Indelible Freckles

What have I achieved this year then?

• I wrote a ten-minute play in twelve hours, and watched it premiere (and close) twelve hours after that;
• I’m facilitating a disparate group of Pasifika playwrights (four months straight and counting);
• I’m an (increasingly) active Board member of the New Zealand Writers Guild;
• I’ve had a short radio play accepted for broadcast on National Radio;
• and I did some script consulting on a couple of projects.

I’m tempted to skew my stats a la the police leadership in The Wire but, for me, a project isn’t finished unless it’s finished, knowwha’Imean?

So:

• To’ona’i crawls towards completion;
• I’m co-writing a play, to premiere in 2012;
• I have my own play to push - and thanks to the joys of misery likes company peer pressure, the first act is due by mid-January 2009;
• the diversionary feature spec has copious thematic and strucutural notes… but an actual story has yet to emerge;
• enamoured with the short radio play’s ’success’, I’m writing an hour-long radio play: I’ve got the opening and closing acts while the middle is currently all rough notes - forty pages to go!
• and the long awaited spec feature of 2007 has been roughed out and is approaching a proper first draft.

[Takes a few steps back and squints]

Okay. I suppose it’s just about perspective.

I’ve done my shopping. I can do whatever I like now.

• Danny Stack has ten essential ingredients to becoming a professional screenwriter (the first step? read.)
• John August has some solid advice on what to do with your ill-gotten gains hard-earned ch-ching: money 101 for screenwriters.
• Lynden Barber has a posted an excellent article on The non-cinematic art of David Lynch (with part one of seven here).
• Another Kiwi scribe hits the ’sphere: Sanjay Patel asks, in the context of local stories having global resonance, What makes a Kiwi film?
• It would be just like Lucy Vee to be an agent of the universe and provide some online resources for writing a play.
• Lee Lofland has a list of suggested pressies for the protagonist in your life (no Barretts or miniguns, but).
• Jane Espenson has a post about writing comics, while –
• – the Lair of the Kung Fu Monkey has a been taken over by comic scribes Mark Waid and Michael Alan Nelson. (“[A] comic story is made up of frozen moments” - I mean, who’d a thunk?)
• And I’ve just read the final volume of Brian K Vaughan and Pia Guerra’s Y the Last Man. Having swallowed tears aplenty, I have vowed to read the whole series through again (once the libraries reopen).

Ladies and germs - happy holiday reading, viewing and relaxing.

You know those black-and-white films where -

How do they do that?

(Okay-okay-okay: it’s a movie.)

I was flashing on those kinds of scenes when I took up a 24-hour theatre challenge last weekend. Twelve hours to write a ten-minute script (to be followed by another twelve hours where the director and actors would make the script a reality). I’d spent the first two hours thus: 30 minutes to find out the actors’ strengths and weaknesses (the director couldn’t make the meet-and-greet so I’d have to wing the content and style); 15 minutes to drive home; 45 minutes of quality time with The Goddess; and 30 minutes of, among other things, making coffee, adjusting my seat, realigning the rubbish on my workspace for optimum feng shui, scheduling my chocolate intake, and surfing the net.

… Maybe the quality time was more 30 minutes (and no less) and the fart-arsing writing prep/warm-up was 45 minutes.

So. There I was, in my cave, mentally juggling the following elements:

• three actors - one male and two females - to play with;
• two props - a length of rope and a violin case - to work into the story;
• and less than ten hours before I had to hand in a script.

The first opening riffed on Waiting for Godot. Maybe too self-referencing. I stopped after the second line of dialogue.

The second opening came straight out of Casablanca. I stopped the moment I typed (V.O.).

I had beginnings but no ends. With the nine-hour mark rapidly approaching, I tried to tackle it more from a production point of view instead of my usual story-is-king position.

I had my props, both meat and inanimate. I had a running time. I was one of six writers, and my position in the playing schedule was four - after an intermission. Assuming the first three plays were trend- and bar-setters, I needed to get right into the action. I needed to stake a claim on the audience’s attention, and keep it.

A filthy smile formed on my lips: What if we returned from intermission to some good ol’ bondage?

I laughed out loud.

And in that beginning was the ending, too.

Sometimes, I’m just too cool for school.

POSTSCRIPT: As it played out on stage, all I could see were the bits of dialogue I could have trimmed, all the action I could have written, as well as an act that is one long fridge moment. But it has a beginning, middle and end. It has a set-up, exposition and pay-off. And it got some laughs, none of them cheaply, and moved. Thank the gods for actors - and the director, of course.

After the play’s opening scene was given a group reading, I did a Q&A on the script’s background, why’s and wherefores, and there was one question I didn’t get around to answering (sorry Bronwen): How long did it take to write?

Thirty minutes including a couple of passes at dialogue and characterisation.

Such a glib response, however, is disrespectful to the craft. The actual writing typing may have taken only a half-hour but that doesn’t take into account that:

• I’d had the idea since May;
• I didn’t start making notes about it until July;
• and the mental image of actors lying on the stage before the audience only occurred in September, and kicked around my head for a week before I put finger to keyboard.

I continue to live in hope that my creative process would be something like being struck by a sustained series of creative lightning, long enough to thump out a feature-length script… but the reality is a much more mundane process:

Sometimes, due to sheer inspiration, utter bullheadedness or an insane deadline, it can all occur within a matter of weeks. Other times… it takes as long as it takes.