Struggling with a story with a mind of its own

Press, 2 December 1987, Page 18

Struggling with a story with a mind of its own

Margaret Mahy believes stories are most exciting before they are written down, while they are still an unconfined “cloud of possibility.” This was put to the test during the filming of tonight’s second programme in the “Inspiration” series, “Margaret Mahy — Writer” (9 on One). Director Keith Hunter had planned to structure the programme around a number of short stories he had asked Mahy to write. They were to be “children’s fantasies for adults," about a writer’s relationship with her letter-box — every writer’s lifeline.

But he had not properly foreseen the difficulties in filming the stories — “letterboxes being poor actors, notoriously wooden in their general attitudes and modes of expression.” When asked to simply sit at her typewriter and pound the keys for a couple of wide shots, rather than sit and type gibberish, Mahy began to while away the time with a story that came out of nowhere. It began: All day the author had been trying to write a story, but it just wouldn’t work out. You

see this was a story with a mind of its own. The author struggled with it but the story was very stubborn. At one-thirty in the morning the haggard author, swearing most forcibly out of despair, rose from his faithful typewriter, drank a quarter of a

bottle of gin and fell heavily into bed.

Left in the typewriter the stbry struggled furiously. It wanted to be written down ...

Ten minutes later she had a story that “flew around the room like a midnight moth” in its search for an author.

‘Tm sure that for Margaret it was nothing more than a doodle,” says Hunter, “but I was so intrigued by it that I wanted to know what happened in the end. Of course she didn’t know what happened because she hadn’t written it yet “So I asked her to finish the story, with the help of a couple of young illustrators from Auckland Technical Institute. It became a touchstone for the documentary that we return to from time to time, following the story as it settles into the v sleeping head of a captain of industry, infecting him with dreams, upsetting agendas, and disrupting meetings.” Just as Mahy’s stories are defined in the writing, the film was defining itself throughout the filming — all the shots of Margaret Mahy working were taken while she was actually writing the story that supplied the documentary’s structure. “Margaret Mahy — Writer” is a journey into the mind of one of New Zealand's most acclaimed writers, examining some of her ideas, and capturing her wit and her extraordinary feeling for fantasy.