Almost the end of June

It's almost the end of June. I've set myself a target of the end of this month to finish at least 30 minutes and the first draft of the one page synopsis.
I'm happy with my first 10 minutes but I'm going to keep going back to it until I make myself unhappy and then get myself back to happy again.
The problem is the one page synopsis. I'm rubbish at summarising projects. Ask me to write a full series bible and I'd be laughing but ask me to pitch the idea in one page and I just stare at a blank screen and force out a sentence every now and again. Then delete the sentence.
I keep reading and re-reading anything I can find on how to do it but still all I get is a blank screen.
I have lots to say about it, I've been developing it for about two months now, but summarise it in one page?

Lost causes

after noticing a brief mention by Danny Stack that there might be news soon about the Red Planet Prize I've pushed everything to one side to focus on "Book". This is the start of a novel written back in my MA days, turned into insipid radio play about a year after I finished the MA. The core idea is something I keep thinking about as I really do think it has a potential to become something much, much bigger if I let it. Its progressing slowly and so far I haven't had those vibes I often get that I'm forcing the story into something it doesn;t want to be. Still best not jinx it.

Thoughts on text-based character-driven theatre

I like words and I like stories. I like how words and stories play out across different mediums; theatre, film, radio, internet and television. I like how physicality frames words. I like how images create words. I like how a thousand words can be created by an image. I like how one word can say a thousand things. I like characters, I like to follow their words, their moments, their stories. I like how a single image or a single words can tell you a lifetime of stories about one character. I like words and I like stories.

It's a marathon not a sprint!

I’ve just realised, as I sit down to write a negative blog, that my blogs so far have been about positive moments. I read a lot of books and blogs about writing. Yesterday I read two new blogs that referred to things writers do wrong. As I read the references I found myself saying, “I do that”.

http://lucyvee.blogspot.com/

Write here, Write now is Lucy v Hay’s networking and tips blog for her Bang2write Script Reading service. The blog, The Final Hundred Metres, is the blog that deflated my, previously quite effervescent, writing ego. The thing is, I hate making predictable writing mistakes. There is so much information out there about writing, so many blogs, books, articles, courses. I have no excuse for being amateurish particularly when it comes to common mistakes.

But The Final Hundred Metres has got me so sussed its scary. I absolutely, “default, just before the finish line”. I absolutely send out scripts that are “not the best they can be”. I also have a real tendency to get a script back from rejection and put it into the terminal drawer because I can’t face trying to throw myself into trying to resolve the problems. I always begin another script instead. Arguably each script gets better but that’s not the point.

Then I found myself reading Kim Revell from BBC Writers Academy blogging on BBC Writersroom about the incredible experience she’s had during the last year.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/writersroom/2010/04/do_it_1.shtml

A few things she said had a little too much meaning for me,
“I thought I was a writer before I went on the Academy. I wasn't. Not really. I was playing at it. Winging it with a knack for dialogue.”

“Thinking structurally has really transformed my approach to stories. I used to always get stuck... stories that began as promising ideas all too often fizzled out, ran out of steam, lurched to a grinding halt.”

Again I have lots of stories that began with promise but ground to a halt before being consigned to one of my many crates marked “Ideas”. So pulling these two things together it means I’ve always been rubbish at beginning and finishing a project properly. Effectively I’m grinding to a halt just before the finish line.
What do I need to do about it? I need to work more, I need to think more, I need to write more and I definitely need to polish more! I need to stop getting it wrong and start getting it right.

However in an attempt to pick myself up and move on from this I want to believe that this is all to do with the old me, the pre-New Year, pre-room of my own, pre-blog me. I am a new writer who is developing new ways of working. I think I've already made the changes needed to make it to the finish line. Hopefully it's a marathon not a sprint.

I love it when a plan comes together

A strange thing happened a couple of days ago. I was working on the other blog and needed to write a quick profile of myself. I decided the best thing to do was a quick summary of the 3 projects I'm currently developing, so sat down at the computer to attempt to summarise each project in a few words. In just a few moments of writing the synopsis for each was finished. The strange thing was, in trying to sum up the mountains and oceans of thoughts and ideas I have about these projects into a few sentences I'd managed to find the core of the play. Each of the plays had suddenly clarified for me.

The synopsis of each of these plays can be found here

When a project sprouts legs and runs

As so often happens with a project, Dirty to Me has evolved into something very different. Obviously this is a good thing. If a project doesn’t evolve then it ultimately ends up going back in the drawer (metaphorically and organisationally as I have my folders structured as On The Table, On The Mind, In The Drawer and In The Attic). Take First/Second Person?, for example, which has unfortunately gone back into the -In the Drawer - folder. I’ve done masses of work on it, the characters are developed, the idea strengthened, the different threads have emerged, the synopsis has been written and the plot has been developed but it just hasn’t started to form into something beyond the idea in my head. It hasn’t sprouted legs and run away with me in pursuit trying to keep up with it. The characters haven’t started to talk to one another, the story hasn’t started to hammer itself out, the plot hasn’t formed. The epiphany moment when themes and metaphors materialise is missing. After the epiphany point then usually the moment when the whole thing crystallizes follows but with First/Second Person I still need to help it find its legs. For now though it will go back into – In the Drawer.

Dirty To Me however has been a very different creature. I set out with it, as my first venture back into writing for performance, determined to approach my writing from a very different place. Because this is what I’d learned about my writing from my week course with Kate O’Reilly at Ty Newydd last year. The course was a brilliant week of a great tutor whose enthusiasm for writing was infectious and inspiring sessions that provoked ideas from very different sources than usual for me. I knew that if I wanted to write the kind of theatre that I enjoy watching then I had to work in a very different way. With Dirty to Me I set out with a fragment of an idea which was to explore how a relationship can reach a sexless relationship stage within a society where we are supposedly able to talk about our need for sex, talk during sex and discuss in lurid detail our sex lives with those around us.

I then very specifically set about working on the idea whilst restricting myself from thinking about characters, story, plot, dramatic moments – most definitely and determinedly not a narrative structure. All of them barred.

I asked friends to answer some questions about sex, noting down their words and images. I wanted to create a mass of unlinked thoughts and ideas. I found myself with random words, figments of characters, brief moments, all swirling around. I researched the subject of sex; sex in myth, sex in religion, sex in literature, sex in film, sex in the media. It was going to plan, figments, abstract conversations, images, film, music – unstructured chaos as I’d so carefully planned swirled faster. The swirling turned into a very definite dizziness and then suddenly the whole thing sprouted legs and ran off, characters started to talk amongst themselves with one character in particular emerging, then somehow dramatic moments started to hammer themselves out into a story and a plot, and then the epiphany moment of themes and metaphors spewed out into a ………..

-oh no, how did that happen- a linear narrative structure.

What can I say? I guess I’m just an old-fashioned narrative-structure girl at heart and no matter what I do there’s no avoiding it. Apologies Ash, I tried really hard.

I’m not quite at the Crystallize stage yet but getting very close at which point I will actually be able to do some writing.

Why would a mermaid have stairs in her house?

A friend of mine illustrates children’s books http://www.patriciamoffett.com/, recently at lunch she related the various discussions she’d been having with her editor, one was about the colour of gold being used for a mermaid’s letterbox and the other had been about whether mermaids would have staircases in their homes. I immediately wanted to live in her world. Discussing décor and lifestyles of mermaids and fairies and pirates just seems such a wonderful world to live on a daily basis.

I suppose though on reflection my world isn’t so bad if a little less delightful than contemplating how a mermaid travels from the upper floor to the lower floor of her house.

At the moment I have three ideas in development. “In development” varies from floating around in my head, to flip-chart notes (I find big pages and big pens a huge asset to pushing and pulling an idea from my head to the page), to outlining. Blogs Home is in my head, Dirty To Me is being drawn out on a flip chart and Today is the day you’re going to die is being outlined. This is alongside all the research that I’m doing around these ideas at the moment. So at the moment I’m imaginatively undertaking the following – a beginners welsh class, a history lecture on Lancashire and Welsh witches, a sex therapy session, a female stand-up sex-based comedy act, an 18 year old girl losing her virginity, being stalked, being in a 35 year marriage and only having had sex three times and being a Chinese international student on her first day at university in Wales.

Still I can’t help myself being drawn back to the conclusion that mermaids would NEVER have stairs.