As mentioned in the previous post, I’ve been fortunate enough to have another of my short stories selected as a winner by the Liars’ League . Titled Elevator Pitch, it featured in the May event, themed Beginnings and Ends.
Elevator Pitch was the final story to be performed on the night. This will have been due in no small part to the actor, Sarah Feathers’s, tremendously energetic and humorous performance, which I’m sure will have sent the audience homewards with a real buzz.
The video is now available on the Liars’ League website along with the manuscript of the story. I’ve embedded a link to Sarah’s reading below. It lasts just under fifteen minutes. (A podcast is also now available of the whole night’s readings.)
As in March, I went to the rehearsals the weekend before the show, met Sarah and sat in on the read-through. The story involves three characters in a confined space and Sarah did a brilliant job of bringing each character to life, using body language, gestures and facial expressions to complement the dialogue.
It’s an incredible privilege to watch a professional lift your words off the page and voice plausible characters that hold an audience’s attention. It feels like alchemy – and, as mentioned in the post after March’s Liars’ League, it’s an invaluable insight into how writing is interpreted by a reader.
It’s fascinating to discover details that an actor has added into the story on their own initiative before the rehearsal – in this story Sarah had some great views on how to deliver the male character’s voice.
Some of the Liars’ League stories tend to focus on narratorial exposition or one character’s internal voice and this can make them extremely compelling (Birth Plan by Uschi Gatward in the latest event was a good example). However, my story is quite dialogue heavy, with three very different characters and this can be quite challenging for an actor performing a reading – how many different voices (accents, variations of delivery) can be juggled simultaneously in such a short time?
As did Alex Woodhall with his reading of my previous story, Sarah met the challenge brilliantly — each character has an unmistakable and convincing identity. This shouldn’t be surprising as Sarah is one of Liars’ League’s most regular actors and she’s also narrated many popular audiobooks, including the recent, bestselling Philippa Gregory novel, The White Princess.
Katy and Liam, who run the Liars’ League are also very insightful editors and directors: with their help the story also evolved considerably during the rehearsal – and afterwards. Its many contemporary references – mainly movie actors’ names – were batted around with alternative suggestions offered, even by email on the day of the performance itself.
We found it most difficult to settle on the heroine in Isabel’s pitch: a kick-ass, British submarine commander – you’ll need to watch or read the story before this makes much sense)
After going through countless others, we settled on Kate Winslet. There was something a little surreal — and metafictional — about how we ended up casting an imaginary lead role for a piece of fiction within a piece of fiction that itself was concerned with casting movie stars. Weird – but it didn’t raise any Sunset Boulevard mogul ambitions in me (although I wouldn’t mind living out in Santa Barbara again – the place where I was trained in screenwriting by a genuine Hollywood old-timer).
The story appeared to go down well with the audience – Sarah promptedlots of laughs (in the right places) from the audience, which included my friend Fay again plus ex-City University coursemates, Guy and Sue and Alison Burns, who ran the City University Certificate in Novel Writing (now the Novel Studio) at the time Sue, Guy and myself took the course.
The night went far too quickly and it was fantastic to see everyone – and to meet Jim Cogan – whose excellent and poignant story The Memory Man preceded Elevator Pitch. In fact, all the stories were entertaining and captivating and would repay anyone’s time watching, listening or reading them on the website or podcast.
I feel very lucky to have had two stories chosen recently (the selection is done anonymously, by the way) and the quality of the writing on the evening shows how difficult is the Liars task every month — picking from what obviously seems to be a sea of excellent submissions. It’s no wonder the event was recently voted one of the UK’s Top Ten Storytelling Nights by The Guardian.