In this writing workshop, you will learn how to use a notebook and paper in innovative ways to outline the shape of a character and a story.

Writer Sally Bayley and filmmaker Suzie Hanna will lead you through a series of exercises using haptic methods — methods related to touch and texture – to create simple shapes and templates. These will help you to begin to arrange relationships between character and object; character and place; character and time and character to other characters as you build a set of emotional pressure points or tensions. The paper world you create will allow you to conceal and reveal elements in a flexible moveable format, encouraging a non-linear approach to the creative process.

The workshop will be framed by a series of small performance pieces by Sally exploring words, colours, shapes, rhythms and sounds drawn from her own work. We will take some of the sonic ideas from her examples as prompts to plot temporal and spatial soundscapes for the characters and scenarios you have initiated. You will be encouraged to consider sound in relation to character, landscape and object. Suzie will lead the second part of the workshop focusing on the creation of your own graphic representations on paper as you consider how sound can generate a story structure.