cold hard cash

I have very few rules about writing, but one of them has always been that I won't pay anyone to look at my script. Whether it's entries fees or script consultancies or whatever...

Until now.

I ummed and ahhed. But in the end I decided I would, with a heavy heart, pay a £10 fee to enter a competition.

The reasons are twofold, and I will elaborate.

1. Good, old-fashioned enthusiasm to get this script on somewhere. It's proper and it makes sense and I like it. (Which is why I've sent it to about 7 different things and am waiting to hear back on all of them.)

2. I know some people who run open submission showcases, and to be honest, they get sent a right load of old shit. Obviously, some good stuff in there. But there are a lot of people who dust off their script from the bottom drawer and send it in without bothering to look at the guidelines.

'You wanted romantic comedy? Well, this is more of an Estonian hitman revenge thriller, but I think with the right director, you could really find the laughs...'

Of course, I've never been guilty of this...

Oh no, wait. hang on. I actually have. Sort of.

Here's the thing: last year when this same showcase opened entries (for free) I got well carried away, and sent in two things, neither of which were in any way finished/ready. But they had, y'know, some good lines, and so I was hopeful. (I can do 'some good lines'. Storytelling remains a work in progress.)

So when this year's competition rolled around, I felt more kindly inclined. Since I'd sent my dear, misshapen misfits in last year, I thought I would pay the £10 in some kind of recompense.

(This is the kind of guilt-ridden thinking you get from being steeped in the dramatic narrative of sin and penance from birth to rational thinking age. Thanks Catholicism!)

Anyway, I've paid, and it's in, so the fuckers better pick it or I'm going round to kick some doors in.

a small selection of the stupid questions I'm pondering right now

Why am I so motivated by jealousy?
Like, when I see that a writer who took part in a showcase thing I did is having a short piece put on, I immediately do a trawl of everywhere I can think of to start getting some scripts sent out. I mean, it's great that it gives me a kick up the arse, but is that really what it takes? Am I really so uncharitable? (Yes, yes I am. It doesn't help, of course, that she wrote a very beautiful piece that was quite frankly better than mine.)

What on earth is going on in my head?
The last script I've written is weird and a bit dark. I re-read it last night and there was a point I just had to stop. It was TOO STRANGE. All this stuff comes straight out of my head, scarily enough.

It's a bit terrifying when I write things I had no idea I thought. I discovered a deep-seated aversion to homeopaths in one of the first things I ever wrote. I never even thought I had an opinion on the matter. I'm going to hope it's a good thing that this stuff comes out.

Why do I need constant praise and validation?
And this being the case, why do I persist in writing scripts, which have approximately a 97 per cent rejection rate?

How do I tell some bloke off the internet I don't want to see him again?
I find it deeply unnerving when people go all keen on me. And I have no idea how to tell them that I find them completely, irredemably unattractive. Not because they're horrible. Just because. God I'm rubbish at this.

Feel free to provide answers to any of the above.

anyone but Cameron

I really, really need to meet some Tories. People like my friend's flatmate, who has a signed photograph af Margaret Thatcher displayed pride of place, his best ever birthday present.

This is not because I have gone mental. It is because right now I only have political debate with people who agree with me.

It's good, I think, that I mix with like-minded people. That I live and work with people who are broadly similar in political terms. That the 57 people I follow on Twitter are all clearly on the left-wing side of the spectrum.

And yet... lots and lots of people in the country voted Tory on Thursday, and I want to meet them and have a conversation with them/shake them firmly and ask why oh why in a disappointed tone.

Hating the Tories is more than a default position. I grew up experiencing the worst of Thatcher. My home town was all but destroyed by their policies. I still feel slightly sick when I think of the wealth accrued by over-privileged, over-entitled grandees who thought it would be quite a laugh to dismantle industry, sell it off, bit by bit, to provide a massive profit for them and their mates.

And at this stage you might be thinking, well what about Labour? Their record hasn't exactly been great. They're very relaxed about people being filthy rich and avoiding their taxes.

Labour have been a disappointment. I don't doubt that there are people growing up who feel exactly as I feel about the Tories. On the Iraq War and the surveillence state and lots of other ways they got it wrong.

But I don't hate Labour in the way that I hate the Tories. I may be the only person in the country who doesn't hate Gordon Brown. I feel exasperated. I wanted more from them. But they don't make me feel sick to the stomach like David Cameron, who as far as I can tell has no discernible belief in anything except his entitlement to rule, and the god-given right for rich people to stay being rich.

I don't hate rich people, or people who went to public school. I just find it difficult when they don't realise that not everyone had the same opportunities that they did, that it's not a level playing field, that the place where you're born still determines far too much about your destiny in life.

I don't want people who've lived in a bubble of Eton and Oxbridge to be making the decisions that affect single mums and people on benefits and people who don't have aspirations because they don't realise they can.

In short, if and when the Lib Dems do their deal with these knob-ends, I will feel sad.

And I will need to find a way to hang out with some Tristans and Quentins and Camillas and Tabithas to indulge my need to argue.

Watch this space.

the latest work of genius. also, crap telly.

This is the typical cycle of my feelings towards any given script I write:

Stage 1: in which I am wildly enthused about my most recent scribblings. And decide that it is by far the best thing I've ever written.

Stage 2: doubt creeps in. It's good but...
Editing ensues. It's brilliant again! Stage 1 and 2 can take a little while.

Stage 3: It's bloody awful. Irredemable. Why did I ever think I could write. I'm an idiot.

(At this stage I pause and go away and do something else to forget about it all. I'd like to pretend that 'something else' is generally a highbrow cultural event, but more often than not its those Friends repeats on E4. Still! What's wrong with me? I have no idea.)

Stage 4: Revelation: the final piece slots into place, and I have a script that is - in my head at least - somewhere on the scale of not bad to quite good.

In case you're wondering, I'm somewhere between stages 3 and 4, so metaphorically speaking on the Friends repeats.

Something is definitely missing from my latest script. I just can't work out what.

One problem is that I feel like I'm beating people around the head to make my point. So it needs some nuance. And after months and months of writing short, sharp scenes, I've gone a bit mentile and decided to write a sustained piece over 15 minutes real time, which requires quite a lot of skill with pacing that I'm not sure I have yet. But for it to work at all, it has to work in this format.

Sigh.

Wonder what Ross and Rachel are up to.

My greatest work of fiction yet

I hate internet dating. It's soulless and heartless and effectively reduces romance to the status of shopping from Tesco.

Which is why I never have and I never will...

Oh no, hang on, I am. I am internet dating.

Why oh why oh why would I do that? Because I've yet to find an alternative. Let me rephrase that: I've yet to find an alternative that doesn't involve being horrifically drunk, and I gave up on that caper a little while ago.

Oh, but it'll just happen. This is what people say. Pah.

If you live in London, take a look next time you walk down the South Bank in nice weather, at the cafes and the benches. Tens of single women sitting winsomely on their own in cafes reading an interesting intelligent book and just waiting for an interesting intelligent other to engage them in conversation. To start off on a path that will end in something deeply romantic.

It doesn't happen, I bloody assure you. The South Bank isn't so much a side of the river as a graveyard for crushed dreams of romance, built on the lonely tears and misplaced optimism of women. The men, sensibly, are mainly down the pub.

So that's why I'm doing internet dating, and that's why I've written a stupid profile to try and show how, ahem, cool and amazing I am. Or, er, something. It's true, mainly, what I've written about myself. It's just selective. So watch this space.

Material, that's what I remind myself. As well as being my life, this is all material.

Pah, and thrice pah.

feedback

This is probably the nicest rejection email I've had to date:

Many thanks for your entry. We had over 200 entries and sorry to say your script wasn't selected for the final six. It did make it to a final shortlist of fifteen, however, and we thought it was an excellent piece of work...

Excellent work, eh? My best review ever, and it hasn't even been staged.

Producers of open script things take note: Be nice! Even if it's not true. Just pretend. Nothing wrong with some politeness to spare sensitive writerly feelings. OK?

I'm being a bit flippant. But a personalised email saying something nice genuinely does feel better than the usual half-hearted round robin seven months after the closing date/no response at all.

I did a playwriting course a couple of years and one of the tutors brought along some of his rejection letters. He had a lot of rejection letters, but is now wildly successful. So it just goes to show... something or other.

15 minutes

I don't know why I feel compelled to give advice - I haven't achieved any great measure of success - and yet there's something I find I want to share. If any aspiring writer has somehow stumbled on to my nonsense, there is just one bit of advice I feel I have to give. (Drum roll please).

Write a 15 minute script.

Actually, the main bit of advice I would give is to start writing. Don't waste time thinking how much you'd like to be a writer without actually commiting to put pen to paper in case what you write isn't a masterpiece.

(A cautionary tale: that's mainly how I spent my 20s, and now I'm considered pretty ancient and decrepit at the grand old age of 31, too old for most of the new writing development work that happens in London, cos apparently you stop being interesting at the age of 26. I was fucking tedious at the age of 26. I'm much more interesting now. I digress.)

Anyway, once you've become one of the small minority of would-be writers who actually write, and you've started something - anything - aiming for a 15 minute script is helpful. It's a manageable length. It's good practise for story-telling. And much, much more importantly than either of these things is the fact that once you start looking, there are loads of wee showcases going on looking for short scripts. Which means you might have a chance of getting something put on.

Ok, that was my brief foray into advice. I'm going to stop now.

The reason I'm sharing this, and that I'm slightly excited about it all, is that a script I wrote on my hols (with love and care and attention obviously) is having not one, but two outings.

Performance number one happened last week. A rehearsed reading. It was... ok. Heck. It was quite good. The flaws I mainly knew about already, I think.

But in subsequent revising I have done a couple of things: I've gotten rid of some swearing. It looks fine on the page, but it's hard on the ear if you overuse it. And it loses impact. I've also clarified some of the lines that made perfect sense to me, but got lost in the melee.

The rehearsed reading was interesting in lots of ways. There were five other writers there, most of them more experienced than me. Some of them intimidatingly successful. And yet there we all were, in some tiny fringe venue, just glad to have an audience. Just glad that someone was bringing to life some words we wrote down, some words that mean something.

Hopefully - TBC - which is why I'm being a tad cagey, there is a performance number two happening next week. Once the deal is done, I will be more celebratory.

Deal I mean in a metaphorical sense. No actual money is changing hands. it's just for the, er, glory, or something like that (see above).

Last but not least, a comedy script I wrote last year is having an outing on the actual radio. Ok, community radio, but radio nonetheless.

Now, I realise that all of the above isn't exactly an Oscar nomination, but little bits and bobs like these keep me going, and help me believe I might actually be a writer. So this is good news.