Pre Four Play

Deadlines are so useful. I have about twenty to thirty short story ideas on the boil at the moment, but it seems that the only way I can get any of them finished is to find that they're suitable for any one of the hundreds of short story competitions that are going on at any one time. That, I've found, seems to concentrate the mind wonderfully, concentrating your focus into an idea that is actually finished (as opposed to one that might be finished, one of these days). In this respect, then, I'm a very poor writer, in that I've not yet managed to get myself into some kind of routine where I'm writing at least something every single day ... you'd think that that would be something that I would learn from the heady days of NaNoWriMo, but, unfortunately, it wasn't something I even achieved while doing NaNoWriMo: there would be long stretches of days when I didn't manage to write anything at all (hence, I suppose, the wrist breaking strain of having out about 9,000 words on the last day). The other advantage of writing competitions, of course, is that it gets your name out there, and sometimes comes with a cash prize. I won't let the fact that I have never won one yet put me off. Too much. 

Two Christmases ago, I was putting the final touches to a script of mine called Four Play. Well, I say final touches. It turned out that I had to do a major redraft in order to get it ready for the Brighton Festival Fringe that year. Well, I say that. It's still not finished, not really, which is alarming, since there was an early version of this play knocking around over ten years ago. And it's still not done, not really. This isn't so much an example of a writer not being able to leave well alone (not entirely, anyway), but the result of too many people telling me that the play has a future. A professional future, I mean. You need too many people telling you stuff like that. Obviously, after every production - as writer, actor, director, whatever - you have a certain number of people telling you nice things, and usually you're able to tell whether they mean it, or if they're just being polite. There's nothing wrong with just being polite, of course, but I think we have all - certainly in the non-professional arena of theatre, anyway - seen lots of stuff that is perfectly fine. You know, it's OK. There's nothing wrong with it. Certainly, there's also a lot of productions that are truly excellent, or come across as professional - or whatever it is we regard as professional. And since I tend to be a fairly paranoid little writer/director/actor, it takes a lot of persuasion to convince me that your compliment isn't just false flattery. I'm not saying that I'm wanting you to repeat the flattery again and again (I am a bit), but it is true that if you hear the same compliments from different sources, and, most importantly, from sources who seemingly don't have anything to gain one way or the other, then you do begin to consider the possibility that there might be something of a future in something you've written. Fear of failure (and indeed, fear of success, which we'll get into another time) can only go on so long before it just gets boring. Or - more disturbingly - part of your DNA. 

But, anyway, the damn play still isn't finished. I hope to get a good chunks of it done this holiday season, mainly because once 2013 kicks in, so do quite a few other projects that will begin to take up my time. But, here's the thing: Four Play is currently too long to be a successful touring production. By a good 50 minutes. What's going to challenge me over the next couple of weeks isn't so much what to write next: but what to cut out ..