Sunday 30th June 2013

Spent the last couple of hours working on a play. It's only a ten minute play, but that doesn't necessarily make things any easier. With a regular play - or indeed any story, you have to hit the ground running, not spend too much time circling the plot before getting stuck in. Apparently, a hell of a lot of scripts and stories submitted to competitions and  companies have too many opening scenes where people are just meeting up over coffee, having not particularly interesting conversations about nothing in particular. You can understand why these scenes have been written - the writer has had to try and work out who these characters are, how they talk, what makes them tick. What's less clear is why such scenes survive several drafts until the final submitted version. Those scenes are the ones that get cut (or should get cut) while you get to the point of the story, in two minutes or less. 

In a ten minute play, without stating the bleeding obvious, the same applies, to the nth degree. Your statement of intent has to be - well, stated, in the first thirty seconds or so. Certainly, in the draft that I've written so far, that hasn't happened. I can understand why, and also why many authors shy away from the same in their scripts. You don't want to blow it all in the first minute - otherwise, it could be argued, where else is there for your story to go? The answer, of course, is always forward. The story may not even be about what you originally thought it was. Now, that's a startling thought for any writer - that whatever idea got them to start the actual story is in fact facile, unoriginal, and at best, merely the kickstarter to the other story that you haven't even thought of yet - but it's an important one to realise, I think. It allows you to stop being quite so precious, and to be slightly more relaxed about letting go of your ideas - adapting, adopting to change. 

The draft that I'm working on isn't even the first draft, I think. I've recently got into the frame of mind that the first bit of work you do on a story or a script doesn't have to be thought of as the first draft. This allows your inner critic to get a lot more freedom, when you finally let them off the leash. Your inner critic still gets to go wild, bitter, and - yes, critical - on your 'first' draft, but it also means that you still get to do a lot of false starts and working out of ideas before you get to that level. For me, a first draft should still be a reasonable piece of work. Sure, there's probably (at least) ten drafts to follow, but that first draft shouldn't exactly be an embarrassment to anyone, least of all its author. 

This summer, I hope to redraft an old script that just won't let go - Four Play. This is a script that has already had two productions, albeit of two very different versions of the script. The most recent version, a couple of years ago, had very positive feedback, and I have decided in a fit of entirely uncharacteristic ego, to take that feedback at face value, including the holy grail that it (the script) might have some kind of life entirely independent from me (in other words, that it might make me some money). However, in order to make that any kind of reality, the one piece of negative feedback, often and consistently repeated, has to be taken into account - that it was just too damn long. 

Now, I believe people who were in the audiences that said that, when you were actually watching the play, that it didn't seem all that long. However, I also believe those people that said that, yes, it really did seem that dam long. So, its required from me to hack out about half a hour. Not exactly an easy task, and not just because I'm a precious writer who can't bear to kill his darlings. Well, not entirely because of that. 

For those of you that don't already know, Four Play is a story set in the traditional trappings of a county house murder mystery. The twist in this play is that all four actors have to play four parts each, the costume changes getting all the more impossibly quick and frenetic. Plus, there's also four endings. I think we calculated that by the end of the night, there are more than 116 costume changes - and an equal number of exits and entrances. All of this means that any editing that I do isn't simply a matter of just cutting out that scene or this scene, since that scene or this scene is very likely in place to accommodate another actor's costume change. Having said all that, I worked out earlier this year how I could (probably) knock off twenty minutes or so from the running time. In the original (or, to be more accurate, most recent) version of the script, a murder is committed in the prologue. Then, scene two, set the following morning, introduces all the main characters, and goes about setting up their motives, red herrings, etc. Nobody knows about the murder that's already been committed. After about forty minutes, the next murder is committed, and then the pace really kicks in. I always likened it to a roller coaster that spends the first part of the journey going steeply uphill, so that when it drops, it can do so with real speed and energy. 

Finally, I worked out earlier this year that if all the characters already know that the prologue murder has been committed, then we could get to the meat of the story a helluva lot quicker. Of course, it worried me that it would be a lot more difficult to introduce all the back stories and red herrings, and also how I was going to hide the identity of the first victim - it's a big reveal in the finale because nobody's actually aware of the murder, and therefore a lot more difficult to pull off as a surprise if everyone knows that somebody has been murdered. But, I was reasonably confident that something would work itself out if I just got along to writing it. It was still going to be a bit clunky, but I figured, that's what 27th drafts are for. 

However, yesterday, I realised that there was no need for scene two to be set the following morning - that was a waste of time, and actually made the pacing a bit odd. Actually, I realised, scene two should follow pretty much continuously from scene one. It does mean, however, that the very top of the play is pretty much at the heightened level of finale  - the pace and attitude of where we come in at the very start of the play is where most plays check out. Now, that worries me for a number of reasons - it's a hell of a big ask for the audience, and an even bigger ask for the actors -and I'm not yet convinced that the story itself won't be capsized by such a move. However, starting at the end is exactly what any writing manual / workshop implores you to do. I just never expected to be considering to do it quite so literally. Whatever else, I'm convinced that many audiences will not have seen anything like that on stage before. And that's a good thing. 

Probably.  

Saturday 29 June 2013

So, this time last week (God, has it been a week already? How the hell did that happen?) I tried to organise a picnic/barbecue thing on the beach. Of course, I know, and you know, that as soon as you say those sort of things out loud, then the weather will be against you. And so it came to pass that there were pretty healthy winds all day long, which effectively (very effectively, in fact) put paid to any chances of spending time whatsoever outside. This Saturday, things are different. This Saturday, there was a full day rehearsal with the youth theatre, so it was pretty much inevitable that today would be the first day of 2013 where there would be more than two hours of uninterrupted warm sunlight (please don't message me to tell you that, actually,  you've had loads of days of brilliant sunshine: we're talking about my experience here. My experience may admittedly be significantly a lot more boring than yours, but we happen to be on my blog, and not yours. Of course, you could argue - very successfully - that the reason that you don't have a blog is precisely because your experience is less boring than mine, and I'm really not going to argue with you on that point). 

Like most people who write a blog (with the honorable exception of Richard Herring) I've let it go a bit fallow without updates this month. This is mainly because of the festival fringe production I was directing (which I really, really will chat about in more detail in a couple of posts time), but a few other things have happened in the meantime. I guess the main thing most recently was turning forty. This, in fact, was the main reason for attempting a beach picnic/barbecue type of thing. Many people have been asking me - quite intensely, in fact - if I've bothered by this milestone. They ask with such intensity, in fact, that I've begun to wonder if it isn't to facilitate their own sense of glee at a fellow human being falling apart and crumbling to dust before them than any actual concern they might have for my well-being. But the fact is, I feel like I was born at the age of forty, so getting to the actual physical age is no great hardship. Of course, traditionally, this is the point in time when a man is supposed to have a  mid-life crisis, but since I'm not exactly adverse to the idea of suddenly having a classic car and a girlfriend who's all sorts of wrong for me, I'm not exactly sure that it will be any kind of crisis at all. 

There are probably lots of things that did or didn't happen while I was far-too-busy to keep the blog updated, but the thing that springs to mind was getting to the long list for a writing competition. Now, I'm hopelessly naive about these sort of things. I wasn't even aware that there was such a thing as a long list. I know, logically, that there must be - that would make a lot more sense of the phrase 'short list', but it wasn't really something that I gave much thought. So when I originally got the email telling me that I hadn't made the short list, I took that as a standard rejection, and thought no further about it, other than to redraft the story (for what was probably about the tenth time, now). I rewrote it with the critical eye of a story that had, in fact, been rejected. I think the changes that I made were actually pretty important, and vital - indeed, how had I missed them the first nine times? - and made the story a helluva lot better. That done, I sent the story off again (to its third chance). 

I hadn't really read the rejection email until weeks later, and it was only then that I discovered that my name was on the long list. Sure, it was still a 'rejected' entry, but I wasn't exactly sure what long list actually meant, believe it or not. For a moment there, I did wonder if it was simply a list of all the stories that had been entered - literally, a long list. Turns out, not. Apparently, there was over a thousand entries, and the long list was under 100 stories. As 'rejections' go, that's pretty good odds. As I say, I have already redrafted the story and improved it. The long list (now that I actually know what that phrase means) gets announced at the end of next week. It might not be third time lucky. 

But, then again .. 

Thursday 27th June 2013

Right, where were we? The last time we spoke, I was deep in rehearsals for the completely improvised play that I'd been directing, 'A Beginning A Muddle And An End,' I'm not stopping for long here today - at least, I don't expect to be - so for now, I'll simply say that the show, for the most part, seemed to be very well received. 

Well, for the most part. There were a couple of people who clearly hated it. There were also a couple of people for whom improv wasn't exactly their thing, and the production did absolutely nothing to shake them from their beliefs. But they still found the time to hang back and vocalise their admiration for bravery of the cast who threw themselves onstage (sometimes quite literally) with no idea what the hell was going on (again, quite literally). In fact, with this particular person I'm thinking of, I might well be assuming wrongly that they didn't exactly like improv; I'm just reading that into their lack of effusive praise about the actual show. But they were at pains to praise the dedication and cajones of the cast. In many ways, it was this praise that meant more than any compliment regarding clever or funny storylines that the crew came up with. 

Oh, and there was one more section of the audience that didn't exactly warm to us. (by the way, I should point out that the show went very well. There were lots of people that were giddily excited about what the cast came up with. It's just that this particular blog post is about the less flattering elements of the audience). These people had a problem with the show not because they thought it boring, or ill-prepared, or incoherent. In fact, they thought the exact opposite. Rather too much so. In other words, they thought that our improvised show wasn't in any way improvised. 

OK, on one hand - our first reaction, indeed - was to take this as some kind of compliment: the idea that everyone was so-damn-slick that it beggared belief - literally, that it was unbelievable - that anyone could be quite that smart to come up with this stuff without some kind of process or plan. I can understand it, to some degree. As audience members, we're primed to see a structure in our stories - sometimes, literally, a three-act one (a beginning, a middle, and an end, if you will). But, since at least two of our un-believers had actually written reviews taking us to task and, in the case of the particularly bad-tempered one, pretty much accused us of breaking the trades description act, I had been advised by many to exercise my right of reply.  I had been reluctant to do this, simply because a director replying irritably to what's essentially a negative review can come across as a crate of sour grapes. But when our in-house reviewer also raised an eyebrow at the possibility that the show was made up, I was persuaded. 

I won't post my reply here just yet - I'll wait to see if it gets printed in the NVT newsletter first. But the writing of it reminded me that audiences really like to see their improv performers sweat. It can't look too easy, otherwise it just gets drenched in what is, for me at least, one of the cardinal sins of bad improv, a sin that you are capable of even if you're excellent; that of self indulgence. 

Well, more on that another time. The coffee shop I'm stealing internet from closed twenty minutes ago.