A Writers Skillset...

Two skills are essential if you really want to write.

One is that you will find time to write.

You will cancel an assortment of fun/ kind/ thoughtful things to do with/ for other people in order to write. The house will fall apart, your child will watch too much tv occasionally but you will write. You will step away from sitting with your family to watch meaningless - but comforting - tv to write and yet, somehow, keep time to eat together, walk together, talk somehow about all the important and unimportant things, and check homework!

Taking time for your writing takes courage and strength of character. Most of all, it takes self belief and somehow, from the experience of writing all my life, I know men tend to be far better at this. How many writer's life stories have you read where the (male) writer locks himself away, ignoring every demand for his attention until his writing day is done. Are there women - mothers - who can do this?!

At one point it seemed that every male writer I knew also had a wife who worked in a high power financial job and supported her husband. But I'm not sure I could cope with that either. And it doesn't seem to be true of Irish male writers.

So if you want to write, find five muinutes while waiting for a bus/a dentist/ life to get exciting again. Go to bed an hour early and script a few scenes just to get to the next stage. Brainstorm characters/ plot/ visuals while you walk.

Don't you love it when you HAVE to stop to scribble something down?! Here's my latest: Sweetmeat was a very misshapen dragon.

I guess you had to be there.

And because I've been told blogs should be short, I'll save the second half of this till my next one. So stop reading and go write for five minutes instead! About the colour blue. Your first childhood memory of feeling fear. Or just how you're feeling now...

Competition deadlines...

And yes, competitions are a pain in the neck but they make useful deadlines, and once a script is ready then your choices are greater. More competitions, if it doesn't get shortlisted/ win the first; contacting producers to convince them it's their next big thing; or a rewrite to make it even better. At least it will be done.

Came across this site that might be useful: http://robinkellyuk.blogspot.com/2008/03/playwriting-links.html. He has a 'calendar' panel on the right of the page listing all competition deadlines. The next two I've already mentioned but they're so close you can smell the sulphur: 15th Jan - Page International - and Blue Cat Fellini - 20th.

Could be useful, but check the rules. I've found a few I'm not eligible for because of I have about four hours of screened material. (In short, one feature, five non-verbal children's films of 15 mins, two episodes of soap and three shorts - one I've never seen and didn't know existed until I saw it on IMdB. I think they culled it from the feature and gave it the name of the leading character. If I could track down the producer, I could ask. Maybe that's a background task for this year!)

Let's all have a productive and satisfying writing year!

Tentpoles and quadrants

Where have I been hiding? I've never come across either of these phrases in relation to scripts so I did a bit of a trawl and apparently, between them, they are exactly what everyone wants in a script:

Four quadrant: a movie that appeals to all four main demographic groups — young and old, male and female;

Tentpole : a film that ‘supports’ the other films on a studio’s slate financially and will be an almost guaranteed success;

Easy, huh?

Monkey Puzzle Tree... and a chocolate gobbling dog

I finally allowed myself to print out the script, running at 118 scenes and 87 pages. And yes, it's short which is great because I've realised the fun to be had out of re-writing comes when there is space to flesh scenes or characters out in tiny little ways as you polish. Though that only works when the script works as a whole... so I haven't started reading it yet!

Meanwhile my dog, Roxy trotted into the babysitter and my daughter with a large bar of dark chocolate - 70% proof - clamped proudly between her hairy jaws. Even when tempted away with chorizo, she managed to get the sausage and still guard the chocolate under her hot little belly but yes, it was finally rescued or she was rescued from it. Or so we thought...

Cue the back bedroom next morning. Very hungover friend called Jane. Snoring softly. Softly enough to make the blind flutter like an escaped convict.

What I hadn't known was that when we'd gone out was that Jane had left a handbag by the bed. Inside were various things of international importance... and four bars of same chocolate. Only now there was no chocolate in the bag and the floor was littered with infinitely small pieces of paper and foil. Absolutely NO trace of chocolate ever having been near either. It was as if the chocolate itself must have thought it dreamed it existed and now knew it was untrue.

Judging by the quantity of debris, my guess is that the bar Roxy brought downstairs was the fourth of these, and maybe she just got tired of binging on her own and wanted to continue her binge in company. BIG mistake. I'm sure there's a lesson for us all here... hoard your chocolate at a height? learn to enjoy your guilty pleasures away from babysitters and children?

But it's better than the time she managed to lock herself into the bathroom and ate most of the contents of the bin. And at least she doesn't eat poo like the last dog. (Yeah, it's amazing what you can become grateful for over the years!)

Why is it soooo much easier to write about a dog than to read a script or a novel you've just finished? Is it fear?

I think it's fear.

On Rewriting...

First proper full draft of the children's novel is now done, and waiting to be dusted - ie read through, tidied, threads of thought and story securely fastened in the right places. I've put it aside until New Year; my theory being that then I can come at it fresh, read it as I would a fresh novel and then I'll see if it works and test it out on a couple of readers.

Which is why rewriting sucks! It just expands to fit whatever time is available, not helped by four projects not getting funded - only one put in by myself, the others by a production company who are still burrowing out through the recession and sending stuff of mine out into potential markets for funding. I had hoped the rule of three would work and the third would get the money but that's the world we're in at the moment.

Two weeks ago, I dived back into a script called Monkey Puzzle Tree. (Yeah, it's one of the few titles I've come up with that I absolutely love; which makes me fear that it will have to be dumped at some point.)

The first draft made its producer laugh out loud all the way from here to LA; the second, well suffice to say she said she smiled for the first time on p 27. And she was right. It had become over earnest, solidly fed with stuff that made sense and set up the world but added nothing to the story or characters or the atmosphere. Scenes with purpose but with no real predicament. Dead weight. The very fault I warn my students about.

But I know I can make it work, hence the splicing open of its heart and all its characters and brainstorming the most erratic ideas and images and words just to see where they lead.

Which leaves the plot - my personal bete noir - looking almost healthy except for one or two absolutely crucial decisions that will affect just about everything and without which I can't pull all the pieces back into a fresh draft: my goal for this week!

Which is why I've spent the morning writing Christmas cards for Australia and the UK. Hmmm.

Stroke of Insight...

This was recorded in 2008 as one of the TED lectures. It was the first TED lecture I was shown, as part of a course run by Screen Training Ireland and it is pretty amazing. If you feel like taking a coffee break, it might be worth a look !

Essentially, it's the story, from the inside, of the experience - and, believe or not, wonder - of having a massive stroke. But with a difference. Jill Bolte Taylor is a brain scientist - and yes, she recovered. So she had studied these awful things clinically but was both fascinated to observe what it actually felt like. As her brain functions slipped away one by one - speech, movement, understanding — she studied and remembered every moment. As her blurb says: "This is a powerful story of recovery and awareness — of how our brains define us and connect us to the world and to one another."

The link is: http://blog.ted.com/2008/03/12/jill_bolte_tayl/

Slowly does it...

I'm seriously hoping this is the 'tortoise wins the race' period of the year. Work is slow. The intention to work gets muffled by cups of coffee, walking the dog, staying in the warmest room of the house where the tv and family are... and then the guilt for not working hard enough, fast enough or just plain enough.

My neighbour keeps hanging plastic bags on her washing line. The last time I saw this was in 1990 when I was on a work exchange as a journo to Sverdlovsk in Russia. (It reverted to Ekaterinberg later, the town in which the Tsar and his family were killed under the orders of Josef Sverdlov; hence the name).

But back then I also saw people collecting beer in plastic bags there too and fishing for two and a half hours on a freezing lake to produce a few handfuls of carp, the goldfish-sized ones for lunch.

I don't think we're there yet but I have to say I donot like the idea of handing over sovereignty in return for an EU bailout which seems to have been sprung to the Press last night. The way Fianna Fail, greedy developers, corrupt bankers and greed reduced this country to its knees, wasted all its money and given us the scariest health system despite the wonderful medical personnel we have makes me so angry...

So it's either bake a chocolate cake with whiskey in it or get back to my novel. Ho hum... Which would you do?