Creative Writer Seeks Illustrator

Must be patient, imaginative and good with their hands.
GSOH and non-smoker essential.


“As in marriage, the rules of collaboration are communication and surrender. Afterall, it's all a learning experience.”
Syd Field - Screenplay: The Foundations of Screenwriting

Title Page by Elaine Brambil

Collaboration One: Constructing Tina Freeth

As part of the National Academy of Writing Professional Development module we are required to work with others in creating a piece of work. I had managed to make contact with a Birmingham City University lecturer and artist Chiu Kwong Man in the hope that I might be able to meet some of his illustration students to work on a collaboration. He put me in touch with his third year student Elaine Brambil, whose illustrations weren’t what I imagined illustrations to be…that is drawings. Elaine’s work is subtle collage and nostalgically layered images, stuck, cut and pasted together to create a visual narrative. Elaine wanted to collaborate with a writer to experiment with a narrative that was already in place. Her previous work assembled from bits of discarded pieces (postcards, old tickets, old photographs) and trinkets sold cheaply in the Rag Market or passed down to her from her parents or grandparents. I have to admit this kind of collaboration was not what I had expected to do, but the more I thought about it the more I came around to the idea.

Elaine discussed her initial ideas about a fictional person dying and leaving behind objects which form the basis for a narrative. On hearing her ideas I began to formulate my own in alignment with hers. My mother had died a few years back and I inherited the family photographs and old documents. I offered these up to Elaine for her use and agreed that I could write some pieces of fragmented memoir. Unbeknownst to Elaine I had started my memoir last year, but had reached a blockage when I had to begin writing about my distant past and the 70s. I knew this project would get me thinking about memories. Elaine was very much interested in secrets and the emotional and quirky parts of families we rarely see beyond the smiling family portraits, so I wrote fragmented accounts of my family and of my childhood growing up in a council house in Birmingham.
The result of our collaboration is a dummy book made by Elaine featuring my words and her illustrations.

This is the prologue:
I used to have recurring dreams of Mom dying. Some nights I’d wake up sobbing with snot and sorrow drenching my pyjamas. The terror of not having her in my life was larger than my phobia of snakes and my fear of the dark. She was just like the light on the stairwell - always switched on helping me to navigate the ups and downs of life. I was twenty-six when my light went out. Mom died on the 6th August 2003 whilst I held her hand. As a child I used to sneak into her bedroom asking for pain relief from cramped calf muscles. ‘Put your foot on a cold floor,’ she would whisper, as she rubbed my hardened leg with her warm hands easing my pain away. It always worked, like some kind of instant magic. The one person who used to take my pain away, was gone. The woman whose apron strings I was tied to, had left me as others had left me before. She was the person I loved most in the world and suddenly I felt very much alone.

Collaborating with Elaine has been great for me as it enabled me to look at my past creatively, we went through my old photos together and she picked out the ones she felt were visually interesting. I began writing whatever came into my head about my past, using the photographs as memory joggers. If I was stuck with knowing what I should edit and cut I would look at her illustrations and vice verse, she would looked to my writing for inspiration on visual content and composition.

Collaboration Two: The Lonely Lemon

After working with Elaine for a few weeks, Chiu then asked me if I wanted to collaborate with him, a kind of see-saw experiment where we both draw and write. I have to say that I was unconfident about my drawing abilities and also Chiu’s style is rather dark compared to my own happy-go-lucky conversational writing style. We began with a sentence:
There was a lemon boy, how he came to be nobody nose (yes, a homonym!).

This collaboration began quite rocky with my social realism drawings not working alongside the art I know Chiu produces. I didn’t see how it would work. After a few attempts to create a working path that we would both be happy with, we decided on sticking to what we did best, him drawing and me writing. Chiu produced eight illustrations featuring a lemon boy and a host of other strange characters and left me to get on with writing a first draft response to the creatures that had broken free from his imagination.

I wanted the story to mean something and so it is about the human condition, I also wanted to get as many lemon references in there and play with language and the meaning of various words. The whole first draft can be read on Chiu’s website http://www.myeyeisonfire.net/ (The Lonely Lemon) and I’m currently in the process of rewriting it as a children’s story inspired by his family’s collaborative follow-up to my initial draft.

From collaborating with other people and visual artists in particular I’ve realised how creative we can encourage each other to be. Collaboration, like Syd Field said is like a marriage, a relationship where both parties should get what they desire but with the overall outcome foremost in your mind. From these two projects I’ve decided to write some short stories using my friend’s photographs of Hong Kong as starting points and visual stimuli for creating a narrative. I’ve also recently been to Paris and bought some postcards written during the early 1900s. Anything can be a made into a story – all you need is that creative spark ignited, whether by another person or an object or memorabilia.