Ian McMillan: Imagine and tonic

Write about what you know, they say, and on the whole that's good advice, although I reckon you should sometimes speculate about things you don't know, places you've never been to, people you've never met. As a man, you could write from a woman's point of view, and vice versa. And then there are things you know really well: how about looking at them from a completely different angle, seeing what you can mine from them that you've not noticed before?
Ian McMillanIan McMillan
Ian McMillan

Take the Yorkshire anthem, the greatest dirge ever written, On Ilkla Moor Baht ’at. Of course all Yorkshiremen and Yorkshirewomen know it like the back of their hand and sing it at any given opportunity, often including all the verses including the little-known one about Mary Jane retraining as a librarian. I made that one up, because that’s what you can do with a cultural item like that: it’s infinitely malleable so that you can set it running, like a clockwork toy, in any direction you like.

So once we train the creative eye on the song we can come up with all kinds of possibilities. Let’s start with the form: it doesn’t have to be a song. Imagine it as a cartoon strip in a comic, or a more grown-up graphic novel. Imagine it as a series of graffitied images across a wide white wall. Imagine it as a children’s story, done in the old Janet and John style: Here is the man. See the man. Hello man, hello. Here is Mary Jane. See Mary Jane. Hello Mary Jane, hello. See man courting Mary Jane. Court, court, man.

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Imagine it as an opera: now that would really work! It’s got all the operatic tropes of violence and thwarted love. There’s room for a big aria by Mary Jane and a comic scene involving a number of counter-tenors dressed as ducks. Or, at the other end of the scale, let’s imagine it as a musical, a limerick or a haiku or an epic poem or a sonnet.

On Ilkla Moor Baht ’at as a crime novel, with the great detective Ben Rhydding: who really did kill the protagonist up there on the moor? Would his hat have protected him? Or how about the song as Mills and Boon-style romance? Or Science Fiction Trilogy, with the moor as a hostile planet and the ducks as evil feather-based life-forms?

Imagine it as a mime-show performed on the street at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, or as a piece of contemporary dance. Imagine it as a comedian’s routine, and try to work out the jokes and the comic songs.

Move away from the idea of the song as a literary work and rethink it as a map. Imagine the song as a set of instructions or recipe in a cookbook. Imagine it as a letter or a postcard or an email or a text or a tweet.

And now let’s translate it. How would it sound in French? Or German? Or Welsh: now there’s an idea. On the Great Orme without my bonnet!

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