STORY DOLLS

Today is the first handover between the artists and writers involved in the Tunbridge Wells Art Gallery project, to be exhibited at the start of the next year.

I have written already about the ideas that didn't make it to the final round, (here) so here's the one that did.

Please welcome for her first outing anywhere apart from my radiator at home one of my little STORY DOLLS...



The idea is that each body part represents a different part of the story. Either you can leave the story as it is, or you can use it to write something new from it. Or you can swop in another body part and make a completely different story. Rather like those women who used the dress patterns could make up different parts of the doll's dress and therefore create a new story for the doll every time they used the pattern.

And here's one of my stories from the doll above..

PEOPLE LIKE US

I tell the guards I didn’t do it, but they tell me that’s what people like us always say.

Except in the papers there was no ‘us’, there was only me. EVIL BUS DRIVER’S ROYAL KIDNAP ATTEMPT.

I didn’t even know who she was at the time. Thought she was just another dumpy old mad woman. We got those a lot round here. Especially after 10am when they can travel for free.

‘Help me,’ she’d begged. ‘My train is late, and I must get to my sick mother.’

Everybody knows the Queen Mother is dead, they said at the trial, but I didn’t know she was the Queen then, did I? And it was the sick mother bit that got me too. I always go that bit extra to help customers. Plus it was a question of pride. I wanted to show that buses were better than trains.

There’d been a fuss going on at the station. The Mayor and lots of camera crews were there, so I wasn’t surprised that the trains were late. I took her through the back way where my bus was waiting. Behind us, someone started blowing a trumpet. There was no way the passengers on the 5.45 were going to get in on time so I could make it to the hospital and back.

Her hat blew off as she climbed on board. Perhaps I should have twigged then, but I was trying to work out who her voice reminded me of.

‘This is exciting,’ she said. ‘Much better than judging boring hanging baskets. And of course we have private buses at Windsor but not so thrillingly dirty.’

I was about to get cross because I have high standards of cleanliness, when I saw the police lights behind and the helicopters above.

‘Oh, this always happens,’ she said then, ‘just when I’m having fun.’

The others on the prison floor tell similar stories, but no one ever believes us. Not people like us.

She visited the prison this afternoon though. I watched from the window as that new warden escorted an anonymous dumpy woman in need of help through the side door. And then I heard the sirens.

They’re already making up a new cell.

***

To be honest, I'm rather worried about my little story dolls and hope they get a good reception. Luckily I'm much more excited though to see what the others in our group have come up with. I feel very lucky to be involved in this project.

SO WHAT DO YOU DO WITH THE IDEAS THAT DON'T QUITE WORK?

(And have a sneaky look at the final piece and meet Bertha here!)

So how does the creative process work?

Of course if there was one quick answer to that, there wouldn't be any point in being artists, or writers, or scientists. We could just programme the computer and let it go. But there's no doubt it's addictive to keep trying to uncover our own creative processes.

Several times on this blog, I've written about how I sabotage myself with trying to do too many things at once. One of the exercises in Barbara Sher's book, Refuse to Choose has been useful beyond belief in helping me address this.

So to show how it works for me, I'm going to explore the process involved in one particular project, a collaboration between four writers and four artists for an upcoming exhibition at the Tunbridge Wells art gallery based on objects held in the basement there. I wrote here about how I decided to use a collection of dolls patterns, some cut out of old newspapers, as the object I was going to work with.



But what was I going to do with them?

I carried the idea of the dolls patterns in my head, the photographs on my phone, my notes in my daily journal. I thought about poems. About stories. About short plays. The best way to describe what was going on in my mind was chaos. It wasn't pretty to live with.

But I stuck with it, using what Twyla Tharp calls scratching. It is absolutely astonishing to me, every time, how if you can hold an idea in your head then you pick up more and more ideas and images that make it more substantial. It is a form of magnetism. And when you start to attract the right metals, there is that same buzz like an electric shock. Ping!

My final itch came when I visited the V&A's Quilt exhibition and read the beautiful story about a quilt still retaining its mosiac of paper templates cut out of love letters.

But what should I do with all the other ideas. The ones I've been convinced at separate times that they were RIGHT.

Cue Barbara Sher, and her journal idea.



Barbara Sher suggests that rather than just dismissing the idea, or following each new lead like a headless chicken, we can write it down in our journal. Play with it there, write exactly what we liked about the idea, the sources that drew us to it, and to dream too. Write about it as the bestselling, Turner or Booker Prize winning, world changing idea we thought it was for even jsut one minute.

So here - presented rather nervously, I must admit - are three ideas I've recorded in my journal but have dismissed for this particular project. I would dearly love to do something with them one day though, so having them outlined so clearly really helps. It's not something I've tried before reading Barbara's work, trusting on the invisible compost approach but running in danger, if I'm honest, of filling up with so many ideas I couldn't get any space to breathe. Here, at least, I get them OUT!



Above is one of a series of paper cut out dolls I was thinking about. Each dress made from a different newsmedia - financial, cooking, travel, interior, fashion - and with an apt caption.



And this comes from the idea of erasure poetry, something I've been playing with a lot recently. Instead of particular words, I was thinking about inserting different versions of the word 'doll'. Changing 'facts' so they mean something quite different.



Those first two ideas I spent a bit of time on, cutting and sticking like a demented playschooler, but just to show it doesn't have to be so complicated, here's my scribble for taking the concept of patterns being sent in an envelope - sometimes across the world - and what those patterns could mean to the receiver. Here I was thinking of stories, in the form of instructions, for making worlds, or lives, or even stories.

And what idea did I choose?

Hah, you'll just have to come to the exhibition when it opens!