Except for that, things looked much the way they had in the bedroom—nightstand and reading lamp on his side of the bed, nightstand and reading lamp on her side. His side, her side. He considered this as he sipped the whiskey.

Raymond Carver - Excerpt from Why Don't You Dance?

Carver's writing is often incredibly poetic and this element is similar in my own writing of prose fiction. I agree with Mary Park in her review of What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, one of Carver's collections:

Much of what happens in What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (1981) happens offstage, and we're left with tragedy's props: booze, instant coffee, furniture from a failed marriage, cigarettes smoked in the middle of the night. This is not merely a matter of technique. Carver leaves out a great deal, but that's only a measure of his characters' vulnerability, the nerve endings his stories lay bare. To say anything more, one feels, would simply hurt too much.

Mary Park
(http://www.amazon.com/What-Talk-About-When-Love/dp/0679723056)

This quote from Mary Park highlights some key words/phrases I would like to consider in the making of my solo:

• What happens offstage - behind the story we see onstage
• Use of props - Could end exiting leaving objects onstage - lights go down a fraction after I've left the stage - creates moment of thought for the audience before the lights go down. These props could represent themes of the character and their life or story.
• What is left out and not seen has as much meaning as what is seen.
• "Laying bare" the story of a character.

Other thoughts:

• Use of humour to make the character and their story accessible to the audience
• What story would I like to tell?
• Snapshot
• Purity - only what is needed
• Beauty - how to evoke and translate the beauty I find in stories by these writers into my own work.
  

It has dawned on me that the text elements of the solo must work with, enhance, and be an integral part of creating movement, as I want to create a physical theatre piece, not just a straight monologue.