Freeflow

My Writing

Since 1985 I have written short stories, radio dramas, magazine and journal articles, stage plays and an e-book published on CD. To read sample extracts of my published work click on the titles below.
I have also created pieces for my own solo performance. These range from five minute fragments, like When You’re Dead, through to my hour long solo show The Pleiades.

My play A Long Trail and my short story In the Heartland were both awarded first prize in literary competitions. My short story Casablanca was published in 2005. Perry Como and a Twelve Gauge Shotgun and In Flight were published in 2006.

My articles on writing are published in Australia and the UK. To read the opening pages of Drowning in Words and Writing with Style click on the links.

Please visit the News page to read my latest piece.

Publications since 1990:

2008: 'The New Alchemy ', Writing Queenland, March 2008

2007: 'Another Casablanca', Wet Ink, June 2007

2007: ‘The Writer’s Inner Voice’, The New Writer ( UK), No. 82, March 2007

2007: ‘ The Heartland ’, short story, ABC Radio National (Feb 25th 2007)

2006: ‘The Power of Plain English’, The New Writer ( UK), No. 80, September 2006, pp. 10-11

2006: ‘The New Worlds’, short story, Staples, No. 4, September 2006, pp. 26-27

2006: ‘Writing with Style: The Power of Plain English’, Leading the Way-The Magazine for Office Professionals, AIOP Perth, Vol. 2, No. 3, April, pp. 10-12

2006: ‘Writing with Style: The Power of Plain English’, Keeping Good Companies - Journal of Chartered Secretaries Australia Ltd, Vol. 58, No. 2, March, pp. 113-115

2006: The Call, radio drama, original script commissioned by ABC Radio National: September

2006: ‘In Flight’, short story, Short Stories Australia, Vol 1, 3 Autumn 2006, pp. 15-21

2006: ‘Ready for the Storm’, short story, Short Stories Australia, Vol 1, 2 Summer 2006, pp. 26-33

2005: ‘Casablanca’, short story, Short Stories Australia, Vol 1, 1 Spring 2005, pp. 37-43

2005: ‘Drowning in Words – And Learning How to Swim’, Leading the Way-The Magazine for Office Professionals, AIOP Perth, Vol. 2, 1, April, pp. 8-9

2004: ‘In the Heartland’, Marginata, February, W.A. Writers Centre, pp. 6-7

2003: In the Heartland, short story, first prize in the Julie Lewis Literary Award

2002: Complexity and Devising for Theatre. e-book, Hush Performing Arts, Fremantle.

2002: A Long Trail Winding, stage script, first prize in the Todhunter Literary Award

2002: Ghost Dance, radio drama, ABC Radio National, broadcast May 26,

2002: The Pleiades, solo show with live music, Artrage 2002, The Blue Room Northbridge, October 28 – 30th, performer/writer

1999: ‘Cyberspace is Cool: some reflections on Drama education and the new digital media’. In Carole Miller and Juliana Saxton (Eds.) Drama and Theatre in Education: International Conversations (pp. 67-74). Victoria BC, Canada: IDIERI Publications

1996: (with Leonie Ramondt) ‘Drama on CD-ROM: The theatre training CD ROM project’, Media Information Australia , August pp. 41-48

1996: ‘CyberStage: Drama Education and the Digital Media’ Drama, 4 (3) pp. 24-28

1995: ‘Chaos in Drama: the metaphors of Chaos Theory as a way of understanding drama process’, The NADIE Journal, 19 (1), 15-26.

1995: ‘Chaos in Drama’, Drama, 3 (4), pp 8-18.

1995: ‘Cyber-theatre changes the face of modern drama’ (interview), Wheels for the Mind, 5 (1), pp 1-4

1993: one o’clock kids, radio play, ABC Radio National, broadcast May 15, three repeat broadcasts 1993 - 1995

1992: A Sailor Dreaming, radio play, ABC Radio National, broadcast November 1, two repeat broadcasts 1992 -1993 .

1990: Captain Cook, radio play, BBC Radio Four, broadcast July 5

Extracts from my writing:

When You’re Dead
© Alan Hancock 2002
(extract)

When you’re dead you live on in people’s memories.
When you’re dead you are born again and have another life.
When you’re dead people tell lies about you.
When you’re dead you become a star in the sky.
When you’re dead someone lights a candle for you.
There is no death, only a change of worlds.

When you're dead, if you've been really good, you come back as an enlightened one.
If you've been really bad you come back as a tapeworm or a slug.
When you're dead, if you've been successful, you come back as money. Pure money.

My uncle died and he came back as a lounge extension and a Toyota Corolla, a Technics hi-fi system with twelve disc CD changer, a holiday in Florida with all airfares and hotel accommodation fully paid, and a mountain bike with twelve gears. Everyone was really and truly sad that he had died, but they liked the money.

My friend's mum died and she came back almost immediately as a very large mortgage repayment. That was nice.
I wonder what I'll come back as?

There is no death, only a change of worlds.

Perry Como and a twelve gauge shotgun
© Alan Hancock 2005
(extract)

At the end of the day what he liked most was to sit out on the back veranda. He’d pour himself a double scotch, put Perry Como on the old Bang and Olufsen, then slip a new magazine into the pump action shotgun. Remington 870 Express, best thing they ever made. Felt nice too, heavy enough – so you knew you’d got a gun in your hands. Just loved the way those cartridges slid in all clunkety snap click, just loved the way Perry did it every night.

There wasn’t much else left these days, but if they wanted him tonight then they’d have to come and get him. He knew they were out there alright. Kids mostly, running wild with all that drug shit and rap music addling their brains. He’d seen them out there in the shadows. Well just step into range my weirdo friends, step in a little closer and see what you get for dinner from your uncle Mac.

The Pleiades
©Alan Hancock 2002
(extract)

The performer stands lit by a sequence of projected slides and video: images of stars, galaxies, planets, primitive carvings and masks, ufos, space probes. Music: digitally enhanced voice played live on a synthesizer.

You probably won't believe this, but I'm going to tell you anyway.

You'll probably think I've gone a bit weird, you'll probably say to yourself, Oh dear, I think Alan's been working too hard on the PhD, too much thinking and writing and not enough fresh air, too much stress and come to think of it he never did seem completely balanced did he. He's probably been reading those funny new age books again, and taking an unhealthy interest in the some of the more peculiar bits they put in Nova magazine. You'll say, oh-oh, Al's been trying out that channelling stuff, he's been at the crystals and the Feng Shui, he’s into the astral travel and the seriously out of body experiences. He's gone a bit strange.

But I'll tell you anyway, because recently it's all become a lot clearer, and I know from my Gestalt therapy group that it's never a good idea to keep these things bottled up for too long.

You see, I was abducted by aliens.

And I'm not talking here about the X-files kind of experience. It wasn't the greys or the guys in black or the big tall ones that they reckon are a bit more friendly. It wasn't like I was driving on that gravel road from Narrogin to Lake Grace one evening and there was this strange glow in the sky then this flash of blue light and the car engine went dead and then suddenly it was eight a.m. and I was sitting in a roadhouse on the Albany Highway thinking what the fuck happened to those ten hours? And why do I have this triangular mark on my upper arm, which mysteriously faded completely by the time I got back to Perth, and why do I have a nose bleed and why do I feel confused and knackered but somehow peaceful and elated as if I've just had a spiritual experience?

No. It wasn't like that at all. You're just jumping to conclusions.

This is even more weird.

Forty nine earth years ago I was abducted from the photon belt which surrounds the star Alcione in the constellation of the Pleiades, approximately 450 light years from here. It's all coming back to me very clearly now, and I think it's time I told you all. I didn't use to look like this at all. In the Pleiades I wasn't a theatre studies lecturer and I didn't have a house in Hilton or a 1976 Volvo: I was really very different. I was in fact an entity of the fourth density vibrating at a level far higher than can be perceived by humans. I was a manifestation of life force energy that just sort of flickered and buzzed and was all joined up with all the other energy forms out there in the photon belt. So there wasn't any conflict or separation, or shopping or therapy groups. It was all just this kind of flow that everything joined in. It was really nice.

But then I got abducted.

A Long Trail
© Alan Hancock 2002
(extract)

ARTHUR: (Sings along with the harmonica.)
There's a long, long trail a winding,
Into the land of my dreams,
Where the nightingales are singing,
And a white moon beams;
There's a long, long night of waiting
Until my dreams all come true;
Till the day when I'll be going
Down that long, long trail with you.

(Long pause. Then JAMES and ARTHUR get to their feet and go over to the bed.)

ARTHUR: David lad, are tha reet?

LAWRENCE: Dad.

ARTHUR: And thy uncle James.

JAMES: How do young Lawrence.

LAWRENCE: But you're dead. They sent me a telegram. They said you were dead.

ARTHUR: Oh I am. So's uncle Jim.

JAMES: In a roof fall at Brinsley Colliery. Very nasty. D'tha remember David?

LAWRENCE: What do you want ?

ARTHUR: Tha's not very friendly son. Is that all tha've got to say?

LAWRENCE: I don't know what you want.

JAMES: We've come to tek thee back lad.

LAWRENCE: I've got to finish my book.

ARTHUR: (Laughs.)

JAMES: (Laughs.) Books.

ARTHUR: Still book writing eh? Is that what they call a man's job round here? Show us thy ands son, come on, show thy Uncle Jim thy ands.

(JAMES takes LAWRENCE’s hands.)

JAMES: Soft as a little girl's.

ARTHUR: And what dun they gi'e thee for one of tha books?

LAWRENCE: It depends . . . Two or three hundred pounds.

ARTHUR: Three hundred pound! And tha's nivir dun a day's work in tha life.

JAMES: Mebbe not all the fools in the world are dead, eh Arthur.

ARTHUR: Come on lad. Let’s be off.

LAWRENCE: I'm too small to go down the pit. It's not safe. I don’t want to go.

JAMES: Who said we were goin down the pit?

ARTHUR: Don't be a big baby.

LAWRENCE: I'm not strong enough. I'm not well.

ARTHUR: (Takes LAWRENCE by the arm and guides him to his feet.) This way me duck.

LAWRENCE: Where?

ARTHUR: Underground.

JAMES: Deep.

ARTHUR: It's a wonder. Tha’ll see.

LAWRENCE: You mean the underworld?

ARTHUR: Give us a hand Jim. Come on.

(JAMES takes LAWRENCE’s other arm in a firm grip and the two men start to walk him back in the direction from which they came.)

LAWRENCE: (Puts up a desperate but ineffectual resistance: he is physically no match for the two miners.) I'm not going!

Just after midnight he puts the phone down for the last time and sits. No reply, no message: just him and the telephone, as pointless as everything else in this house. He picks up him keys from the kitchen table and walks quickly down the hallway to the front door. Outside the air is restless and hot. An easterly is sending a swirl of dead leaves and paper wrappers chasing themselves round a corner in the yard. The palms in the neighbour’s garden rattle and shiver in the wind. Everything is restless. Everything is on edge, and he jumps as the front door is caught in a gust and slammed shut behind him. He did not punch the four digits into the security key pad. What the hell. What does it matter? What does anything matter now? And he sets off at a brisk walk as if he has somewhere to go.

He walks, because he cannot be still. He walks the empty wind raked streets of this empty suburb. He walks past the neat gardens and the hissing sprinklers, past the blank eyes of windows shut against the night. He haunts crescents, groves and dead-end drives, all named after poets that nobody here has ever read. He walks past the shopping centre where coke cans go rattling along in the wind. He walks and walks because anything is better than sitting at home and facing the truth of what has happened. And his entire being is consumed with one yearning, one ache, one longing for what he knows he cannot have.

As darkness thins to grey and the street lights blink off, block by block, as the first bus goes growling down the highway at the end of the street, he comes home. He comes back to a place where he cannot sleep, where he cannot be still. He stares at the computer screen as if it holds a secret to turn back time and give him back what he has lost. He thinks the same thought, over and over again, as if the thinking itself could change what has happened. In his mind he runs the movie of all his fears and he cannot look away: two bodies, one he knows all too well, and this aching for it not to be so. He thinks, if only. And if he closes his eyes he wakes with a start. He wakes with a question that he knows he cannot answer. Is she with him tonight? Then, at last, he sleeps.

A wave of Egyptian pop music flooded through the car as they passed a roadside stall, cassette tapes and CDs laid out on a rug. He said nothing. Above the violins and drums a woman was singing ‘Habibi, habibi’: my darling, darling. Then the music was gone, and they were out again on the long flat sweep of the highway. Alex spotted a stork atop a farmhouse, perching long-legged on its bundle of sticks; she marveled at the wheat fields splashed red with poppies. Then the conversation faltered as they headed south, the sun filling the car with light and heat.

Half an hour later Route Nationale Number was pushing through the industrial fringe of Casablanca. A stream of trucks and buses roared and fumed its way past factories and grim blocks of flats, past every conceivable kind of rubbish. Clouds of dust and blue plastic bags swirled and spiraled in the slipstream of the aging Dafs and Volvos as they hammered past on their way north to Rabat and Tangier. The road was hemmed in by a line of cement works, belching out smoke into the open balconies of tatty apartments. ‘Not much like the film is it?’ Alex said.
‘What film?’
‘You know, Casablanca.’
‘Oh that. No.’

A group of tough looking children at the side of the road drew her attention. Perilously close to the traffic, they gestured and shouted at the passing vehicles. She waved. A boy of nine or ten, shaved head, a filthy t-shirt that said ‘Ferrari Team Racing’, waved back energetically. At his side an older lad aimed a small rock. It cracked against the front wing just as the car shuddered through a series of potholes. The stone thrower punched the air with his fist, and another boy pulled back an arm ready for a second shot. Phil swore, swerved hard at the gang, then at the last moment yanked the steering wheel to the left as they scattered in surprise.

The Renault over-steered and veered out into the road. He braked hard and suddenly the whole world was filled with the sound of blaring air-horn and screeching tyres. Phil watched, appalled, as the front end of a cement truck loomed huge in the rear view mirror, as the massive front bumper smashed into the rear of the car. There was a sound of rending metal. A shower of plastic and glass flew into the air as the car was shoved broadside into the gutter, then silence.

Time ticks by in the jerky second hand on my new watch, bought an hour ago, duty free, in the vacuum night-time of my journey back from England. Sleep comes and goes, up here where the hours and days lose their meaning, where memories and dreams fill the empty time.

Somewhere far away I imagine the cicadas buzz in our back yard as they too mark the time. January, mid-day in Perth, everything flattened by the heat. An inflatable armchair drifts in the middle of the pool, floating on its ripples of pure turquoise light. On the hot concrete, next to a child’s t-shirt and thongs, a beach towel bakes in the sun. A single leaf drops from the big white gum in the corner of the garden and spirals straight down into the water. Then everything is still once again, waiting for the sea-breeze, waiting for night.

Three days ago I was at the funeral. Family faces all pink and grey in the freezing air outside the crematorium chapel. I shake hands with a stream of mourners as they leave. Many of them I have never seen before. English faces: here we are all so English. I had forgotten. How?

If you work, the chances are that you will need to write. Whether it’s a report, a letter, a media release or a job application, you want it to communicate effectively with a reader. You want to get a message across. And, let’s face it, the job of writing isn’t always easy. How often do we put off writing something important? I think we all know those moments when tidying the desk, checking the email, answering a phone call – just about anything is preferable to sitting down with a blank screen or page to start the work of writing.

Have you ever wondered why this might be so, when other aspects of language use pose no such problems whatsoever? Most of us can hold a conversation or send an informal email message without any sense of anxiety or dread. Yet the work of drafting something that needs to be well written can feel onerous, even overwhelming, and all too often we approach the task with less than positive thoughts.

A brief history of language: hard-wired for speech

If we take a moment to look at our history of language use as a species, and at how the mind organises both writing and speech, then we might have a better idea why writing is hard, and how we can make it easier. Humans have been speaking to one another for at least 100 000 years, maybe twice that long, or so the archaeologists and anthropologists tell us. The evidence is in the fossil record, which shows how our ancestors’ jaws and mouths developed to facilitate speech.

When we look at the length of time humanity has been literate, the story is very different. While simple written language has been around since the time of the ancient Sumerians, around 5 000 years ago, writing skills have been the norm, rather than the exception, for a much shorter period. If I go back four or five generations in my family, I find very few individuals who could read, let alone write. In most Western societies widespread literacy was unknown before the Renaissance. So we have 100 000 years of talking, against say 500 years writing. You can guess which ability appears to be hard-wired into the human brain, and which we struggle to learn.

Capturing your audience

There is a wonderful cartoon that appeared in the New Yorker magazine some years ago. It shows a man holding in one hand a sheaf of paper, and in the other a gun. He’s standing in the aisle of a bus or plane, facing a group of passengers who all look scared or apprehensive. The words in the speech bubble coming from his mouth go something like this: ‘Okay, relax. No-one is going to get hurt. I’m just going to read you some of my poetry.’

When we write something, we all want our reader or readers to be engaged and interested. And we are afraid that they might not be. While we probably won’t take matters to the extremes illustrated in the cartoon, we are often affected by this concern, that our writing is not good enough. So as we write we may have in mind some imagined reader, whose interest and attention we want to capture. Let’s take a look at how this internal audience for our work might influence our writing, not always for the better.

Trying hard to impress

I mark a lot of papers and theses at university; some are well written, and some are awful. With the latter I sometimes imagine that my students have me as their inner reader/critic. I can only guess that their aim is to impress this virtual Dr Hancock, by using the kind of language they associate with serious, academic discourse. So they include plenty of long words, which they embed in long and complicated sentences. Wherever possible they employ the passive, not active, voice – of which more later – and choose nouns ending in ‘-ion’ or ‘-ism’. Their prose is often long-winded, using as many words as possible to express each idea. The style is bland, the tone is deadly serious, never playful or provocative: there are few surprises. Outright statement of opinion is avoided at all cost, so that the voice of the writer is never allowed to come through. It’s careful, plodding, hard to read, and utterly boring.

What these students think will impress me does just the opposite. I get irritable, and reach for my red pen to write on their paper comments like: ‘Keep it simple’, ‘What does this mean?’, ‘This is confusing’, ‘Put it in plain English’. They are often surprised by my response to their work, and use terms like ‘formal’ or ‘professional’ to justify their written style. The fact is that the very best writing of any kind, whether in the world of business, academia, journalism or science, is clear, elegant and concise. It is never showy, verbose or pompous. We are all aware of this, at some level, but applying it to our own writing is another matter.