martedì 22 luglio 2014

It's all about trust


Having spent 10 years trying to guess the needs of the publishing market, and fulfill its expectations rather than my own, I'm feeling over-inspired for perhaps the first time in my working life. Writing a creative dissertation requires you to be... well, creative! Not creative in that I'm-trying-to-fool-the-marketing-office way, but creative like a person (an artist?) who doesn’t need to sell her work to survive. Wooooo! How liberating (and ephemeral).

I decided to make the adaptation of my banned novel more interesting than a plain novella, because I didn’t like the idea of summarising the story just to fit it into the word-count. I wanted a new life for Aleksandra and the other characters, a life with fewer boundaries. I remembered what Noga, the marker on my Creative Writing course, said about my short story: you didn’t trust the reader enough. Trust is a word I’ve come across so many times during these two academic years at Roehampton. Trust the reader. Trust the author. It's so true. Trust is the secret.
Perhaps I didn’t trust my readers enough because I’m an Italian children’s writer. I don’t know about other countries, but in Italy the age group is often artificially raised. A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness? In the UK it is marketed as +11, in Italy it’s a YA. The curious incident of the dog in the nightime? In the UK it’s a classic of children’s literature, in Italy (drum roll) it’s in the adult list. So maybe we get  accustomed to dumbing down stories for children. But this time, I decided, I will trust my readers. Who in this case are also my markers.

So I’m composing a fake dossier of both real and fictional material: pictures, videos, fake police investigative interviews, real articles, fake articles, letters, emails, a song in mp3, and much more. In this way the writer (me) becomes one of the characters, the one who’s collecting evidence for the fictional story (Aleksandra’s) using also non-fictional elements. Sound complicated? It’s not! It’s just exciting, and the characters feel much more alive. Because I blurred the boundaries between real and not real. Could this be defined as literary “docufiction”?

Today I also tried to jot down some poems. As if I were Aleksandra, after the trial, sharing my thoughts with Manuela the writer. Manuela had contacted Aleksandra suggesting she write something herself and here it is, a sixteen-year-old girl’s poems:
1
I am the ghost you never see,
I walk, I eat, I breathe,
one in a million girls like me.
  
 2
When the judge stared at me
What did she see?
A whore,
a moth, a wasted being?
I stared back at her, though.
What did I see?
An adult who’s never been naked
In front of a crowd
Who’s never been branded
Like a fucking cow.

 3
The first kiss was on my boob.
The second, on my butt.
The third, on my vag.
This is the fairy tale of sleeping beauties
Who’ll never wake up.




Nessun commento:

Posta un commento