Gill Kirk, writer

Category: Learning

  • Unravelling security blankets you didn’t know you had

    Unravelling security blankets you didn’t know you had

    I had a horrible realisation the other day. I haven’t had a show on stage for a year and no new work’s been on-stage since a personal train crash….Never under-estimate the impact of a writer’s daily life on their work.

  • Giving good story: it’s all about the posture (but never posturing!)

    If you love writing, you just love writing. I’ve got several fresh projects on the go  (film, stage and TV) and it’s a lovely time, tending the garden, straightening the bamboo poles, checking the rainfall, soil and consulting the manual…I also have several (*metaphor switch alert*) fully formed babies out there, trying to find their…

  • Leslie Crowther & The Red Pen of Time

    I’m catching up on the quantum script after moving house.  As you’d expect, I had put the annotated script “somewhere really safe”…. far too safe, it turns out. Almost four months later, it was still “lost but obviously not lost”. Panic was forbidden. It was just not lost. Right? The irony of this is not lost,…

  • And as if by magic, the story structure appeared

    There are a million books on story structure, especially in the screenwriting world. You can leap from Joseph Campbell, through Christophers Vogler & Booker, to Robert Key, Syd Field, Viki King, Blake Snyder and most recently, the excellent Into The Woods by John Yorke (if you want a reading list, I refer you to the…

  • Good, better, best

    V chuffed to report that “Hard Men’, my pilot show script, developed through last year’s Channel 4’s 4Screenwriting programme, has got through the quarter-finals of the Screenwriting Goldmine Awards 2013. It made for a lovely afternoon, with writers galore getting in touch to check that I knew! Just goes to show what a community we…

  • Gnash, gobble, splat: the sounds of a new script hitting the genre wall

    It is a fine thing to get the teeth into a new script. Delicious, clean pages. Fresh bodies waiting to spurt, the splatter marks on the walls giving us the story to decipher, like CSIs of dramatic fiction. Does that make the writer a bitey vampire or besplattered detective? Either way – and I suspect…

  • Muscle, sinew, brain surgery

    I’ve spent the last few months at the lathe. Honing, smoothing, cutting myself, wiping the blood off the creation… It’s been very interesting. 2012’s been a year of muscle, driven without a doubt by the rigour of Channel 4’s 4Screenwriting course, which I was fortunate enough to get a place on this year. Every sinew…

  • Get creative on yo’ ass

    The other day, I remembered that 2012 is going to be an exciting year. And then realised we’re 7/12s of the way through. Apart from making me feel like my brain is falling has fallen through a hole in my saggy toddler-mum trews and lies spat on, in a wet puddle alongside the rotted tendrils…

  • Devoted & Disgruntled Roadshow: massive

    There’s a thing called Devoted & Disgruntled (D&D). It’s for theatre people who love theatre but also get pissed off with it from time to time. It’s a forum, an open space where you gather, raise issues, talk about them, share them. It’s real and online. It’s also on the road. Right now! I spent…

  • What Dali can, Su-bo can’t? Artist / audience gap

    An artist works, gives their sweat and soul to communicate something in a form that is somehow different to the everyday-expected. The audience engages, pays, comes, listens, studies. Different activities. If these two then disagree on the art, whose opinion matters more? Which one defines the “art”? When there’s a jarring chasm between what an…

  • Catching Up

    You (I) run fast through autumn and early December to get that time off at Christmas and New Year, trip up (get the lurgy, natch), sleep a lot and fall madly behind. It has, I realise, become a pattern. BUT! Waving a blazing torch of flaming, rejected, double-side printed scripts, I stride with gumption into…

  • High Tide Winter Retreat

    6 December already? How did that happen? Terrifying. So I’ll ignore it and pretend I will easily make the year-end deadlines I’ve given myself… Let’s deal with the Now instead.  Am back a day or so from the excellent High Tide winter retreat in Halesworth, Suffolk.  Sixteen brave scribes [wrighters, rather than writers, we hope]…