Martyn on himself…
I was born in Newcastle upon Tyne. After leaving school I bummed around for a while doing the kind of jobs you’re supposed to do to make for an interesting CV: selling leather coats on the quayside market, assistant bar manager in pub, stand up comedy, stagehand and teaching improvisational drama to teenage ex-offenders. Following this job I went to drama school in Birmingham where, three years later, I emerged as a professional actor.
Theatre was always my primary passion rather than TV or film so I sent six months in Hull with a community theatre performing an oral history play about Scunthorpe steel works then another year on the road playing the villain in Catherine Cookson’s The Fifteen Streets. After that I went where the work was. Oldham, Colchester, Hornchurch, Westcliff on Sea, Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre, fringe theatres in Chelsea . . . anywhere that would employ me and give me a good part.
TV work started to come in too. I appeared in all the usual stuff: Spender, Inspector Morse, Badger, The Bill and probably some other ones I’ve forgotten about that keep UKTV Gold going. Also some low budget indie films and loads of commercials. I’ve advertised Bass beer, Marks and Spencer, The News of the World, Woodpecker cider, Kellogs Rice Krispie Squares, BT and loads of others that I’ve never seen. Probably the best TV job I had was in the New Adventures of Robin Hood for Warner Brothers TV in America. Wigs, leathers, overseas filming and possibly the only time the words “guest starring Martyn Waites” will ever appear on a TV programme.
All the while I was doing this I was telling people I was going to write a novel. I never actually did anything about it, but the thought was there. I had written a couple of awful plays that will never see the light of day but no prose. So I wrote a short story. Then another one. And they started getting longer and more involved. I figured I was ready to write a novel.
What to write about and how to write it was easy. The only thing that fired me up at the time was American crime fiction. This was the early Nineties, where James Ellroy, James Lee Burke, Andrew Vachss, Eugene Izzi, James Crumley, Walter Mosley and the like were all at, or getting to, their peaks. These writers (and others like them) had a vitality and involvement that was lacking in British crime fiction or indeed any fiction over here, the notable exception being Derek Raymond. I wanted to take some of what the Americans had and set it in a recognisably contemporary British city. The obvious place was Newcastle.
The result was Mary’s Prayer, a noirish crime novel featuring the flawed but interesting Stephen Larkin. It was published five years after I started it. I followed it a year later with Little Triggers, again featuring Larkin, then Candleland and the Larkin trilogy was complete.
Born Under Punches followed, an ambitious novel about the miners’ strike and its legacy. Then The White Room, a harrowing, fictionalised account of a child killer not unlike Mary Bell set in Sixties Newcastle. The Guardian named it as one of the books of the year.
After that I needed a change of direction so created Joe Donovan and his Albion team and wrote The Mercy Seat. It was nominated for the Crime Writers Association Ian Fleming Steel Dagger Award for thriller of the year. Didn’t win. But things were changing. I was also nominated for the CWA Dagger in the Library for best body of work and the CWA Short Story Dagger for ‘Love’, a story that had appeared in the anthology London Noir. Didn’t win either of them, though.
The next Donovan novel was Bone Machine, a serial killer thriller set in Newcastle. The third, White Riot, will be released in January 2008.
In addition to writing the novels I have also held two writing residencies in prisons. One at Huntercombe Young Offenders Institution and one at HMP Chelmsford. I have also delivered drama and creative writing workshops to socially excluded adults and teenagers in South London and Essex. I am currently the RLF Writing Fellow for Essex University and about to start teaching a Creative Writing MA at another university.
And that’s the story so far.
After Martyn’s introduction he kicked off with some exercises to get everyone thinking…
So/But
This can be done orally just to get a group focused and energised and working together.
Two members of the group take the floor. One of them starts with a statement. For instance, ‘Flora fell in love.’ The other would counter with an obstructive statement beginning with the word ‘but’. ‘But the person she loved didn’t love her.’ The first person then counters with another statement overcoming that obstacle. This statement begins with the word ‘so’. ‘So Flora went out and found someone else.’ The second person then counters, beginning with ‘but’. And so on until a story is formed. Once the story has reached an ending, another two take their place until everyone has had a go.
Essences
Everyone in the group thinks of a famous person. Someone everyone else in the group will know. We then mutually write a list of ten things, our things were:
- Food
- Luggage
- Animal
- Furniture
- Type of music
- Cars
- Films
- Item of clothing
- Place
- Smell
Then you have to imagine what your person would be if they were the objects on the list. Each person then reads out their list and the rest of the group have to guess who their person is.
Haiku Short Story
Write a short story.
Very short. One hundred words.
You have ten minutes.
You can then write the whole story as a haiku to put even tighter constraints on the writing. Seventeen syllables, five – seven – five.
We then read out our stories. It was amazing how different each story was and how individual each voice was. The next exercise really got people thinking…
Gendercise
Everyone reads out their one hundred word stories that they have just written. Now, everyone has to change the gender of one character in the story, without changing anything else. Then read them out alongside the originals. What happens? How much of the story stays the same? How much of it changes or shifts? Why? This is an excellent way to bring preconceptions to the surface or to spot them in writing.
Running short on time the group moved on to the piece they were to write responding to the work of writers in the festival. The exercise to get everyone thinking about this was…
10 Things
Starting with a discussion of the work of the other writers in the festival we developed a list of the ten most important or engaging aspects of the work for each of us. These form the basis of the final large-scale exercise. Added to this list was a location for the story to take place and two adjectives to describe the main character. Work then began on the main writing exercise and will be continuing on people’s blogs. The group have to write a story that encompasses the ten points (or five from the ten if time is a constraint or they’re particularly complex) in the setting provided with a protagonist as described. This protagonist must also come into conflict with an antagonist who embodies the opposite properties of the main character. The exercise started well with lots of ideas floating around and some very concentrated work getting done. Now we just have to wait to see what emerges from this on the blogs…
