Sunday 31 May 2015

Tomorrow, I start a new series of acting classes at the New Venture Theatre, for all the Mondays in June. Before, the classes have mainly been centred around improvisation and confidence in performance, but this time around, we're going to have a look at script work. There's a line that I now quote in my classes - and annoyingly, I can't actually remember who I'm stealing it from - that goes something like, the script is just the blueprint, not the final product. This is something I think a lot of us could afford to bear in mind a lot more keenly.

 

Obviously, we should have a lot of respect for the writer's words - hell, I write myself, I know how much time, effort, and low level depression I put into an average script - but I notice that a few actors and directors feel really handcuffed by a script. Sometimes, admittedly, that's the playwrights fault, when the script is too exacting in its directions, saying that an actor should exit stage left when there's no real reason for the actor to leave in that direction. I remember a good chunk of rehearsal time being sunk because two characters were meant to be having a private conversation, but another character was in earshot. That third character had no more lines, no more narrative relevance, and was clearly not meant to be on stage anymore. But the director refused to have him leave the stage, simply because there was no stage direction dictating that. They were allowing the story to get trampled over by a stray LX cue.

 

But I like the idea of a script being your starting point for a production, rather than the end game. For many that's obvious - nobody pays £70 for a West End show simply to pick up a copy of the text and read it in silence - but like many obvious things, simply re-stating it in slightly different language makes us reassess and realise it anew. Plus, if the script is any good, it can certainly put up with a little punishment. Shakespeare is particularly good at this, and it's one of the reasons why his plays still get performed 400 years later. You can rip them apart, dress them in Gulf War fatigues, and make them continually relevant to the audience watching.

 

Obviously, not everyone agrees. I remember talking with a director as they prepared to take on Romeo And Juliet. He was keen to do an entirely original, refreshing production, unlike any that had been done before. I mentioned that I'd enjoyed the 90s film version (the one with Claire Danes and Leonardo DiCaprio), at which he sniffed, and muttered: 'That's not Shakespeare.' I knew then that this was a conversation that wasn't going to last much longer, and in any case, I didn't quite understand it, coming from a man who habitually did all his Shakespeare productions in non-Elizabethan dress. If you're going to make such an absolute criticism, at least commit to it absolutely.

 

Anyway. Five acting classes at the NVT in June, all to do with fear of script, and using it as a blueprint. I've got one more Iron Clad Improv class (tonight) at the Cricketers in The Lanes, and then we're back to the DukeBox Theatre from next Sunday.

 

Writing has been going well this week, but I'm mournfully aware that I've just had a week off. Check in this time next week, and you'll see if I've kept up my word count.

 

Acting Class details here and improve drop-in details here.

Friday 26th September 2014

So, that's the first week of rehearsals done for The Snow Queen. And it feels like we've already got a fair bit done. I'm trying to go in softly to begin with, and have relatively few rehearsals when I call everybody. Frankly, there'll be enough time for that later in the production process. What's already so pleasing - so exciting - is the amount of charisma already bubbling off the stage. Everyone seems to be perfectly pitched opposite each other, and finding little nuanced moments that I didn't think of writing. Hell, when this year began, I didn't think I'd end up writing a musical, (or to be exact: a play with songs in it) but it's odd how things turn out sometimes. I mean, I don't have a musical bone in my body (actually, I do: it's my femur, and you can use it to drum out a mean solo on some Led Zep, but the downside for me is that I have to be either dead or an amputee), and I've managed to hack out some lyrics. Let's be honest - in a couple of cases, those lyrics are almost literally hacked out. They initially sounded clunky and and straining, and I've greedily availed myself of any help that I could in order to get them purring like an engine or a head of state on the phone to a smary Prime Minister. We've got most of the songs in some kind of working order (we're gonna have another meet about it tomorrow), and I still need to fix a couple of basic problems in certain lines (apparently, I refuse to accept that singers quite like to take a breath every 560 seconds or so), but it sounds like we are in fairly good shape. 

Newsjack came back this week. It's the open-door submission radio show that pretty much anyone can write for. I've had my eye (ear?) on it for a couple of years now, but never submitted. Actually, that's lie: I did deliver a sketch a couple of years ago, which, if I remember correctly, was a Life On Mars sketch that put Gordon Brown in the Sam Tyler role. Yes, I know. But generally I haven't tried writing anything for the show because .. well, because I'm not sure that I know how. I'm not being self-deprecating. I'm genuinely fascinated and somewhat awed by sketch writing. I don't quite k kw how it works. I love good sketch comedy, although I'll concede that the definition of good sketch comedy varies wildly from audience member to audience member. And lest we forget, Big Train (the one that usually gets mentioned in conversations like this is about 15 years old now. I find something very attractive and seductive about a good sketch. A novel is a strange and exciting journey, a stand-up is a bottle of wine with a great friend who shares much of the same opinions as you, and a sketch - a sketch is that piece of cake that makes you emit inappropriate noises when you consume it. A good sketch (for the most part) is  delightful, small, unique (I knew someone who used that phrase on their dating profile). All my favourite sketches have got from me first, a bark of laughter, then a hiss of jealousy: that idea was so clever/beautiful/simple .. It was there for the taking, for years and years .. and someone got there first. 

A friend of mine tagged me in a post this week, suggesting that I write for NJ, which is prompting enough to do something I guess (we all write a lot better if there's someone waiting over our shoulder). The fact is that I'd already tried to write a couple of one-liners , and then my Internet failed - I was trying to send emails from my phone, but my email wasn't playing fair. I'd had lots of phone time with the lovely people at EE (not Phones 4U, they weren't returning my calls for some reason) before it became apparent that I had apparently exceeded my Internet allowance. So, the readers of the slush pile at Radio 4 Extra were spared my inane ramblings for at least another week. 

I listened to the show as it aired, however, at least partially out of research: what was the house style? What exactly was the sort of joke/sketch to get through the gate? I have a sad suspicion that this is the mood that most of the listeners attend the show: not simply punters, but slightly earnest would-be writers listening stony-faced as they try and crack the code. I'm not judging: as I've said, I'm one of them. There were a pleasing amount of gags that made me laugh out loud (and at least one that made me jealous that they'd got to the joke before I did: one about Phones 4U employees and their contracts), but I'm still not really any the wiser as to what makes a good sketch. But if I can get at least one joke through the gate .. then I would consider myself at least holding the foot of the ladder. Not the first rung. That'd take some more time yet. 

Wednesday 24th September 2014

Last week was the first read thru for The Snow Queen. I only realised during the evening that a significant number of the cast were there on a lot of faith - they hadn't seen a script at audition, or even when being offered a part. (They should consider themselves lucky: some of my casts haven't seen a complete script until halfway through rehearsal. You think I'm kidding). 

It was a lovely night. Obviously, as director/writer, you're hyper-sensitive to the mood of the room, anxiously scanning the faces to gauge the reaction of everybody (particularly when they're not reading, and simply listening to others), but it seemed to me that everyone was generally positive, even allowing for my manical paranoia. The play itself seemed to whip along at a fair pace - a good sign if that's happening on the very first read thru - and no scenes sounded like they outstayed their welcome. 

A couple of lines still clanged in my ears, dialogue that just snagged like a jagged nail on a jumper (lines  like that one, for instance), but they seem to me to be easy fixes: a word here or there to get everything breezy. And it's encouraging to know that all of the actors are already finding the character within their characters - in a play like this one, even though it's not actually a pantomime, it's really important (to me at least) that each character, even those who might only be on stage for a matter of minutes, have the potential to be the absolute favourite character of some kid in the audience. 

Despite my very best intentions to keep things simple (no, honestly - don't laugh), there are still a good number of technical demands on the show, not least a number of snow effects. To their credit, the team on Snow Queen (Team Queen?) have not yet ran away screaming, and are clearly thinking hard about how to get me what I want, or at the very least a decent facsimile. It's all very humbling, and prompts in me a desire to look like I know what the hell I'm talking about. We've had a couple of rehearsals proper since then, and I'm keeping them fairly small and simple - the big rehearsals with twenty-plus (?!?) won't start really untill next month. We've got a couple of issues, like the image that's in my head for the Snow Queen's throne, and the fact that, while we have the music and lyrics written, we've just lost our best chance of someone to arrange the music. It's not that surprising, really - its quite a challenge to find someone who's prepared to give up lots and lots of hours of creativity and talent for no money whatsoever. 

Actually, scratch that - it's what the New Venture Theatre (and many other non-professional theatres up and down the country) are absolutely brilliant at. Obviously, a good few of us - such as the actors and directors - are reasonably guaranteed of some degree of praise at the end of everything. Generally speaking, people don't tend to go out of their way to praise the set. Indeed, if they do, it's usually an implicit criticism of the production. So I'm reasonably confident that we'll be able to solve our musical quandary (I must be, otherwise I wouldn't be happy talking about it on a public blog). 

Tonight's rehearsal is with Gerda and the Robber Girl, both of whom I'm rehearsing with for the first time - Gerda partially because the actress is already deep into rehearsals for another production which goes up in about a fortnight, so frankly, that tends to be her priority at the moment. I'm really looking forward to tonights session, and seeing what everyone does with the roles, particularly as I've altered the characteristics somewhat from the Hans Christian Andersen original. But then, I had to do that once or twice in the adaptation .. 

Tuesday 29th July 2014

Going through the sixth / seventh / eighth draft of The Snow Queen. I don't even know anymore; the drafts have all sort of blended into each other; fixing the problems in one as I reprint out the next, printing out the next knowing already that such and such a scene has to be swapped with another, except that there's no real way of doing that yet ... and at least three characters haven't been fully sketched out yet .. All the usual stuff that happens around this time of the rewrites. 

At the moment, I'm far too close, scaling the sheer cliff face of the script to know if it's actually any good or not (I'm going to have to have another sweep of the original Hans Christian Andersen before I do too many more rewrites, that's for certain). But on one thing alone, I appear to be in pretty good shape. Currently, I have almost all the story that I need to tell down on paper - in about half the pages that I need. This is very good news. The last script I produced clocked in at over two hours. People didn't mind too much, but they didn't mind with the qualification that, yes, it was too long. Plus, this is a kid's show. There's no way that I'm going to be able to get those kids to sit still for a hour and a half, let alone over two. I was initially slightly concerned, because as well as all the actual plot and narrative stuff I'm writing for this thing, I'm also writing songs (yeah, I know. Shush). I thought that perhaps that once I'd come up with the songs, there would be room for only the lightest and flimsiest of plots. I've been watching a lot of Disney, to see how they get away with it. Turns out there's a lot of swinging from tall buildings. 

The other thing that's been a bit of a challenge this week is the casting for our next batch of short plays - for CAST IRON 3 - in September. We always knew that we would lose some of our regular company this time round, to the likes of Edinburgh, summer holidays, and 'a life' (yeah, me neither), but it's been a particularly tough call in terms of casting and the like. I think we've almost got it sorted, but it has meant that our various casts have significantly less time to rehearse their plays. 

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.  

Methods Of Work Avoidance # 2365

In between writing re-drafts (no, really), I have also found the time to create a avatar of myself via the website BitStrips.I'm fully aware I may have created  a generously attractive   version of myself, but screw it, it's my cartoon,and so I'll do what the hell I like.  

Thursday 29th August 2013

At ‘that’ stage with a good few short stories. I’ve been a bit like a magpie with them over the last few months (and by ‘few’, I’ve just realised I mean ‘twelve’), in that as soon as one idea gets a bit too tough to carry on writing, then I’ve flitted to another work in progress, and tinkered with that one. As soon as the tinkering gets a bit too much like hard work, then I’ve gone back to the first WIP (or a completely different one), so that my attention  span doesn’t get too hammered over the head, and I give up on the writing altogether.

Now, depending on who you listen to, this is either a perfectly fine and noble way to stop ideas (stories) getting too saggy and baggy and boring, or it’s the worst idea ever, because you have to stay committed to your ideas, and see them through to the very end, otherwise you’re never actually going to finish the bloody things at all. And, of course, in some cases, both those statements have been made by the same person at different times. Like all pieces of advice, they can be embraced or ignored as you see fit (and as you see that the advice itself fits you).

Right now, however, I feel that I need to go the hard-work route, and commit to the stories, and finish them off. One by one. This will be somewhat tough, because, at the moment, a lot of them are crap. Don’t get me wrong; this isn’t self-loathing, deprecating analysis. Even at their current stage (and I think a good few of them are about three drafts away from the final version), some of them read better than a few of the short stories I’ve bought on the kindle. There’s a reasonable amount of short stories self-published by unknown authors, some of them good, some of them awful (not nearly as many as you might think, however), and the majority of them – uh, average. Now, I’m sticking my neck out here slightly, because of course, I intend to publish my own collection at some point (reasonably) soon. So it’s a bit of a risky job – if not actually arrogant – to compare my unfinished works to those that have actually been uploaded onto a website and people are paying for. But, what the hell. I will claim that in at least a couple of cases, the stories that I’ve got, in their second or third draft, are better than the stories that somebody has deemed fit for public domain, publication, and consumption. And, yes, I am talking about the drafts of my stories that are currently in the ‘crap’ stage.

It’s not as if the stories that I’m talking about are bad, not at all. And I’m aware that I’m certainly setting myself up for a fall when I do publish my own (hey, here’s an idea, maybe I don’t publish them, that’ll keep me safe from public criticism – even better, hell, I won’t actually finish any of the stories ..). The ideas behind the stories (the ones that people have published, not mine) are actually pretty good. But quite often, the story is told in such a brief, perfunctory fashion – in the matter of about three kindle pages – that I wonder, what’s the point? It feels less like a story well told, and more like the synopsis on the back of the DVD cover : ‘Once there was this guy who said that it would be cool if we were all nice to each other but he got nailed to a tree but it was OK because he came back to life the end’ … Now, come on. I’m sure you could’ve stretched that out a bit.

It’s occurred to me recently that short stories don’t always have to be short, and they don’t have to be stories, not in the normal sense of the word. Quite often, I see short stories (very short, around 1,000 words) struggle to keep to the format of a beginning, a middle and an end. I understand the desire to keep things coherent and within a recognisable framework, but I’m not sure it’s always vitally necessary. Some of the best short stories deal with a passing thought or emotion, a reaction to something else (I’ll be honest – some of the very worst short stories do that, too, because the writer is shrinking away from committing to an idea – but that’s a blog for another time).

Anyway, I managed a few thousand words each on two stories this morning. They’re both currently at the stage of ‘terrible’, but they still feel good to write, and I still (just about) remember what I liked about the ideas in the first place, which isn’t always the case. Plus, it’s helped that in the café where I’m writing at the moment, there’s a couple of other people, both working on Important Stuff. There is a distraction here, and it’s name is Free WiFi, but there seems to be a atmosphere in these kind of places; if you’re vaguely aware that the other people are actually furiously working, rather than piddling about on facebook, or tweeting the hilarious ‘other’ dream that Martin Luther King was going to talk about, it ‘shames’ you into doing some work yourself.

Or, as writing avoidances go, writing a blog isn’t exactly the most terrible .. 

Monday 29th April 2013

When do you throw in the towel, and realise that the story you're working on isn't actually any good? I'm in the middle of a couple of tweaks on a short story that's due a deadline to tomorrow. Any tweaking is purely cosmetic now, just a tightening up here and there. At this stage, I don't want to do too much of a rewrite, because the story itself is pretty much written. Completed. Finished. As well it should be. I've sent it off to two other competitions already.

Basically, the not so hidden punchline to that paragraph is that, not only have I posted the story to two previous competitions, I've also had it rejected twice, too. It hasn't even made the long list. I just got the last rejection a couple of days ago, meaning that it's perfect timing to release it from statis and get it out there one more time. Now, I'm a reasonably paranoid and self deprecating kind of chap. Hell, I'm also a unreasonably paranoid and self deprecating kind of chap. Any lack of praise for my work will cause me to tense up, convinced that whatever it is that I'm working on isn't worth any kind of comment whatsoever, and people are all too willing to change the subject before being forced into a situation where they have to concede that whatever thing it is that's under discussion is just disappointing, whether it be a short story, a play, or maybe even sexual congress. Maybe that that middle one. Whatever. Obviously, being like many other creative types, these paranoid feelings remain in check even when people say flattering things. Maybe they even get heightened, because we're hard wired, most of us, not to really take on compliments, not without a great deal of effort and self coaching. Many famous actors refer wryly to the recurring dream that one day they're going to get 'found out' as someone with no talent. Why should it be any different for a creative type who hasn't even had a career yet?

Look, I know how a lot of short story competitions work. I've heard the horror stories about, uh, the stories. The unpalatable truth is that the people judging these things have to wade through a remarkable amount of dreck, of stuff that is at best unoriginal, and at worst, seemingly unfinished. And a lot of the time, judges are forced to wonder to themselves 'does this writer know? Do they actually think they're good?' Presumably they do. Here's the thing: I actually like this twice rejected story. It's not any great and powerful change of events, but it is a sweet moment. A passing kiss, if you like. So I have no problem with sending it off one more time. To see what happens. I keep in my mind all those popular tales of the authors who had their most famous story rejected thirty or forty times before finally getting accepted. Sometimes, it really is just a numbers game.

(while writing this blog, I came across a flyer for the very short story competition I'm about to enter. I've decided to take this as a good omen. On the other hand, while writing the last paragraph, I spotted someone pushing a ten foot wicker man down a Brighton high street. I'm being serious. I haven't yet decided what sort of omen that is. Probably best not to think about it too much)