Original Vinyl Recording

Writing prompts are amazing things. I know that a simple phrase or group of words always has the potential to spawn a much longer and more imaginative piece of work, but just how little you need to create something never ceases to astound me. I took part in a creative writing exercise yesterday along with a group of other people, and we were encouraged to come up with a range of short stories using only a few photographs and objects. They seemed simple and self-explanatory at first, but then we started digging. One of the photos was of a city being bombed by fighter jets. Fire and thick black smoke dominated the image, and anybody’s natural response to this would have been to see it from a civilian’s perspective – all of the horror and devastation that comes with losing your home and livelihood. However, we were presented with something different, namely the question of how the pilot dropping the bombs may be feeling as he presses the big red button. It only took the addition of a second point of view, and a small alteration to the original viewpoint, to make the possibilities seem endless – but it would be the objects that intrigued me the most.

Each person in the group was asked to take a card at random that had an equally random object written on it. One person was left with a highwayman’s mask, another with a fortune teller’s crystal ball. I, meanwhile, took one that read “an original vinyl ABBA recording”. I felt confident about my ability to write something from this, being a record collector myself, and I quickly discovered that even from these five words, I already had a fully-formed character in my mind who would feature in my short story – to consist of no more than four or five lines. I pictured a lonely man, single, tired and perhaps middle-aged, who struggled to find solace in anything except buying music. The reader needed to feel sympathy for him, and pleased that he had – at long last – found the rare record he so dearly wanted, since it would be key to his happiness. But then they needed to stifle a guilty giggle at the dark humour to follow when he proudly placed it amongst all his other LPs, only for them to topple over and crush his prized new addition along with all his hopes and dreams. This all had to happen, as aforementioned, in the space of only a few lines – and, to my delight, they seemed to flow in exactly the way I had hoped.

I wasn’t brave enough to read what I had written out once everyone had finished their stories, but I was quietly rather proud of what I’d come up with in two minutes. I was also greatly impressed by the fact that a clear character and scenario had both been incorporated – along with a late twist of humour – into a text shorter than this paragraph. Mind blown. And it was all thanks to that ABBA record. Who would really dare say that the English language is boring? To use an unusual analogy, it’s like chicken – Dad says you can do anything with it…

Mason

Brown And Sticky

I wrote my first feature film script in the space of 14 months, between March 2013 and May 2014. It was titled Excludable (although that was always meant to be a working title, since it’s clearly not a real word), and it might not have been a masterpiece but I was very proud of it. I hadn’t started this blog at that point, so it was in many ways the most personal thing I’d ever written. Will seemed to like it – all 73 pages of it – and I was committed to making the idea work after his ever-reliable feedback. I therefore started working on a second draft, and had even written a pitch that I sent to a production company for a radio series based on the concept. That old devil called writer’s block would soon put the brakes on proceedings, however, and a change of laptop just over a year ago accidentally caused me to lose the entire script. I still have the pitch, which I am confident will come in very handy one day – but the script is gone forever, inaccessible on my new computer, and that means that I am now eagerly pondering its replacement.

I do, however, have one other complete script I can showcase, even if it is just a single page in length. It was written quickly in September 2015, when I was required to shoot a short advertisement for a product of my choice as part of the college course I was on after my A-Levels. Having held a lifelong affinity for the brown and sticky stuff, I chose Marmite, but I was struggling to figure out how to tackle it in an original or memorable way. I thought about it long and hard for at least a week, seemingly getting nowhere despite watching a whole host of past adverts in search of inspiration. It was my tutor who eventually suggested that I use the famous “love or hate” debate surrounding the spread to portray a group of Marmite lovers at a support group gathering, discussing their shared issue as though it was something sordid or taboo. This was something of a eureka moment, and I agreed with it immediately, recalling an advert I’d seen in which a man was implied to be pleasuring himself to footage of Marmite on his TV screen. I thought that if I approached it carefully, the idea could give me just the memorable quality I’d been looking for in my advert.

I got writing soon after the discussion with the tutor. It was only one page, as I’ve said, but a lot of thought still had to go into it, as it needed to pack a punch and sell the product to the audience in the space of a minute. I can’t say I was entirely happy with the finished piece of work – for me, dialogue is an area that will always need improvement, and admittedly, the view of a support group that I presented was probably nowhere near as realistic as it could have been. Far from being supportive, gentle or encouraging, the leader of the session was a cold and ruthless man who had little time for anyone else’s stories and was determined to berate them and their relatives for their introduction to Marmite. I’m pretty sure that doesn’t quite happen in real addict gatherings. I’m also in doubt as to whether they end with leaders and visitors alike licking Marmite jars in an ecstatic frenzy, but if nothing else the script may still turn out to be a useful basis for another idea one day. I left my course the day before I was due to film it. I don’t know how happy I would have been with the end advert, but I might feel better if it resurfaces in another form one day, knowing that another complete piece of my work is out there for the world to see representing my portfolio.

Mason

Unwritten

Will wrote about his dyspraxia recently because it was our shared intention that all four members of this project – Emily, Tamara, Will and myself – would write about our respective long-term conditions. In my case, that obviously meant banging on about cerebral palsy again, which I suspected you’d heard enough about for the time being, so if I was going to do this I’d have to think of another way of talking about it. And that seemed impossible. A lot has been covered, so what could I tell you that you probably haven’t read already?

Then I had a thought – namely that there’s always more to write about any given topic than you think there is. Take my life, for example. As I may have said before, I resisted starting a blog for years, and all because I doubted that I’d have more than ten posts’ worth of material. 108 posts (including this one) later, and I’d like to think that Third Time Enabled is still going strong. That must mean that either my life isn’t as dull as I thought it was, or I’ve just been consistently repeating myself for the last two years. I would imagine it’s probably the latter, on second thoughts! Seriously though – at the moment it might seem like I’ve exhausted every possibility when it comes to talking about any topic, but maybe it’ll transpire that there’s a new perspective on my disability that I haven’t found yet. Part of the beauty of life is that some of its best stories are yet to be written, and when I find them I’m glad I have the perfect space to bring them to life.

Mason

Mudflap Manifesto

The closest I’ve ever come to living life on the edge was probably when I saved 90% of my make-or-break A-Level coursework on a small, wonky USB stick without a lid, which I believe got lost because Dad Hoovered it up one day. The lack of a tiny plastic cap should have made the stick susceptible to dust, Dorito crumbs and other miscellaneous kinds of damage, but it miraculously made it through the entire two years of sixth form unscathed – and I still have it today. It’s been lying on a side table in my living room for a while now, and sat there largely untouched until I decided to plug it back into my laptop out of curiosity the other day.

I began to rummage through what it held, and alongside the aforementioned College materials lay some projects I probably started, but never finished, in the common room whilst I was supposed to be doing something else for a lesson. That seems to be the way in which all the best memories came about – when the teacher had left the room and we swiftly concluded that we’d “do this work later”. If I wasn’t mucking about with Will and co, however, I’d be writing something of my own. According to a file saved on my stick, I sat down one day in February 2014 to begin work on an autobiographical book that I gave the first alliterative title to pop into my head – Mudflap Manifesto, as the title of this post would suggest. It was something that would explore my oft-referenced love of motorsport and its significance in my life, over chapters that would collectively be divided into named sections. It would appear that I only got 11 pages in before becoming distracted and abandoning the project, but when I re-read what I’d written the other day, I was fairly satisfied and convinced that I might have something worth finishing at some point. And that’s pretty rare, believe me – because when it comes to writing, I often think that I am my own harshest critic.

The first section of the book was simply entitled “Guys, I’ve got a great idea”, and it opened by recounting a collision my wheelchair once had with a bench in the College quad on a rainy day. I must have felt that this was a good starting point for the book because it led to a visit to the folks in the Motor Vehicle Department, who took out their tools to bash my footplate back into shape whilst various decommissioned cars were being tinkered with nearby. As I could see them up close, I began to reflect on my lifelong passion for them, and particularly for when they are being driven at serious speed. I asked myself questions about where its roots lay, and what my feelings and standout memories are in relation to it, and I ultimately decided that the best way to express the answers would be in prose on a page. So I began with this anecdote, before proceeding to talk about how my wheelchair has always been seen as a racier vehicle than it actually is, putting forward my pitch for a less elitist form of motorsport that anyone with a working wheelchair can enter as I then paced about memory lane and my countless racing memories. Predictably, I seemed to have done this eagerly and fondly – of course, I wouldn’t ever say that the introduction was perfect, but I’ve probably written worse!

One thing that’s even rarer than a passable piece of writing from me is me giving any kind of written attention to the countryside, which many people know has never really appealed to me. Within the context of the book, I talked about our local Somerset Stages Rally and how – from our first visit in 2004 to the present day – it has been the only thing to significantly pique my interest in our local green surroundings. Whether we locate ourselves on a crest, a hairpin bend or any other sort of corner, it’s always a spectacle and one we’re very lucky to play host to in our secluded part of the world. When it leaves town, however, the forest tracks and trees lose their sparkle completely until the following year, and so does the rest of the extensive Exmoor tundra. The hills give me nothing apart from an occasionally acceptable location in which to eat a McDonald’s as the sun goes down, or a reason to prolong a leisurely evening drive with Mum, Dad or Louis. Or do they? Upon discovering the brief beginnings of Mudflap Manifesto, which have not been added to, edited or saved since April three years ago, I’ve realised that the great outdoors appear to have given me something worthwhile to build on, and something that allows me to bring back more awesome memories and connections to the sport I love. And I owe it all, in turn, to a single moment of College quad recklessness, followed by one of many fruitful common room laziness moments. Time well spent, don’t you think?

Mason