INDELIBLE FRECKLES

Let’s say you’re writing a thriller where your heroes are forced to take one of their own to a hospital, and for whatever reason the authorities MUST NOT KNOW whatever the hell they’ve been up to.

How d’you wanna play the hospital trip – straight or strange?

Straight:

– or Strange:

What we have from the ’straight’ version is a worry-wart father and weak-sister girlie character – understandable but BORing.

But in the ’strange’ version, who’d've expected a ballsy quick-thinker underneath Sexpot’s push-up brassiere and peroxided bob?

Let’s say your task is to write a one-page description of your project and, coming out of your ‘creative fugue’, you find yourself with three pages almost black with text.

You ask yourself:

• What is my story about?
• What is my story in one paragraph of three to six sentences?
• What is my story in one sentence?

It’s about finding the absolute core of your story: A fearful lass takes aikido lessons and learns about life – and sometimes finding a theme en route: Aikido teaches you to wait until you can see the whites of your enemies’ eyes.

But back to me and my screeds of story and character and plot notes, and my drowning dreams, and my hands that are tired and hurting from constantly being bunched into fists… and the realisation that I just have to walk away just far enough to say:

• What the heck am I writing?

From a certain distance – and without my spectacles – you’d be surprised.

The other day, I tried to google lyrics that had hardest words to say or similar but got distracted. (I spotted Chicago among the results and, having a sudden and intense urge to play their best-of CD – thanks, Stevo! – did so, sang along with Peter Cetera to 25 or 6 to 4, came back humming Happy Man, and on returning to my desk, couldn’t remember for the life of me why I’d googled hardest words to say.)

So I’ll just come out with it: there are three words that worry my manager – I don’t know.

Y’know, I don’t know as in –

Or like when your reader, having softened you up with nice noises about your latest draft, says they’ve got a few teeny questions, and you can answer the first few easy-peasy, but then the questions get more and more specific until your very limited dissembling skills quickly run out and you’re forced to confess –

The writer’s job is to answer as many of their readers’ (and audiences’) (and manager’s) questions up front.

It’s not enough to write something like –

– on page 13 just for some variety between the explosions and manly roars of exertion.

There has to be a reason for the eyes narrowing. Does the Eye Narrower know something the audience will discover to their horror – yes, their HORROR – on page 78? Is it merely dust in their eyes at that moment? Were they channeling Clint Eastwood for kicks?

If your Eye Narrower knows things, and you reveal them in an organic and well-paced fashion through pages 15-92, then your reader will reach your final FADE OUT and smile to themselves. They know now that the Eye Narrower needed some good strong reading glasses which, if they’d just swallowed their pride and bought them on page 2, the mistaken identity on page 13 would have been completely averted, and the script would have continued its Jane Austen meets “Sex in the City” course rather than the Nouvelle Vague Simpson & Bruckheimer reboot they have in their hands.

It’s not enough to know the script by heart. You have to know the story through and through.

The less questions your reader – and your eventual audience – ask of the script, the better the writer you are. Because YOU. KNOW. EVERYTHING.

– my iTunes randomed to Beyonce’s Single Ladies and I went like –

– how could I forget Messrs Murphy, Falchuk and Brennan’s brilliant and irrepressible Glee?

That show is responsible for my Goddess’s growing unease at seeing/hearing how many showtunes I can belt out.

(Yeah, okay: eight days since my last post is more than a few days – more than several days – more, even, thana week. Sorry.)

It’s been so long since we’ve rolled into 2010 I won’t bore you with -0

This is my blog – and in the world of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. Hooah.

2009 was really a year for the goggle box –

– but cinema had some new – and old – pleasures –

– and when not glooed to a flickering screen, there was always –

I won’t be disclosing stats because they’re pitiful and I have no excuse. But if you break my run of comment spam (three figures and rising this past month) and ask nicely, I’ll consider it.

2009 was an okay year for watching and reading – a better year for writing – and 2010 awaits my conquest domination attention.

Overall rating: Satisfactory – but must try harder.

– belated ho-ho-ho’s.

And hey: it’s 2010 and it’s been over a week since my last confession.

I haven’t forsaken you, but. I’m on holiday with my Goddess, and I’ve only recently sorted out things like the six five remotes that our very kind host has for his entertainment system, and how to actually use his broadband connection.

Normal transmission will resume in the next few days. Hope the season has treated you well –

– and happy new year from lovely Melbourne.

I should know better.

But no, I go and brag about Things I Have Done and how a sweet idea just fell in my lap – and now I find myself standing in a growing pile of recycled A4 sheets peppered with handwriting. These aren’t notes on just that one project but (counts titles) – holy moley:

• an opening for a one-act theatre monologue that’s all atmosphere and not a single word of dialogue;
• an opening scene and some random character- and concept-notes for a TV drama;
• pages of bullet points listing wants and not-wants for a feature;
• a concept document and anaemic scriptment for a play;
• and – oh yeah – pages and pages on that ’sweet’ project.

And that’s not all. There’s more where those came from. I’m serious.

‘S nothing like the early-early-early days of development where the promise of the concept seems within easy reach and all those querulous voices in the back of your head are easily silenced with, She’ll be right.

I know.

I know.

I’ll choose one – the ’sweet’ proj’, natch – to actually write. With another project as a fallback. And another to develop in between times.

Then some background music SWELLED –

– and CREDITS floated upwards into the sky as –

– I headed for the exit – the DOOR opened by unseen hands as I approached it and –

– FADE OUT.

Not often one meets The Man Who. And gets to namedrop so.

Mr Goff is leader of the Labour Party.

And a hongi is a traditional Maori greeting done by pressing one’s nose to another’s.

This issue is small but punchy.

• James Henry has written a most agreeable post about how “the actual writing thing [is] a bit tedious, but the feeling of having written is a very special and glowy feeling indeed”.
• Spotted in an Auckland “community entertainment magazine”:
  WANTED
  Wanted somebody to go back in time with me. This is not a joke. You’ll get paid after we get back. Must bring your own weapons. Safety not guaranteed. I have only done this once before. Ph 021 xxx yyyy

  (Fedora-tip: Metro magazine.)

• And speaking of time-travel, how’s this alternate universe where the Beatles didn’t break up in 1970, and John Lennon isn’t killed in 1980.

  (Fedora-tip: Kung Fu Monkey.)