Source A: The totals from the workshop

An original contemporary non-fiction-style practice text, written for this question.

At the end of the tool library’s first year, the funding committee sent me a form containing one large box. Above it was the question: Was the project successful?

I had data ready. We had registered 317 members and recorded 1,842 loans. Our electric drills had spent more time outside the workshop than inside it. Only four tools had been lost, although one of them was a ladder, which was difficult to regard as a minor absence. The totals looked energetic and responsible when arranged in a column.

Yet the number of loans did not show what had happened when people arrived. Some borrowed a tool in three minutes and left. Others remained for an hour, asking how to repair a loose hinge or recognise a wall that should not be drilled. Mr Parry came every Tuesday but borrowed nothing. He stood at the workbench showing younger members how to sharpen blades and replace plugs. According to our system, he was not an active user.

The records also concealed our mistakes. We had bought six identical hedge trimmers because several people had requested them before opening. Five remained almost untouched. Meanwhile, there was a waiting list for the single tile cutter. A high membership total sounded impressive, but some people had registered only because membership was free. Several residents said our opening hours excluded anyone who worked late.

I considered answering yes. The project had clearly helped people, and continued funding depended upon demonstrating progress. Then I considered answering no, because honesty seemed to require suspicion of any result that benefited the person reporting it. Neither answer survived for long.

In the end, I attached a second page. It included the loan total, the missing ladder and the unused hedge trimmers. It described the repair advice that we had never planned to provide and the working residents we had failed to serve. I added a new category to the following year’s records: time spent helping another member.

The committee later described the project as promising. The word was less triumphant than I had hoped and more generous than the records deserved. I pinned their letter above the workbench, where a water stain slowly spread across the final sentence.

Source B: The empty seats on Friday

An original contemporary non-fiction-style practice text, written for this question.

Before rehearsals began, I told the community theatre group that success would mean filling eighty per cent of the seats. It was a clear target, and clear targets have the reassuring appearance of fairness. On the final night, I stood behind the curtain and counted forty-three empty chairs.

Across the whole run, we filled sixty-one per cent. The treasurer circled the percentage twice. Ticket income covered the costumes and the theatre hire but not the final printing bill. If success meant paying for the production and attracting the audience we had predicted, we had failed.

The cast did not experience the result so neatly. Daniel, who had whispered through the first rehearsal, delivered his final speech loudly enough to startle someone in the front row. Priya missed two performances because of work, yet spent every interval helping other actors remember their entrances. One family came three times. A local reviewer called the production ‘uneven but warm’, a phrase that felt accurate until I noticed that everyone repeated only the second half.

It would be easy to convert these details into a comforting story. Empty seats could become evidence that art is valuable regardless of audiences. The unpaid printing bill could be dismissed as the dull concern of people who had not stood under stage lights. That version would be as dishonest as calling the production worthless because it missed a percentage.

On Saturday morning, we dismantled the set. The painted kitchen wall separated into flats of timber, and the window through which Daniel had delivered his speech became an empty frame carried towards a van. People who had barely spoken in the first week worked together without needing instructions. At the same time, the treasurer collected envelopes containing what each of us could afford towards the bill.

I no longer think the production can be placed on one side of a line marked success. It gave some people confidence and cost others money. It reached fewer spectators than we intended, but those spectators stayed afterwards to talk. The target had not been foolish; it had simply been too lonely.

I kept one of the unused tickets. Its blank reverse side seemed more truthful than the printed front. The front promised a performance at a particular time. The back left room for everything that happened because the performance did, and everything that did not happen because the seats remained empty.