The marrow of a story

Last week was hectic: the usual work stuff, preparations, briefings and meetings with new clients, an hour-and-a-half trip across country to see Hamlet, a last minute rethink and rewrite of the end of story about to go to press, a whole day on LV21 telling stories - and dinner with all our neighbours. It was great, and threatened to be just a bit too frantic.

Luckily for me, I topped and tailed the week with a day in the garden. For me that means the veg plot - it's my bit of the garden, and it's where I go for a dose of sanity and silence.

At this time of the year it's burgeoning. What a splendid word - fat and luscious with juice. And that's exactly what my courgette patch was full of - not courgettes, but burgeoning marrows which had escaped my attentions during a week of work.

So last weekend I put out a pile of ten marrows by the front path with a notice asking people to take them. All were gone by the next day.

Yesterday another ten had grown, so I took four and turned them into soup for the freezer, and put six out on the front path. This morning they'd all gone.

It makes me strangely happy to share my produce invisibly like this - to send something I helped to create out into the world - and though it may seem a stretch, it's a similar feeling to the one I felt when telling my story on LV21.

It was dark, so I couldn't see my audience, and they were silent except when one by one they came forward to drop a pebble in my metal bucket, to tell me to start reading the next section of the story. Even as I was standing there in the chain locker with my story in my hand, I knew that it wasn't my story alone any more - it was the audience's too.

When you publish a story, it leaves you. If someone picks it up and reads it, it's theirs, it's in their head and even as its writer you don't have any control over what it's doing in there.

I knew this, but being in the same space, in darkness, listening to my readers absorbing the story, was something very special. I could almost hear it moving through the air between us.

And the same went for the other ReAuthorers - Sonia Overall, Sarah Salway, Kay Syrad and Will Sutton (who took the photo above - thank you Will) - their stories flowed through the pipes and spaces of LV21 and created something really amazing. What a day.

Pebble story

In a minute I'm going to put a metal bucket, nine pebbles and nine small sheets of paper in the boot of my car, and then I'll drive to Gillingham.

I'm heading for LV21where I'm going to tell a story in the chain locker.

If anyone turns up to hear it, they'll be given a pebble (there are pebbles in the story, so it does make sense, sort of) - if they want to hear a part of the story, they put their pebble in the bucket. If they don't, they walk away.

I'll report back on whether this does engage my audience in the process of telling a story, or whether they walk out in disgust!

Oh, and this is another lovely ReAuthoring project, so there will be lots of other writers on LV21 today doing surprising things with words.

Confession: I'm a control freak

It's been quite a week, with two very different highlights.

This was me on Wednesday telling my new ghost story at the Whitstable Oyster festival ...

...and this was the GB cycling team leading the peloton yesterday on Box Hill (blurriness due to me taking the picture on my phone while cheering wildly).















Neither quite went as planned. I think my story went down well - it felt good as I read it - but it proved incredibly difficult to engage listeners who were just passing by. I'd spent hours on the story itself, and almost as many making posters and leaflets to hand out to attract an audience. But on the day, posters and leaflets weren't what was needed - I did have delightful listeners, but it was Facebook and friendship which brought them along (and the sterling work of the ReAuthoring team who brought me to Whitstable and looked after me there).

The one exception was a man who came in to the pub for a drink and (foolishly?) sat at the table next to mine - so I simply went up and asked if he'd like me to tell a story. Not at all what I'd planned, but it worked - he looked really thrilled at the end, and we had a great conversation about why stories and poems mattered to him.

Leap forward to yesterday. The GB cycling team had a plan - they'd deliver Mark Cavendish to the finish and he'd sprint over the line, just as he did in the Tour. Only it didn't work out - a load of other cyclists took the initiative and vanished into the distance, leaving the perfectly planned GB team out of the action.

We cheered anyway, and hoped till the last minute that they'd pull it off - but in the end, it was the guts and risk-taking of Vinokourov that won out and took the gold medal.

I'm off to LV21 in a few weeks to tell another story, and I'm determined this time not to plan it all to the last detail - I'll leave some ends untied, maybe, see what happens on the day. This time I'll be confident that my story will thrive no matter what the audience does. What's the worst that can happen, after all?