fourthirtythree blog

A few days ago we sent out a message to our writers.  This is it, more or less.  We’re really excited about the year ahead.  I mean really, really excited.

We’ve got lots of plans for 2011.  The stories will continue, of course.  One a week, and already in ‘the can’ we have loads of great stuff. We also will start with live events, starting at home base here in London – the first one hopefully in a couple of months in conjunction with the excellent Book Stops Here/aka To Hell With the Lighthouse people.

We’re also working on a partnership with a pretty awesome new electronic publisher which will give you the opportunity to get your stories on the iPhone and other platforms, and get paid for it.  Still ironing out the details on this one, but it should be pretty cool.

You may have heard of the Sony Radio Academy Awards.  They have a special electronic/podcast category, and we’ll be entering.

Somewhat later we hope to come out with a recording, a sort of 4’33” greatest hits album.  This crazy idea could go in any number of directions.

So all humming along, expect some more news soonish, and in the meantime you probably want to shoot us a like and/or a follow … bring your friends …

http://www.facebook.com/pages/433-the-online-audio-magazine/148024898552552

http://twitter.com/#!/433mag

All the best!

We don’t really do full dramatic productions here at 4’33” but as you can probably tell, we have sympathies in that direction.  If you’re writing a radio play (especially in the UK), you’re probably aiming to get it on BBC Radio 4, which is, depending on who you listen to, the biggest commissioner of radio drama in the world.

You’re also probably familiar with slots like the Afternoon Play and the 15-minute Woman’s Hour drama, and if you’re like most listeners some of the radio drama on R4 (as the semi-official BBC abbreviation has it) will enthrall you, some of it will leave you feeling a bit meh, some of it will have you shouting at the radio.  It’s a pretty wide-ranging beast.

Maybe you’ve seen some general advice online but how can you possibly figure out what the commissioners and editors want right now?  Fortunately there’s a little secret that we can share.

Every six months, Radio 4 puts out a detailed document soliciting programme ideas of all sorts for the next commissioning ’round’.  It goes to internal departments and independent production companies — but it’s not like it’s a national secret or anything.  The Spring 2010 guide can be found here.  (We’ve seen the Autumn 2010 doc but for some reason can’t find it on the public internet — rest assured it’s not too much different.)

The drama bit starts on page 20, and in it you’ll find advice such as:

• We are not looking for old fashioned old school radio drama – we want the Radio 4 equivalents of Edge of Darkness, Inglorious Basterds (although we are quite picky about spellin’)…

and:

• Beware the rustle of crinolines! We will commission plays set in the past, but not many, and an overwhelming number of offers we have been receiving are rooted in the past.

You can also see what’s been commissioned but not broadcast yet.  And if you’re interested in other bits of radio, take a look at the excellent Radio Independents Group site.

One more word of advice (from someone who’s never had a play produced by the BBC, so take this as you wish).  While Radio 4 commissions a lot of drama, they have quite a defined audience, and many slots will be taken up by established and famous authors.  It’s always worth exploring other outlets if you’re writing stuff that’s not really that R4ish or R3ish.  For instance, Resonance FM has in the past been receptive to avant-garde drama — such as post-apocalyptic hipster fairy tales.

There you have it … good luck!

We’ve had two coincidental brushes with News International lately.

First and best, we were in The Times. On 23 October.  Only just found out yesterday.  As they might back in the homeland:  How’s that there paywall working out for ya?

Anyway we were little sidebar in the Review section, next to an article mostly about The Book Stops Here/aka To Hell With the Lighthouse written by Ben Machell.

As you know we are ‘A new audio magazine that broadcasts and podcasts edgy engaging stories about modern life’.  Thanks for the plug.

Our second encounter came in the form of a double-glazing window salesman.  We’ve decided to get serious about doing up 4’33” Towers.  The salesman gives his pitch, little of which I remember because frankly, windows are really fucking boring.

My ears prick up when he mentions he’s only been in the job for a few months.  He used to work in newspapers.

‘For 20 years, I was a photographer for The Sun.’

There’s some sort of cultural rumbling or mini-meme out there at the moment that goes something like this:  because of the internet/creative writing courses/self-publishing, there are too many writers in the world, and not enough readers.

This irks me. Forget for a moment the narrowing interests and me-too culture of the big fiction publishers.  Ignore the fact that pretty much every writer is also a voracious reader.  And even set aside recent evidence from the huge popular book prize after which the judges declared themselves “not spoiled for choice.”

No, think of it like this.  Have you ever gone into any decent bookstore and looked around, I mean taken a real good look, and determined after some thought:  Yes!  This contains books on every topic and of every style that I could ever possibly consider reading, for now and all time!

Okay then.  Keep writing.

A couple of years back I met up with an old high school friend in New York. Probably hadn’t seen her since I high-tailed it out of our midwest suburb age 18. What sticks in my mind from that convo is that she mentioned that she had an ex who had a pretty good job, and that when they were going out they used to fly over to London for the weekend.

Now I know that pessimism is in vogue today, but, well, don’t you get the feeling that plunking down a couple of grand and jetting off to a different continent a couple of days is the fairy-tale kind of stuff that we’re all going to miss pretty soon? The kind of thing that we’ll look back on and say wow, you mean we really did that? We drank champagne on Tuesday nights? We went out for dinner sometimes two, three times a week?

Flash forward to last weekend, dinner with another friend, and a few drinks. Nobody at the table has anything to complain about. ‘I was saying to S. just the other day,’ he said, ‘that this is about as wealthy as we’ll ever be.’

(okay so let’s see some stories about the gilded age and the long route down)

You have to chuckle at all this brow furrowing about hipsters even if part of you is quietly dying inside.  The hipster as we know her/him is an incredibly small demographic residing in very select slices of a handful of major cities worldwide.  The meaninglessness of the whole thing is just underscored by the fact you immediately lose hipster status if you move a few miles in the wrong direction, from Greenpoint to Astoria, or Hackney to Kilburn.
And yet.  What if we broadened our categories for just a second and thought of the hipster in general terms like so: youngish or young-thinking, urban, and most important, members of that creative class that, as Richard Florida likes to remind us, provides pretty much the only hope for a new economy rising from the ashes of the old?  Suddenly this includes most of us and most of our friends and, well, maybe hipsters become interesting again.

ps yes go on, send us funny stories about the inner lives of hipsters.

The past may be a different country but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t visit from time to time. Tonight I went to the launch of the UEA Creative Writing Anthology, including readings from the current MA students at the shiny Shoreditchy UEA London.

I’m sure most Brits will be familiar with University of East Anglia, but for those elsewhere, UEA’s creative writing programme is the Big One, the Iowa, the ur-writing course. A few years back – okay, a few more than that – I did a year on the undergraduate part.

Alumni, and this includes me here, always tend to look down on new charges. Everyone likes to score up-and-comers. But the dozen or so UEA writers broke through my protective armour. This year’s offerings were refreshingly distinctive. Settings ranged from pre-war Ukraine to 1880s Papua New Guinea, from contemporary Peru to contemporary London. There was none of that guarded similarity of style that you get on a lot of writing courses, probably because these are MA students who already have a measure of writerly confidence before they even set foot on campus.

Some of those writers will surely get published; most won’t. The odds of success – success being measured merely by being able to make a living by writing – are pretty slim, even though the odds of even landing a place on the UEA course are already lottery-like. It’s questionable how much they’ll have picked up at that bleak and beautiful campus outside Norwich. I can’t say I learned much in the classroom but that’s not really the point of creative writing programmes, is it? You get endless pontification about whether writing can or cannot be taught, but that’s not really the point either. In fact, I don’t think I really got any point at all until I read to the end of a New Yorker article on the same subject, a decade after I’d finished my formal writing education:

I don’t think the workshops taught me too much about craft, but they did teach me about the importance of making things, not just reading things. You care about things that you make, and that makes it easier to care about things that other people make.

Yeah. That’s about it exactly.

We wrote this a couple weeks ago for Electric Literature, it wasn’t quite right for their blog but we thought it was worth sharing anyway…

If there’s been one trend of the last few years that we can all pretty much agree is good, it has to be the explosion in live readings and performances.  What better way to quash all that dull talk about the death of the novel and the irrelevance of literature than with sociable nights out in cool urban locations.  Sometimes people even come to these things when they aren’t friends with the authors.  Sometimes they even pay money to attend!

It’s a relatively well established meme so now you have to allow me one small quibble, to wit: many of these lit nights are just not very good.

Okay, okay, hold on just a second.  Certainly a lot of them are. Literary Death Match is clever and spreading like pandemic flu.  Here in our London backyard, the heavy-hitting and music-friendly Bookslam stands out, and we’re also partial to Pen Pusher‘s raucous launch parties.

And yet.  Too often, we’ve been at readings that are too long.  Ones where the wrong author monopolizes the stage.  Ones where the hosts talk too much. Mumbling and too-quietness is rife, as are faux-actorly pretensions which suck the life out of stories.

We know what’s going on.  As writers and readers, we’re worried that if we criticise the mediocre we’ll only be left with the superficially cool and the solidly traditional, that the only things that will draw crowds will be the whiz-bang-up-to-the minute and the eminently established old-school.

There may have once been an element of truth to that, but now it’s just faintly ridiculous – imagine, for instance, if music fans never slagged off gigs for fear of ending up with a choice between Lady Gaga and Mozart.

To get the ball rolling we’ll name a few names and note that there seems to be a positive correlation between the  money/fame/old-school publishing success and the suckiness of any particular lit night.  So far this year two events stand out in our minds.

One was the London launch of Granta‘s Work issue.  The moderator declared that things would be kept informal, easygoing and with plenty of discussion, which is code for ‘I don’t really have a clue what’s going on and will make it up as I go along.’  The chat randomly from topic to topic, punctuated by questions from shouty old men in the audience.  We couldn’t get out of there soon enough.

At least in that case the actual writers were pleasant, cordial, and entirely blameless, which was not the case when we saw Brett Easton Ellis interviewed by an eminent British cultural critic at the Latitude festival in July. B2E spent the first ten minutes or so complaining about his hangover and detailing how it came into being; then the next five detailing various questions he hated and would refuse to answer. The journalist asking the questions was equal parts flustered, hapless and awestruck.  By some accounts the interview took a turn for the better, but by that time we had wandered off to drink beer and watch bands, which is what people tend to do when writers are boring at music festivals.

So let this be a lesson.  Plan a bit.  Think of the audience.  Remember that keeping it punchy is not necessarily dumbing down.  Mix things up.  Give us a bit of variety.  Writers, slow down.  Don’t worry about taking acting lessons, just learn how to hold a mic and how to read aloud. And hosts, we didn’t come to hear you, so please be quick about it.

Let’s all keep trying and when we’re watching let’s be honest and say what works and what doesn’t instead of clutching our sugary glasses of wine and nodding along to rote platitudes.  Okay?  Have fun.  And have a good night.

Thanks for bearing with us, we had to get that off our chests.

Hope you’re enjoying the new story by Tom Dearden on the home page.
From here on in it’ll work like this. We’ll post a story about every week or so. There will be some bonus tracks but also some weeks when we’ll be in a different country or something, so it should work out to about 50 stories a year.
I want to use the blog for different stuff, so Twitter will be the primary news outlet, the CNN Headline (or BBC News Channel) to the blog’s NPR (Radio 4?).
Whatever. Listen to Tom’s story. Next week we have Tania Hershman. Awesome.

Well only a few days into it and we’ve had a great response from our lovely writers, their excellent friends, the twitterverse, and a hacker who took over our blog this afternoon. Hurrah!
We have a stack of submissions to get through but please keep them coming, we’re enjoying reading even as we gulp when looking at the inbox.