Description

T.S. Eliot’s original title for The Waste Land was “He do the police in different voices”. It’s a quotation from Dickens’s novel, Our Mutual Friend, where one of the characters is spellbound by another character – he’s called Sloppy – reading the newspapers through the windows of the newsagent. Sloppy reads all the different parts in the police and court reports, playing the role to the full, just as Dickens himself did when he performed public readings of his work, most famously the murder of Nancy in Oliver Twist.

When we write, we also need to ‘do the police in different voices’. We have to think about not just what the words look like on the page, but how they sound.

In this workshop we’ll explore different kinds of narrator, think about the ways in which ‘who’ is telling the tale affects the tale that gets told, and practise some rewritings in different voices, to see what happens if someone else is telling the story. And maybe we can even act out what we’ve written to test if our impersonations work.