Plain Talk

By Mursi Saad El-Din

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Some years ago I was responsible for the Advisory Bureau for Children's Culture, brainchild of Tharwat Okasha, sometime minister of culture. The creation of the bureau was the first state initiative directed towards fostering children's culture.

The activities of the bureau ranged from theatre to film, from publishing books to setting up clubs.

The Bureau's programme incorporated story telling, and I still remember how I recruited some popular radio presenters. What we used to do was to select a story which the radio presenter narrated. We would stop towards the end, however, and ask the children to imagine what would happen.

I remembered this programme when I read in a recent issue of The Independent an article with the title "Book ends: 17,000 frustrated writers try to finish novels started by their heroes". The End of the Story Project was launched by BBC 3 in April. The entries for the competition, according to The Independent, weighed 133 kilogrammes. The BBC had earlier organised a short story competition which attracted a similar volume of interest.

The presenter of the End of the Story Project is quoted in the article.

"I visited the offices where the entries were being collected to see for myself and couldn't believe the avalanche of words in front of me. I have to admit I'm gobsmacked but also delighted: fifty professional readers are ploughing through the stories before the judging panel choose 24 finalists."

The procedure is that the writers will get to meet the author whose story they completed while the authors will select their personal winners who will each receive a handbound edition of their efforts.

Interest in writing is reflected in many ways. For instance, there has been a marked increase in the number of students enrolled in creative writing courses. Two years ago WH Smith had 13,500 entries when it ran a Raw Talent Competition which asked entrants to write the first chapter of a novel with a synopsis. Another recent BBC competition, to write a Canterbury Tale, a work evocative of Chaucer's masterpiece, attracted 4000 entries.

According to Alison Black, the producer of the End of the Story, the response exceeded all expectations.

"It really seems to have tapped into a creative drive to write across the UK and touched a nerve with people who wanted to do something for themselves."

The procedure appeared to operate somewhat like a treasure hunt. Some 20,000 copies of a book that contained story openings provided by seven authors were hidden around the country, in places such as train seats or behind park benches. They could be discovered by chance or from cryptic clues published on the BBC Web site. The half written stories were also published on the BBC Web site and entrants were asked to provide a final 1200 words.

Summaries of the stories of the seven well-established writers are published in The Independent and they cover a wide variety of plots. One is "a comic and disturbing tale about a life gone sour, and the mystery man who could put it back on the right track". Then there is the detective story about a literary critic who dies from arsenic poisoning at a restaurant. "Who could be responsible for bumping off one of the city's most feared reviewers?" asks the writer. "A writer whose work she trashed? Or someone close to her?"

I wonder what ending the entrants gave to this story.

There is the comic element too. There is the story of Roy's irritating friends, Byron and Danula who overstay their welcome. So Roy invents a lodger to get rid of them . "It is a tale," says The Independent, "of social embarrassment, overstayed welcomes and a play that has gone too far."

I wonder what kind of endings the 27,000 entrants will invent. I know in the case of children some of their imagined endings were more convincing and entertaining than the original ones.