Tuesday 31 December 2013

OK, we're up. 2013 is almost done, and it's a fair bet that you haven't achieved all the things that you intended this time last year. It's not all bad: new stuff will have come out of left field that makes life a bit better - you finally caught up with that boxset on Netflix that everyone else has been wittering on about for years, you found a place that still sells fizzy cola bottles (you know, the decent actually fizzy ones), that kiss was wonderful. The second one was even better. And it all happens again, starting tomorrow. 

And that's terrifying, isn't it? Obviously, 2013 had its good points (no, honestly, it did - look at the feed of pretty much anybody on your facebook right now: apparently there was a really funny meme from Buzzfeed sometime in March), but there were clearly some devastatingly upsetting moments over the last twelves months. Now, in real terms, that isn't going to change in any perceptible sense anytime soon. 2014 will be just as challenging as 2013. But with much less food banks. 

This isn't meant to sound depressing. Well, no more than how I usually sound. But it can be instructive to acknowledge the darkness, and find for yourself where the light may be found. So, the usual thing is to make the change starting with yourself (Ghandi had a very good bumper sticker about exactly that). This, in theory, is what New Year resolutions are all about. Give up this. Start doing that. Stop buying e-cigarettes from Poundland (you don't want to be the focus of the news story when the first e-cig rip-off blows up in someone's face). 

The problem, though, with New Year's is that it's so abritary. It doesn't actually mean anything. Since time itself doesn't actually exist (don't tell Steven Moffat that, however, otherwise that will be the plot of season 8 of Doctor Who, as well as the backstory of Doctor Who back in 1977), we can accept that NYE falling on December 31st is vastly unimportant. We already know that Jesus wasn't even born on his own birthday, and it's worth remembering that nothing changes tonight: the clocks don't go back, and the solstice doesn't kick in. Tomorrow might be another year, but it's also just a Wednesday. The middle of the week. What disillusioned office workers usually refer to as 'hump day.' 

Once you realise this,  it can deliver you free of a great deal of pressure. There is nothing special about tonight. You are not contractually obliged to stay up til the ball drops (even if Miley Cyrus is hanging from it). You don't need to have anyone to kiss at twelve. And there is absolutely no pressure to make a great sea change in your life and attitude starting tomorrow morning. Apart from anything else, there's still a tin of Roses and two decent bottles of wine to be finished off from the holidays, and if you're going to let them go to waste just because you are seeking to improve your life, then you have somewhat elegantly missed the point of what 'improving your life' actually means. 

This is not to say that seeking to improve is not a desirable pursuit. Sure, by all means, give up smoking. Ask that guy out / finally dump him. Eat more fruit. Take up rockclimbing/learning Mandarin/burlesque/a combination of all three. But here's the thing. It doesn't have to happen tomorrow. And indeed, if it gets to, say, April, and you haven't managed to get round to it, that's not a new year resolution that you failed at, because it's not about some arbitrary date in the calender. If you get to April, and there's still something that you need to start striving for, something that gives you energy and passion to push yourself forward, well, that's brilliant. Because, as you might have already worked out, tomorrow won't be the only Wednesday of 2014. There are plenty more hump days to come. 

Happy New Year. 

Sunday 29 December 2013

So, I'm going to be directing Shakespeare in the new year. I'm not convinced that I have truly comprehended what that will actually entail; particularly as I'm going to be directing teenagers. And it will be an open air performance. and, for he most part, the rehearsals won't be much longer than a hour. I truly may have bitten off more than I can chew.

The play that I've chosen is Twelfth Night. I have to admit, a lot of the reasoning behind that choice is sheerly me being bloody minded. One of the usual go to choices when you're doing Shakespeare with kids is A Midsummer Night's Dream (the younger kids can play the fairies!) or perhaps Macbeth (the older kids like the bloody bits! - plus, it's short). I do have ideas for both those plays, but now isn't the time. Twelfth Night is much more of a cheerful mess of a plot, which actually makes it a far more attractive project for a young group with a potential attention span deficit. The main challenged at the moment is doing a non-offensive hack job on the text, as it's reasonably unlikely that we'll be able to deliver the full text (then why bother, you may well ask, and I'm sure I'll get into that in a later blog entry).

Elsewhere, I'm considering directing again for the NVT (I'd already decided not to direct this season). Reading through scripts from old pot boilers, to Ibsen (of whom I'm inordinately fond) to a couple of more crowd pleasing, kids shows (which are performed reasonably rarely at the NVT). Nowhere near making a decision yet, but I think I have to put in an application soon. Truth is, I'm going to be fairly busy outside of the NVT as well this year: the short form improv workshops continue to go well, a second batch of longform courses start in the spring, and, perhaps most excitingly, we're setting up a regular night of brand new short plays at the DukeBox Theatre, which will begin in April. I know it's exciting because, very gratifyingly, friends are often taking the time to tell me how excited they ate about it.

And those two short stories I'm working on, to meet a deadline? Still working on them. One was for an event that demands its stories are no more than 1500 words. There's no way that's going to happen. And that's not a far-too-previous writer incapable of killing his darlings talking: the story just won't work if I try to shave it into the right word count. I've tried that before for another comp - while vicious editing is almost always a good thing, it can be instructive to realise sometimes that if the story needs to be told in, say, 2000 words rather than 15000 - then it should be. And the competion should be shelved for another day.

Unless, of course, I come up with another idea. You see, that's the mark of a truly lazy writer: always abandoning the work in progress for the next great idea.

Wait here ...

28 December 2013

Revisiting old stories can be very strange. I’m reworking a couple of old stories for upcoming competitions, and they seem to be fitting very well. The startling thing is that I’m only now really discovering what the stories are about. Not what happens in them, not the plot – that hasn’t changed, not really – but what the actual theme is, what the story means, potentially, to anyone who reads them. And these stories are both about a year old.

In the case of one of them, it’s been a very pleasing revelation, because I was always aware that I didn’t actually know what the story was about. I mean, it was a good story, it pottered along from beginning to end, it got the job done. And it got good feedback; people seemed to like it. But me (and, crucially, my inner editor)? I wasn’t quite satisfied. Obviously, I was being a bit more harsh on it than many of my readers were, but I tended to be left with a sense of ‘yes, very nice, but so what? What’s changed?’

Actually, lots of things had changed in what was a relatively short story (under 2,000 words), but I wasn’t convinced that my characters had learned all that much, that they themselves had been altered by events. And I wasn’t quite sure how to solve it. In the end (or at least, the original end), I decided to use my lack of certainty as a writer as a plot point: the characters themselves voiced a lack of certainty about how things were going to turn out. Now, if that sounds to you like something of a cop-out, I’d be the first to agree with you. But it seemed that most of my audience were perfectly happy by my cheat, finding it pleasingly ambiguous. Of course, sometimes the writer should shut up and quit while they’re ahead, but I was never quite satisfied. Then this competition turned up which appeared to be tailor made (with a couple of alterations) for this story, and I knew that I needed to make the ending neater. I just didn’t quite know how.

I’ve argued before (here, probably) that whenever I’ve had a problem that I couldn’t solve in my writing (or directing, or indeed in most any type of story telling), that I have already written the solution in an earlier part of the story: that plot point B has to happen, because I’ve already written plot point A, and they beautifully support each other. Such a shonky mantra, and yet it’s never let me down. I thought I might fail on this one, however. I had no idea how the two central characters could resolve their issues. There was too much difficulty to overcome, and roughly 80 words to do it in. And, it seemed, nothing that I’d already written in the first thousand words was giving me an exit plan.

And then I spotted it. I had the reveal: and I’d hidden it in the God-damned title. In the title. As if I’d always planned it that way, and that I’d named the story after I’d worked out the resolve. And while the rest of the story didn’t exactly write itself (I had to get involved a bit), it further strengthened my belief that a lot of stories are not so much created, as discovered, buried things that already exist, waiting for us to use the correct tools.