Fairly random thoughts on scripts that are a pile of shiny shit and 50th birthday parties

So I jumped and now I’ve been writing full-time for two months.

My script for the Red Planet prize made it to the top 25 but unfortunately no further which was good but not good enough. The script, after a thorough re-draft, also made it into the top twelve of the BBC Drama Wales Award but also no further and though it’s great to think my script put me in the top 12 in all writers in Wales (strictly speaking – all writers in Wales who submitted but if you’re a writing in Wales and you didn’t submit to such a huge competition then you’re a bit silly and frankly worth ignoring) it still didn’t put me in the top six which leaves me with two issues which I’m contemplating as I sit at a very large table in a very large house we’ve hired to celebrate my friend’s 50th birthday. So along with contemplating my two issues I’m wondering when I got so old that I have friends who are celebrating their 50th birthday.

It seems only yesterday I was dreading my 21st birthday party arranged by my mum in the hall above the local snooker and pool club hall and wondering if anyone was going to come because I was horrible and everyone hated me. But now look at me I’m 43, I have friends who invite me to spend a week with them celebrating their 50th birthday so I mustn’t be horrible and they mustn’t hate me. Must they?

Parties are on my mind– firstly because I’m at one and secondly because I’m writing a short play for the Sherman Cymru Scriptslam on the theme of After the Party which has to be sent by the end of today. So better get back to the point which is my two points or issues.

Firstly, writing a script which is better so that next time I make it to the final hurdle rather than falling over just before the finish line. I didn’t fall flat on my face at least which is my usual experience of competitions. Flat on my face in a pile of cow shit. The script being the cow shit though at the time I didn’t think it was a cow shit I thought it was a pile of perfect gold.

Secondly, what the hell to do with the script that is good but not good enough because I absolutely love the idea, the characters and the story and if it did so well, it’s clearly not a pile of cow shit though also it’s not a pile of gold.

So firstly making sure the next script is a pile of gold. Let’s start with not forgetting the things that have been learned through the process of writing the script – write scripts which are fun for me. That is certainly the case with the next script as it’s a subject that has been percolating in my head for about 10 years, almost as long if not longer than the last one.

The idea for the next script is well into development, characters, structure, narrative, plot have all been developed. I’ve already written the first twenty pages. I have started to redraft the first ten pages to ensure that the start of the script has that very special attention required to make it shine like gold amongst the spec scripts. After a brief break to complete the draft of a theatre play, I’ll be heading back to write the first draft through to the end. Then I’ll redraft it as many times as is needed to make it what it needs to be, to make it better than the last script to make it the best script it can possibly be. The fundamental part of all this is the fact that I making sure that the script of finished well ahead of the next Red Planet competition. I want to give myself months to think about it, write it, redraft it, think about it some more. Because the main thing I learned from my flirtation with success is that it’s better to give yourself twelve months to write a script than one month. Pretty obvious really I know but the simple fact is that though the script was made into what it needed to be and was better than my last script it wasn’t the best it could possibly be.

This slides me nicely into the second of my issues, almost like I’d planned it. What to do with the script now? It’s getting there but it still isn’t the best it could possibly be and that’s going to take some more work. But it is still a good script, clearly because it made it into the top 25 of the Red Planet competition and the top twelve of the Drama Wales Award. Sorry - but just thought that was worth repeating.

Once it is the best script it can possibly be then I plan to send it as a spec script to a few places that accept submissions, maybe a few agents, maybe a few TV companies, maybe it can open a few more doors.

But what’s more I’m going to think how I can tell the story in other mediums I genuinely believe that the story could work as a radio play, as a novel, as a film – telling the story differently or telling different aspects of the story but it’s possible and a challenge and I like the challenge of trying to write the story for different mediums. And I don’t like stepping in cow shit.

Running through open doors and jumping in without armbands

Recently I’ve had cause to reflect, in far more serious terms, on my writing career. In general the last few months have been a series of - doors opening and doors closing – shall we say. So the doors opening have been all writing related, I’m through to the last 20 of the Red Planet Prize, I was chosen for the Spread the Word Emerging Writers project, I’ve had interest expressed in several projects, the production side of my work with the Writing for Performance Group has been expanding – all great and all positive momentum. The only frustrating thing has been the lack of time to be able to get on with projects and make the most of the open doors.
Don’t get me wrong I do write in all the available time I have, I’m not one of those writers who whinges about having to write when working full-time and then sits watching 6 hours of television of an evening and a bit more at the weekend. I write every evening and at least one if not two days at the weekend (largely dependent on hangover, occasionally gardening). I use all of my holiday time for writing. I have not had a holiday since...you know I really can’t remember the last holiday I took. I take time off to write around deadlines and the only away time I allow myself is Ty Newydd writing courses. So when I say not enough time to write I really mean, not enough time to write.

But then we get to the door closing - notification that the non-real-job will be coming to an end and I’m being made redundant. I have to admit I never saw it as a bad thing although I should have done. I spend all my time wishing that I had another job (scriptwriter of course) so it’s never going to be that bad when a job you do to pay the bills, that gets in the way of the job you really want to do, comes to an end. But I have a mortgage to pay and a very expensive vodka habit – by that I mean I drink a lot of cheap vodka not limited amounts of expensive vodka which would just be silly since it’s been scientifically proven that some of the cheapest brands of vodka are actually the purest!

Immediately my decision was to take a few months – or however long my severance package allows – to write. It will only be a few months but a few months that will give me those extra spec scripts I need, the proposals written up, the outlines finished.

For so long now my book of ideas – ideas written down onto pages in a notebook, usually in the form of loglines, occasionally in little flowcharts of ideas for scenes, sometimes notes of images, often a character description – has been overwhelming me. It has felt like an overloaded in-tray and an overloaded brain. I’ve wanted to push them from the overloaded brain/in-tray and into the nicely organised portfolio of ideas ready to be pitched or written.

But now I can do that. There is probably a very valid argument about me looking for a job and keeping the money for a really rainy day, after all I’ve been at this writing lark for a long time, and a few bits of good luck in competitions doesn’t really amount to an indication that you might earn actual money from writing, so maybe I should just keep at it in my spare time....but could those people (mainly my Mum) just be quiet for now.

I basically had a choice of jump in or keep paddling and I’m on the verge of jumping. I am at the end of the diving board but I’ve never liked jumping in out of my depth so I’m holding my nose and checking that there are people watching out for me in case it goes wrong.

So here’s to making a big splash end of July. I’ll drink a vodka to that. But then I’ll drink a vodka to anything!

Lock-in Day

I have to admit that I approached the lock-in day with trepidation. A whole day at the Arts Centre locked into a room with my fellow writers and also a 1-1 tutorial with Sarah Woods and Sian Summers to be grilled on the final idea pitch. Also a lock-in that doesn't involve alcohol. Also aren't there health and safety guidelines about locking a group of writers in a room together?

We'd been asked expand on our two page pitch to a fuller document to send in advance and then answer questions on it. I didn't manage to get mine as completed as I would have liked. I got most of the story down though and two of the characters break downs done and then by the Saturday session I'd got all the characters apart from two down. The antogonist eludes me slightly and in fact he still does. He's a bit foggy still but I'm getting closer to him I think. Also until the morning of the lock-in my TV journalist had eluded me, though on the morning of the lock in I watched a BBC news report on divorce stats and suddenly Pauline became clear though her name is now completely wrong.

My tutorial session was great, lots of queries that forced me to clarify things, it was suggested I should explore farce - and funnily enough I've just started to read One Man, Two Guvnors. In a happy trip through of coincidences that seem serendipitous I spotted this discussion

http://community.nationaltheatrewales.org/profiles/blogs/is-pure-comedy-worth-less-than-high-art.

I have no idea what the farce formula will entail, how it will strengthen or indeed box-in my play. But I look forward to exploring farce over Xmas. As I've got my parents with me for Xmas there is already a huge potential for farce especially as my living room has two entrances and my dad is partially deaf!

I came away from the tutorial feeling confident - but that I had a mountain of trailing strings to tie together.

After the morning tutorial I spent the day focusing on plotting and moving the story as well as trying to find the undercurrents. Basically I played with post-it notes for about an hour. Post-it note work is not to be taken lightly or mocked, a hell of a lot can be achieved with precise placing, maneouvering and colour coding schemes. By the end of the day I had a pretty good idea of the whole play and worked out what the play is about which is a pretty useful thing to do ahead of starting to write.

Now all that's left to do is write the whole thing by 6th February.

Spread The Word 4

We started the session with a Noel Grieg exercise on creating instant stories.

Three words – daffodil, cat, kitchen. Tell a story starting with the words, yesterday, using each of the words in the order given.

A few more variations;

Banana, football and telephone starting with I don’t understand why.

Computer, crocodile and toast starting with the phrase, today I would like.

Television, chicken and bed starting with, the world would be a better place.

Then we looked again at structures, talking about 3 act structures, classic five act structures which are still around but not seen very often. We talked about the conventional and obvious reason for breaking up a play into acts like change of location, or time – or the need for an interval. Also there are non-linear and disrupted structures. Within the acts are the scenes, where breaks need to be there for a reason not just because.

We then looked at action within the play and we were asked to think about our idea and describe it focusing on the action. Within that description we had to think about the conflict so something is happening but something is stopping it. Maybe it’s the main action of the protagonist but the antagonist is causing the conflict.

After a while of playing with sentences I came up with;

Hedydd is trying to get her therapy clients to talk dirty but a man with a gun wants them to come clean and admit the truth. I’ve tried to sum up the play lots of times but it was definitely easier to simply focus on the action of the play and the conflicts, and definitely good to find the “but” of the idea.

If we think about the action as how it plays into the structure then we have to think how to keep the action pushing the energy through the acts.

Moving swiftly on we started an exercise on finding the axis of the play. This is about finding the two opposing principles in the play that cause the conflict. eg justice/injustice. This is harder than you might think because though it might be easy to find two opposing words what you’re trying to do is to find two word that not only express the conflict of your play but express it in a way that is unique and also expresses why your idea is distinctive.

Then finally as we approached the end of the end of our sessions we talked about beginnings and endings. The beginning – get in there, explain what’s happening without exposition, set it all up then interrupt it all with an inciting incident.

And then endings – think of the ending as another beginning, the new status quo. Is
it a comedy or a tragedy? Does it need to end well or end in punishment.

Spread the Word 3

In the session we began to explore structure.

Branwen Davies the Associate Tutor began with a small exercise on sketching out what happens in a scene.

The idea in this exercise is to focus on drawing out plot and character without thinking too much about the actual dialogue.

We were asked to create 2 characters, to think about the relationship between the two characters, think about the setting or location of the characters. We had to think of a conflict so that they want something from each other. We were told that all dialogue had to use no more than 3 words.

I used my two main characters from the play that I’m developing for the Spread The Word project effectively for the opening scene in the play.

Richard has just found out that she is using personal details of their life in her stand up comedy routine, Hedydd needs him to leave as she is about to start a group therapy session with clients due to arrive any minute.

We were given ten minutes to write the scene and I came up with the following,

R: Feel so betrayed
H: Stop whingeing.
R: How could you?
H: Get out.
R: How could you?
H: What’s the problem?
R: The problem!
H: It’s just jokes.
R: My life.
H: Our life.
R: It’s private.
H: It’s your fault.
R: It’s wrong.
H: They’ll be here.
R: I’m not leaving.
H: Get out now
R: Never again.
H: If I want/
R: /it’s over/
H: it’s been over
R: I love you
H: I hate you.
R: I hate you
H: I hate myself.

It’s easy to see how you can quickly create an outline for a scene moving things forward using this technique.

We then looked at scenes that everyone had written based on the overheard dialogues. It was great to see the individual voices emerging, the differences in approach and the things that had attracted each writer to the different pieces of dialogue.

We then began to look at the idea of Time and Space in a play; open and closed time, open and closed space. We talked about the difference that these impose on plays, such as the energy created by closed time but complications that come with closing time or the expositional demands caused by choosing open. Not forgetting disrupted time - two different timescales and disconnected time - different storylines happening in same space.

I have a tendency to head for disrupted and disconnected but at the moment I'm trying to force myself into one space and time so I'm closing them both off and seeing what happens.

Spread The Word 2

For the second session Sarah Woods had asked us to bring along a couple of pages of overheard dialogue to share. This is a brilliant exercise and something that every writer should try to do regularly. It shouldn’t really be a surprise that if you want a lesson in writing real conversation then listen to real conversation.

Listen to the pattern and rhythms in the way people speak, listen to how accents inflect the sentences, listen for the words that are specific to an accent, listen to how real conversation undercuts, repeats, erupts and explodes.

The world around us is full of incredible characters with magical stories and all we had to do was listen. Well listen and frantically scribble into a notebook.

Studying real conversation the depth of a character leaps out within a few words . Sarah Woods told us, and I love this expression, -Characters are like a cat that’s been dragged through a hedge, it comes through with bits of history and situation attached to it. It’s what we all should be aiming to do, drag characters through a hedge.

We looked closely at how often real speech is littered with repetitions. Repetition can be used for humour and for fear. The rule for repetition is repeating something 3times builds an idea but if we repeat something 5 times it’s a sign of madness.
Real conversation though can be confusing, creating dialogue is about finding the balance between creating real dialogue that immediately brings a character to life and clarifying the situation.

It was also clear to see that people don’t just speak, in real conversation we are motivated to speak for a reason. We should find the reason for a character to speak and not just force them, in the same way we shouldn’t force words into their mouth for the sake of exposition. How often do you think, that character wouldn’t say that?

We played a character creation game. We created a character by answering the following
What age are they?
What sex?
What ethnicity?
What is their name?
What distinguishing feature do they have?
What are they wearing?
What secret do they have?
What is their favourite food?
What memory do they have?
What is their dream?
What is their worse nightmare?
Where are they at this moment?
What are they saying?

Sarah then introduced us to the above chart, a way to explore characters in further depth.

If we look at the character objectives. What is the overall objective? What are the smaller objectives that drive a character at an individual level. I like this chart, it feels like a great way to get more energy and depth into a play.

If we develop from this into our story and plot, the characters will have motivations in the background that drive the actions and build the energy of the play. We can develop moments like a secret revealed in anger and build of that impacts on the audience. Paying attention to this depth behind it all creates multi-layered characters. If we take all these elements we can draw it into a timeline which would have eruptions stemming from the revelations.

Spread the Word begins

The first session of the Spread the Word programme took place on Monday. The programme is part of a Wales-wide programme for emerging writers effectively it is the Sherman Cymru new writing team on tour, working with new writers in various regional art centres and theatre. In Aberystwyth it is being run with the Arts Centre. Eight writers were selected for a five week course (one evening session a week) followed by a lock in day at which we will have the opportunity to pitch a play and begin its development. Then, by February, we have to submit a play and four writers will be selected for a rehearsed reading with a professional cast and director.

I was really pleased to get through. It feels part of a building momentum that seems to be happening with my writing career at the moment. Certainly it seems as though things are heading in the right direction as opposed to the static, downward or circling trajectories that my writing career has been on for some time.

Sarah Woods is leading the course with Branwen Davies as Associate tutor. The first session started off at quite a pace which is understandable as we have a lot to get through in five weeks. First of all we did the introductory thing – which I hate. I know I need to get more comfortable about talking about myself as a writer and my writing but no matter how many times I do it I detest the experience. My mind goes blank and I struggle to remember even the basic things about my writing and then I spend the rest of the evening remembering all the things I should have said.

Sarah had a slightly different approach to us introducing ourselves. We split into pairs asked one another a set of questions and then introduced the other writer.

The questions were:-
Why do you write plays?
What do you feel is the role of the audience?
Do you have recurring themes or a specific style?
Do you have areas that you’re strong in?
What do you think you can do better?
What do you hope to gain from the course?
We talked these all through sharing what our partner had said, adding things when we felt we needed to expand. It was interesting to listen to the things that we have in common as writers and the differences.

More on these questions to follow because I think they such useful questions for writers to ask themselves on a regular basis that I wanted to address them in more detail.

We then moved on to talk about the elements of a play. We threw out suggestions and the flipchart was filled with words. Some words in green to indicate that they were key. Others in another colour to show that they were part of the elements that run at a deeper level flowing beneath the key green words. Some elements were contentious – with disagreements sparking about whether they were to be considered or not. Then we explored the links between them drawing lines between linking elements to confirm that everything links to everything else.

We talked about the elements being the building blocks or strata. We talked about things going wrong with the inclusion of the elements so that energy leaks from the play and a loss of drive within the play.

Finally Sarah told us a few playwriting methodologies.
Roy Williams – writes the whole play a story first.
Phyllis Nagy – sits in front of sport on television and just writes the play
David Edgar – 9 months of planning and developing then writes the play in 3 weeks
Alan Ayckbourn – writes the plays in a few weeks. Plucks the ideas from nowhere. Never gives them names only numbers. Over time the process of writing has become less complicated.
I love hearing about other writers processes. And on the whole I find that each of these processes makes perfect sense however Phyllis Nagy came as a bit of a shock. I did try this on Sunday and sat in front of the Grand Prix notebook on knee. But unfortunately sport on the television had the same effect as it usually did - I curled up and slept for an hour. Mind you then I felt quite refreshed and did a few hours of character development so maybe it worked in a roundabout way.