Tag: playwriting
Page 1 2018
Work on draft two of my first serious attempt at long form fiction starts on New Years Day 2018.
I’ve tried to absorb all the helpful prose writing tips I can find.
I’ve scoured the net, picked writer friends’ brains, been to a conference and come up with 6 key rules I want to stick to, both with this long story and the next long story in the pipeline.
In a years time I’ll measure success.
RULE 1
Leave the first draft for two to four weeks before returning to it with a fresh eye.
This was very hard to do but I can see the value in opening up the hard copy for the first time in 21 days, on January 1st.
During this hiatus, plot and character holes have become clear in dreams, while walking and when reading and watching comparative genre fiction and drama.
RULE 2
Write a one page synopsis of the first draft.
I had a rough shape in my head before writing draft 1.
I knew my principal characters, what would happen to them and how the story ended.
I’d sketch notes for each ‘block’ of action (about 4-6 chapters) but didn’t want to be bound to a rigid outline, I needed some creative slack, to go with the flow of my people and places as they appeared.
However immediately post draft 1 writing a synopsis offered a great snapshot of the structure and shone a light on some creaky scaffolding.
The synopsis showed that the arc of the story and the shape (point of attack, rising and falling action, climax and twist) were OK but it also highlighted some character inconsistencies, offered clarity around the themes I’m shooting for and flagged a section which needs cutting.
I can’t wait to make the changes.
RULE 3
Read a lot of books.
I’m currently looking at Paul Auster, Anthony Horowitz, Margaret Atwood and Octavia Butler and a doorstep of contemporary writers in the genre I’m writing in.
RULE 4
Long stories take a long time to write. Keep going.
As a dramatist I white heat the first draft of a play. Ten days feels like a long time to spend inside two hours of stage time.
It took a year and a half to write this first long story draft. I had other, consuming, work to do. I had to keep stopping to do the other stuff. At one point after three months of not writing a word I nearly shelved it, then came to my senses. I won’t do this again.
Write everyday, even if its just twenty words and DO NOT STOP.
RULE 5
Choose beta readers carefully and listen to their collective likes and dislikes.
My five first pairs of outside eyes are lined up ready to read the second draft.
They’re all very different people, men and women with all kinds of reading tastes.
I’ll ask them simply to read and react to the story, in the same way they would if they’d picked up the book at WH Smiths at the airport.
Their idiosyncratic reactions will be interesting and their converging criticisms will be acted on.
I trust them to be honest.
RULE 6
Work at being the best editor you can be.
By the time the long story is ready to send to the next filter, the literary agent, the manuscript needs to read perfectly, contain no spelling or grammar errors, be structurally sound and above all be engaging and compelling to read.
The editor, banished to the back brain on draft 1, will come further and further forward until she has full control.
Wish me luck!
Debutantes caught in a revolving door
Chiffon scarf trapped in the mechanism, in one moment and out the next, always new and never seen before, learning disability in general audience-facing theatre is stuck in debut mode.
Watching Imogen Roberts, Dean Hallisey and Stephanie Newman, all actors trained and supported by Access All Areas theatre in Hackney, interviewed on Channel 4 this week promoting JOY, the production they’re opening at Stratford East Theatre, you’d be forgiven for believing that actors with learning disabilities and/or autism have never appeared in mainstream drama before. The edit of the actors’ interview with Cathy Newman articulated the ‘ground-breaking’ nature of their engagement to a mainstream text based production alongside an emphasis of the actor’s outsider experience and difficulties with bullying and depression.
Lisa Evans ONCE WE WERE MOTHERS, directed by Gwenda Hughes at the New Vic Stoke at the turn of the millennium featured an early central role from Sarah Gordy (Call The Midwife and other leading TV and film roles), Mind The Gap toured Tim Wheelers’ productions OF MICE AND MEN and a raft of text based integrated work to general audiences over a span of two decades, with Dark Horse I wrote, directed and toured HYPOTHERMIA and SING SOMETHING SIMPLE on the mid scale across the UK and Hijinx recently took MEET FRED out nationally with an integrated cast to great success.
Many learning disability theatre focused companies including Access All Areas (who trained the actors in the Channel 4 interview on their course at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama) and Dark Horse who train actors who want to work professionally have successfully supported actors with learning disabilities to step into general audience facing theatre work for some considerable time.
A growing canon of narrative drama exists alongside the handful of accomplished companies and producers championing the development of integrated theatre featuring vocational learning disabled actors.
In fact, contradicting a message from the interview, there’s never been greater opportunity for exceptional learning-disabled actors thanks to the drive of many initiatives, casters and influencers.
That’s not to say there couldn’t and shouldn’t be a whole lot more done to redress the lack of representation but suggesting that progress hasn’t been made at all in training or employment may stall recognition for actors currently doing great work and building CV’s.
In theatre, the readily communicable learning disability ‘coming out’ fairy tale is attractive and has a tendency to parade itself into the foreground, in spite of its sketchy veracity.
Is this why every new theatre production with actors with learning disabilities in the cast is flagged as ground-breaking and why its necessary to forget the history of a small but influential group of companies, directors, playwrights and venues? Some significant pieces of integrated theatre work have been produced over the past thirty years.
Its great that JOY is happening and writer Stephanie Martin, director Melanie Fullbrook and the programmers at Stratford East are to be wholeheartedly congratulated, but isn’t it the case that outside of commercial theatre general audiences are as likely to be attracted by a new take on a story or a brilliant piece of drama as they are by the constituency of the actors in the cast?
Maybe success will equal the day when learning disabled actors cease to be promoted as inspirational success stories (with tough back stories) and instead the work is sold as artistically excellent and as part of a training discipline and artistic continuum that feeds into a bigger ‘whole’, the work itself.
First draft complete…But will it fly?
