Anyone can be placed at the centre of the world

During our workshop with Barney Norris, he said “In a play, anyone can be placed at the centre of the world”. Which is so true! When he said this, I felt as though my brain physically expanded, it really made me think that anybody’s life or story can be important or worthy because it is to them. I used to think I shouldn’t write about myself too much or that I should be researching things to make my work more interesting but now I know that it already is interesting because it is my own unique access to the world, my world, the world I live in.

I like to take notice of the small details in the world because they are important to me like how many petals a flower has or if someone I know wears something new. After listening to Barney he has opened my eyes to think that other people may find this interesting as well or it could add to a piece of writing in a special way. Something that I have been thinking about a lot recently is nature and in particular flowers. How each one grows and what colours they are and then I thought, I wonder how they see me, or the number of people that gawk at them on a daily basis, my response to this thought was the following poem:

And what if flowers

picked themselves,

broke their stems,

and plucked their petals.

All because they saw the damage, we do to ourselves, 

And mistook it for beauty - by mckenna k.

I believe that everyone is beautiful because we are all completely different, society has led a lot of people to think they have to look a certain way to be “perfect”, so people change the way they look to please others because it has been drilled into their minds that the way they look is deemed unattractive. What if nature was to do this as well, what would the world look like?

After being inspired by Barney’s words, I thought about what else inspires me, to write, to feel and to achieve. Since reading and performing in it, I have fallen in love with A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams. After reading it I knew that I wanted to use an extract from it for one of my Higher Drama exam pieces, I played Stella and I just loved everything about it, the storyline, the themes, the setting. I wanted to research into Williams more and explore some of his other work, so I wrote my Advanced Higher English dissertation on the theme of Illusion versus Reality in both A Streetcar Named Desire and Sweet Bird of Youth. A book that has inspired me and many of my friends is Women Don’t Owe You Pretty by Florence Given. This book speaks to me, it is for anyone who wants to challenge the outdated narratives supplies to us by the patriarchy. It has taught me many things, to protect my energy, that I am the love of my own life and to just let shit go. I wish that I had written this book, I would love to connect with so many people and to teach them and guide them to be the who that they want to be and to not let anyone hold them back.

My Mum inspires me every single day, she is kind and loving and she is happy and successful in what she does. I have recently been reminded of one of the reasons I see my Mum as such a strong person. At our co-working session on Wednesday, we watched Simon Stones remake of the play Yerma. Watching this play made me quite emotional, it was about a woman who couldn’t conceive. This hit quite close to home because my Mum was originally told that she couldn’t have children and also had to have a pregnancy terminated because the baby wouldn’t survive. Watching this made me hurt for her, to think that she had to go through an experience like this. Knowing this and seeing how damaging it can be for a woman has made me look up to my Mum even more.

I feel very strongly about these things as they are all personal to me and I would love to incorporate aspects of each of them in the work I create during my time on this programme. The exercises that we did with Barney at the workshop will also help me to narrow down what I want to include in my writing. Some of the workshops worked better for me than others but I think that it expected, perhaps one that I didn’t find very useful now, maybe something I use further down the line. I struggled with the exercise named ‘Stories only I Know’, Barney asked us to think about something that only we know. All I could think of were secrets but, sharing secrets are usually include at least two people. So, I couldn’t really think of anything and then what I ended up writing I didn’t like at all. The last exercise that we did was the one that stuck with me the most, I think. We had to write down a few things, either a play, book, movie/tv show etc. These had to be things that we wish we had written ourselves I wrote down Normal people, the book and the programme, Fleabag the play and the programme and the aforementioned book, Women Don’t Owe You Pretty. This allowed me to have a better picture of how I would like my writing to come across and the kind of characters and storyline I am interested in.

Naomi Watson

Naomi is part of the Bunbury Banter Young Playwrights Programme 2020-2021