Saturday 6th April 2013

I'm probably two, maybe three drafts away from the final draft of a story I'm working on called 'Broom Handle'. If I'm lucky, it's only one draft. When I had the idea for the story, it seemed really simple. And, actually, it is: the idea itself is quite a basic one, and shouldn't require too much in the way of complicated add-ons. But because the concepts aren't that simple for the characters themselves, I need to be a bit clever about how I'm telling the story, a cleverness that's currently hiding from me. Over the last few drafts, I've begun to hate this story. Not actively, not with real passion, not even so much that I consider the writing (and re-writing) of it to be a genuine chore .. but certainly enough for me to question if the story is actually good enough. And, by extension, if I'm good enough as a writer. 

Again, this is why it's useful to have deadlines. If I'd been writing this story a year or so ago, pretty much at any point in my history, there's a damn good chance that I'd have given up on it by now. After all: what's the point? Who's actually waiting for this story? No-one. (actually, that's a bit of a lie: two friends have asked to read it when it's finished, because they quite liked the sound of the idea behind it). It's so easy to let a pretty good idea wither and die even before it's finished. That's any idea: whether it be for a short story, a film - or even a little blog like this: if you don't get the damn thing down as quickly as possible, even if it's not particularly good, then there's a very good chance that nothing will get written at all. Of course, that's a major factor in itself: so many things don't get written because they are not perfect in their first incarnation. Then the inner critic gets disheartened, dials back, and thinks that they'll do better if the first running jump is much better. What happens, of course, is that there are lots of running jumps, quite a few bad stumbles, and then: nothing. Nothing actually gets finished. Writing (as well as anything I do, like acting, directing, improvising, whatever) seems to be a journey of constantly re-learning the same things, over and over. You can have twenty years in the same discipline, and still, in that twentieth year, re-realise with evangelical fervour the thing that you learnt in the first day. For me, in this past year, it's been this: it really is irrelevant if I write every single day. Even if I'm producing, say three thousand words every single day: that doesn't matter. Sure, it's relevant, but those three thousand words a day don't really add to the pile if you don't do one simple thing: ACTUALLY FINISH. 

I think it was doing Nanowrimo last year that really cemented that ethos for me. Now, I haven't yet looked back at the novel that I finished in November (with about thirty minutes to spare), and I'm reasonably confident that it's a pretty shoddy bit of story telling. But I know that it's a pretty shoddy bit of storytelling  and that in itself has been a instructive experience. Just the pressure of finding narrative closure (or a deliberate lack of closure) for my characters demanded of me a certain amount of discipline  that I hadn't always really buckled down to before, mainly because of that old idea that nobody's actually waiting for the story, so it didn't matter - not really - if I didn't actually buckle down and finish the damn thing. 

This year, I seem to have got a lot better at actually finishing stories. Some of them, I even think are reasonably good. So far, fate doesn't quite agree - none of them have been shortlisted for any short story competitions that I've sent them off for. On occasion, I suspect that the story wasn't quite right - either for whatever comp I was sending them off for, or maybe even that the story itself wasn't perfect. I haven't sent off a story that I didn't think was as good as it could be, however. 

So, these deadlines are a real life line. As I've indicated, there's a reasonable chance that if I didn't have a deadline for this story (April 15th), I might have bailed on it quite some time ago, as just so much damn hard work. It's easy to forget, however, that writing - good writing - is supposed to be damn hard work: it's not as if you can just throw one word onto the page after the other without so much as a re-write or checking over to see if it makes any sense whatsoever (like this blog, for instance). It really is - without getting pretentious about it all - an actual craft, and that demands a certain amount of respect and hard work. It can take a very long time to understand exactly what that means. I suspect I'm not even close to truly appreciating what I'm taking on. 

Lots of rehearsal this week for both the Brighton Fringe shows. With Three Kinds Of Me, we're having to do a fair bit of re-write in order to get the balance of the show right for the new space (and the new running time). We always knew that, just because of these seemingly innocuous and irrelevant details, that the show would be very different, that, indeed, it would be about something different, but it's still a helluva challenge to rip up what you've already achieved, and, for all practical intents and purposes, begin again. Well, I say we: all of the work is being done by writer/performer Sarah Charsley, who is doing extraordinarily well. I can imagine how challenging it is to totally re-do something that you are creatively so close to. 

As  well as 3KoM, we've got A Beginning, A Muddle, And An End, the totally improvised show. I'm still debating with format, etc - I don't want it to be too much of a ringleader/circus type improv show, where the 'director' directly addresses the audience and asks them to call out suggestions, because I feel (this week, anyway) that this is not quite in the neighbourhood of what I want the finished product to be. This isn't a judgement call on one kind of improvisation as opposed to another, but I certainly want the audience(s) to have the very real experience of a play - rather than an extended sketch - being formed before their very eyes. This week, we were rehearsing in the DukeBox Theatre, which gave the cast a good chance to experience how it will feel to perform on an actual stage, with light and music / sound. Things are beginning to fall into place .. 

Sunday 3 February 2013

I've just come to the rather startling realisation that I'm going to be directing four different things this Spring, all at the same time. Three of them will be in the Brighton Festival Fringe, and the fourth will be about a month after that. This might be what people are going on about when they accuse me of taking too much on.

The first thing is a revival - my friend Sarah Charsley wrote and performed her own script Three Kinds Of Me last year, and graciously allowed me to hinder her in the productions realisation. She's making the same mistake again for the fringe, and we're adapting the production to fit into a hour's space as per the usual demands of the festival. Three Kinds Of Me will be performed at The Warren (we just got the venue confirmed this week) and it looks to be very exciting. I'll be fascinated to see how we adapt a script that was created with one venue in mind (the NVT), and alter it significantly (but on the other hand, seemingly not at all) for a whole new venue complete with it's own dimensions and technical specs. I know that this is what professional productions have to do all the time, but I've never claimed to be in any way professional.

Speaking of the NVT, my second fringe production will be staged there, just a week after Three Kinds Of Me (which will make the production weeks of both interesting, to say the least). It's going to be an entirely improvised play, with a completely new story/play each night. It's at this point that many people react with suspicion, assuming that there must be some kind of 'cheat', or key scenes that stay the same each night. This isn't the case. The cast will rock up on stage each night with absolutely no idea of what they're going to be doing over the following hour. Now, you might argue that's largely true of some scripted plays, and I'm not going to argue with you on that score, but the fact remains that this is already one of the most terrifying productions I've been involved with, and it hasn't even started yet. And I speak as someone who's already directed Greek tragedy. There's a couple of audition dates, the first of which is this Friday (the 8th). If I get enough people along to the audition, I'm hoping to audition people together in hour long slots (you know, 7 til 8, 8 til 9, 9 til 10), so please get in touch if you're thinking about trying out for the production, and I'll let you know what's going on.

The other two productions are both with the youth theatre I work with - the PQA - and the first is a 10 minute play competition. I'll come up with more details as soon as they're confirmed, but generally, if you know any budding playwrights between the ages of 10 and 17, there's a chance for them to script a 10 minute play that will be performed by professional actors at the Old Courtroom in Brighton towards the end of the Fringe Festival. We'll also throw in a master lass with a BAFTA winning playwright to really get you kick started.

The other thing I'm working on with the youth theatre is a musical. For someone who isn't a particular musical fan (and indeed cannot sing) I find myself directing a fair amount of musicals. Well, I say musical. The last one was We Will Rock You. Which was actually great fun, although I did find myself rewriting significant amounts. Not because I'm that power hungry, but because they send you out the same version of the script no matter who you are, and they make no changes in the youth version, leaving you to edit out all the blow job gags (of which there are a fair amount). I felt that some edits were needed before I let the kids loose on it. Luckily, I don't think that there's quite as many of those sort of jokes in The Wiz. Not as far as I can remember, anyway.

Finally, I've spent this morning re-reading my latest draft of a short story called Broom Handle, a thing that I originally started last year. And, by God, it's terrible. Well, it's not terrible, but it's very clunky. The idea itself isn't too bad, and I like the characters, but it's very exposition heavy, and it takes too long to get to the point - which it currently needs to, because there's a lot to explain, otherwise the point that it's currently taking too long to get too will be - well, pointless. It's an odd read, because I can still see the potential for the finished product, but because it's currently frankly not very good, it's a bit of a dispiriting read. It would be extraordinary easy just to give up on it now as far too much effort. Luckily, however, the themes and ideas in it fit terrifyingly well into an upcoming competition with cash prize and inclusion in anthology, so that serves very well as some kind of incentive. It's probably about three drafts away from whatever version I finally send off as an entry. We'll see how it all goes ..

Bye Bye Baby, Sci-Fi

A couple of hundred words today on 'Broom Handle'. Not many, but they feel like important words, because I'm starting on the actual background details of the story, the whys and wherefores of the world I've created, rather than the narrative and plot. There's a problem, though: this story is sci-fi. And sci-fi sucks.

The thing is, I don't actually like sci-fi all that much. I mean, to watch, in film and TV, then great, but I've rarely come across sci-fi book (or speculative fiction, as it's increasingly being called) that I've really been blown over by. Of course, you could argue that that's simply because I'm not looking hard enough, and that would be largely true. I've not read any Phillip K Dick, for instance, and very little Ray Bradbury (although it was a collection of Bradbury short stories that first inspired this story). No Asimov, no Arthur C Clarke, very little John Wyndham (which I really should rectify at some point). I seem, rather, to have gotten trapped in reading, or trying to read, very poor sci-fi, stories that spend far too much time setting up this strange new world that's entirely normal to its inhabitants, but needs to be described in exposition heavy detail to the audience. I remember going to a couple of writers groups in Worthing, when I still lived there. Authors were invited to read extracts from whatever they were working on. On one particular session, a chap spent forty minutes describing in loving detail a post apocalyptic world in which women ruled, and men didn't wear the trousers. He wasn't talking figuratively. He literally meant that all the menfolk were banned from wearing anything below the waist. In the end, the person running the evening had to guide him off the stage.

It's not always like that, I should point out. I only managed two writers groups in Worthing, but at the second, the mood was somewhat grim. Everyone who had read had exhubrent confidence that was in direct inverse proportion to the talent that they displayed. More tension filled the room as everyone realised that no matter how much they hated everyone else's work, it was still better than anything they could produce. Eventually, an overly serious looking teenage girl stood up. She told us she was going to read us her poem. The room tensed even more; poetry is challenging enough even when it's in a book that you bought yourself. Then, as a final aperitif, she informed us that it was about her best friend who had died in a car crash a few months before. The tension felt quivering enough to snap: most of the stuff already read that night had been between mediocre and terrible, but it hadn't been introduced with the baggage of a dead best friend. She began to speak. It was, of course, beautiful. Simple, elegant, unfussy. Just a regretful goodbye to a young woman who had died far too soon. Somehow, she kept her composure throughout. The same couldn't be said of her audience.

Partially it was because that grieving teenager was a skilled writer, tapping into simple emotions and reactions, that brought out the best in her words, but it's also true that there's something about sci-fi that seems to bring out the worst in people, full of exposition and explanation by characters who don't need to explain the universe they live in, because they live in it. It's what I'm struggling with slightly in Broom Handle: there's a few details I need to explain, but I don't want to go overboard; just because we, the readers, don't know what's going on, doesn't mean that the characters are in the dark as well. That said, I'm a great fan of trusting an audience's intelligence: even if they don't exactly know what's going on, they're quite happy to play catch up. For instance, George Orwell's 1984 drops you right into another world without explanation from, literally, the first sentence, and trusts that you'll work out what's going on. It's about finding the balance.

Broom Handle is only a short story, of course - it's probably going to come in at about 4000 words - but I'm fond of it already because it's really the first story where I've had the initial idea, and actually managed to get it down on paper, before it fell apart like a badly mixed cake (or, indeed, like an ill-chosen metaphor). Quite often, I'll come across the first three pages of a story that I began writing some years previously. And the first three pages are pretty good. And the only ones that have been written. And here's the crunch: I have absolutely no idea what to do with the story. The white heat of the initial idea has long since faded, leaving only a dull, uninspired blank.

This blog, of course, helps. Obviously, it gets in the way (I'm writing this paragraph when I could be writing the opening paragraph of my next story), but I find that it's begun to focus me, if only to remind me that jotting down a few words in the evening could easily be a few hundred. And not be that much of a chore.