Script one, draft one: complete

In the words of several American teen tv stars: O. M. G.

I have just typed the last few lines of my first piece of dialogue. I’m pretty sure it’s brimming with typos, glaring clichés and enough wooden discourse to keep The Bold and the Beautiful in cliff-hangers for the next year but hell – it’s all mine! All one hundred and ten pages of it, and I’m pretty proud.

I have sent the script off to both contacts I did reading for on the feedback exchange and will eagerly await their responses. Hopefully my skin will be thick enough, and I think I’m suitably prepared for a mauling. At present I just want to learn as much as possible as quickly as possible, and this seems like the best way to do it. In ten years time when I re-read my first full length script no doubt I’ll be cringing and biting my knuckles in shame.

Conference call with The Artists’ Studio tomorrow. No rest for the wicked.

'Writing is re-writing'

And the editing is under way! I reckon by the end of Wednesday I'm going to have something concrete. 11,036 words so far - I've never written 11,000 words of anything before. It's a great feeling. And once I have a full proper draft I'll send it to the two people I've done work for on the feedback exchange, and let my housemate have a read. All very nerve-wracking. Both the feedback exchange people are older and more experienced than me, so the fear is there of feeling like a silly little girl who wants to play at telly. Luckily my housemate KNOWS I'm a silly little girl, so no need for embarrassment there.

So maybe in a week or so I'll have my very first script to pester the BBC with. Got to start somewhere, eh?

Font of knowledge

Successful day, I think. Completed report for Stephen Marsh on his script Care, pulled some ideas together for the Artists' Studio meeting, and re-read my as yet unnamed script. I'm actually pretty pleased with it, though obviously needs an awful lot of editing.

Couldn't work out why it looked so unproffessional so took the executive decision of changing the font from Calibri to Cambria. There - much better! Though that's taken me down from sixty-eight pages to sixty-five. It's like being back at uni and slipping in another couple of 'ands' to take me up to the 2,000 word essay minimum. I don't suppose Russell T Davies has such a preoccupation with word counts and accidentally opts for Wingdings on such a regular basis.

This week's tasks

Hooray – I have found a flat to move into and am no longer going to be homeless in 2 weeks time! I’m also hoping things calm down a little more at work. Both these factors mean I’ll hopefully be able to pay my second ‘job’ a little more attention. I have two days off this week (Monday and Wednesday) and intend to make the most of them. My aims for the next couple of weeks are:

-After providing feedback on two books for The Artists’ Studio I have a new brief to work on from them.
-Write report on the latest script I received through the Feedback Exchange.
-Try a first round of editing on my as yet unnamed script. I still haven’t decided if it feels like a radio or television script, so need to immerse myself in it tomorrow.
-I have also begun working on a second script, which will be a stage play or radio play.
-I also need to re-write the work I did for my writing group but am going to try from the first person.

There are also a few writing competitions I should try my hand at. One is the Guardian short story competition http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/may/15/guardian-weekend-short-story-competition closing date 18th June 2,000 words on the theme Summer. The other is the Asham Award http://www.ashamaward.com/ for unpublished women writers. The deadline for this is a bit later, 30th September, to write maximum 4,000 word ghost story or gothic tale. I have a little idea brewing for this one, after hearing recently how Alan Ayckbourn greeted a burglar in his house thinking it to be a visitor. I like the idea of a ‘visitor’ in a house greeting a child night after night only for the child to be told they don’t exist.

Here’s an excerpt from last year’s winner Because it is Running By, written by Jo Lloyd:

She would take a book and go walking, along the river, up the hill, nearly as far as the sea sometimes. She would find herself a quiet place in the bracken, and lie there, the book unopened, breathing green bracken, gorse flowers, worm-turned earth, things pushing into life, things dying, things rotting down into the darkness. Insects busied themselves around her. Further away she could hear the sudden panic of lost lambs, the despondent bleat of those that had been lost a while. Further away still, the hum of cars heading for the coast.

I really like that paragraph, and in particular the phrase “worm-turned earth” and the way it conjures the smell of wet wood and damp grass.

Royal Wedding & Worried About the Boy

BBC Two is currently running its 80s season, consisting of several documentaries and two wonderful dramas. Royal Wedding (by Abi Morgan – Birdsong, Brick Lane and Life Isn’t All Ha Ha Hee Hee) and Worried About the Boy (Tony Basgalloop – Hotel Babylon, Teachers, Being Human) are two very different programmes, but both enjoyable in their own way. Morgan’s drama follows a family living in a Welsh village, against the back-drop of Charles and Diana’s wedding in 1981. It seems strange and somewhat patronising to call it a ‘lovely little piece’, but it really was. The eighty minute show was heart-warming and tragic in equal measures. Morgan managed to tackle the political and the historical in an entirely personal way. She also captured the 80s feeling without parodying it too much or making a focal point at the detriment of other detail. The time period and the royal wedding seemed almost incidental, and the lives of the characters took centre stage.

Worried About the Boy was, for me, less about the personal and more about the drama. George O Dowd ripped through the screen in a blaze of drugs, face-paint and sex. The camera work and costumes stood out for me more than the script which, at times, seemed both rushing to get biographical detail in but simultaneously giving the viewer little to engage with. Boy George also made for a not terribly sympathetic character – though the eccentric outfits and make-up more than made up for it.

Real life gets in the way

I hate moving house. I hate it. Everything about it – the house hunting, the packing, the cleaning. I’m not built for physical labour, so after two days of hefting ikea furniture and scrubbing floors that haven’t been touched with the Jif (or to keep up to date, Cif) since moving in I’m bruised like a peach. But these joys are still to come – I’ve seen 12 properties, none of which I’d deign to keep my dog in. Arrrgh. So all this, on top of a joyous long weekend in Paris, have meant my writing/ reading/ general desperation has fallen by the wayside for a couple of weeks. Back on the case this Wednesday and my aims are:

1) To finish reading the book from the Artists’ Studio and provide feedback.
2) To read the next script I have from the Feedback Exchange and write a report

Ideally I also need to tackle re-writing the piece of work from my writing group a couple of weeks ago, taking into account their amends, and finish of my almost-complete first play draft. All of a sudden one day a week doesn’t seem like much time.