Writing
April 26th 2008 12:52
Hi. I know I should post more often, and I hope those that come here find something of interest.
At the moment I have a job. I am writing the one hundred year history of Shepparton High School. I put in a tender for the job. At the interview I said that I would write the human history of the school. First draft by July this year.
A word of warning, if you should ever consider such a job, be sure it’s what you really want to do.
Consider the parameters of this job.
100 years of history starting in 1909.
Maximum of 250 pages.
Basically two and a bit pages per year. Several thousand people attended the school during the last hundred years. Almost everyone from the period from 1909 to 1940 has “passed away” as they say, or, tend to be a bit vague, confused, senile.
250 pages is not enough. What to include, leave out? I really have no idea. There is just so much to tell, so many people with stories, shit, the sports alone would take up a couple thousand pages.
Then there is the question of history itself. History is what really happened, what the people got up to. Should one only write what the powers that be want to hear, or, do you write the truth?
Little things that come out of interviews, like the story of the young female student that was making a start in free enterprise by introducing the male students to sex education on a pay per lesson approach in the packing boxes of the fruit cannery which backed onto the sports field. And this was the forties too.
Would the school council really want the truth in this case? Perhaps not.
The other side is gathering the information, I mean, in this case there is a guy who resembles Sanity Clause walking around the town, stopping people in the street and asking if they attended the high school. (And everybody knows there is no such thing as a sanity clause, thank you Chico Marx)
John Cleese may be the minister for funny walks, but, I’d have to be the minister for funny looks.
The other day I went to a reunion in Melbourne and interviewed some fifteen sweet old ladies who attended the school in the fifties. When I got back to Bendigo the car had a flat battery and when I finally got home I found that the microphone had suffered premature death and there was nothing on any of the recordings.
So, you want to be a writer?
At the moment I have a job. I am writing the one hundred year history of Shepparton High School. I put in a tender for the job. At the interview I said that I would write the human history of the school. First draft by July this year.
A word of warning, if you should ever consider such a job, be sure it’s what you really want to do.
Consider the parameters of this job.
100 years of history starting in 1909.
Maximum of 250 pages.
Basically two and a bit pages per year. Several thousand people attended the school during the last hundred years. Almost everyone from the period from 1909 to 1940 has “passed away” as they say, or, tend to be a bit vague, confused, senile.
250 pages is not enough. What to include, leave out? I really have no idea. There is just so much to tell, so many people with stories, shit, the sports alone would take up a couple thousand pages.
Then there is the question of history itself. History is what really happened, what the people got up to. Should one only write what the powers that be want to hear, or, do you write the truth?
Little things that come out of interviews, like the story of the young female student that was making a start in free enterprise by introducing the male students to sex education on a pay per lesson approach in the packing boxes of the fruit cannery which backed onto the sports field. And this was the forties too.
Would the school council really want the truth in this case? Perhaps not.
The other side is gathering the information, I mean, in this case there is a guy who resembles Sanity Clause walking around the town, stopping people in the street and asking if they attended the high school. (And everybody knows there is no such thing as a sanity clause, thank you Chico Marx)
John Cleese may be the minister for funny walks, but, I’d have to be the minister for funny looks.
The other day I went to a reunion in Melbourne and interviewed some fifteen sweet old ladies who attended the school in the fifties. When I got back to Bendigo the car had a flat battery and when I finally got home I found that the microphone had suffered premature death and there was nothing on any of the recordings.
So, you want to be a writer?
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