Scotch’s rulebook: a liberating force?

‘Before the beginning there was nothing. And nothing came from nothing, since nothing can. But something, somehow, did, and that was the change…’

The idea that brought these words to life sounds like a twisted, regret-inducing New Year’s resolution, or a contrived concept for the Twitter age: create a short story, exactly 365 words long, every day, for a calendar year.

Anyone who writes will be breaking into an empathetic cold sweat. Every day? Exactly 365 words? Inspiration, or literary hair shirt? 

But James Robertson, author of And the Land Lay Still and The Testament of Gideon Mack, did it, and the result was 365 Stories, written throughout 2013, published online on the corresponding days in 2014, then collected into one volume.

Liberating force: Robertson says the impact of the format of 365 Stories was revelatory

‘It’s amazing what you can do within those constraints,’ Robertson explained recently on Radio 4. ‘I found myself going back to really basic, elemental stories, to folk tales, ballads, fairy tales, myths and kind of reusing them and refreshing them – and for me it was a revelation because it opened up this toolbox of things that I didn’t really think I could use, and actually it’s all there to be used and it has to be used.’

‘Elemental stories’, but also satires, frivolities, snapshots of stories in progress, portraits of family life; an in memoriam to fellow novelist Iain Banks on the day he died. As the threads interweave, they inspire a deeper contemplation of the creation and direction of narrative and how our lives shape and shift.

Daily discipline: Robertson’s story-telling reverted to ‘basic, elemental’ subjects (Photo: Marianne Mitchelson)

Then composer Aidan O’Rourke wrote a ‘response tune’ to each story, one a day, for a year. Now Robertson, O’Rourke and another musician, Kit Downes, bring words and music together live in what Robertson calls ‘a wee show’. Creative cells merging and multiplying, generating new artistic life.

We’re often told that the rules governing Scotch whisky are too tightly drawn, that they hamstring innovation and smother creativity. Water, barley, yeast; malt, mill, mash, ferment, distil, mature – all have boundaries.

But they only provide the frame, inside which the canvas is pristinely blank. The constraints fence off a safe space in which whisky’s creators can explore and play.

Far from bemoaning whisky’s rulebook, rejoice in it.

Aidan O’Rourke, Kit Downes and James Robertson are appearing in concert in Bath and London in early October.