Category: Writing

  • All of 2025 in one post

    Being a writer is a bit depressing. The screenwriting world is in crisis. Theatre is in freefall. If you back this profession up – like I do – with writing-related corporate work (I do more than write, but words are still significant), too many commissioning folk are still in the “AI can do it for…

  • Theatre: everything to play for, moment by moment

    Theatre: everything to play for, moment by moment

    Why’s a script more like an advent calendar or a Haynes manual than a novel?

  • It’s all in the telling (and that can be hard)

    It’s all in the telling (and that can be hard)

    The story-telling process (and not the end result) is where to put your focus …I may have been quiet, but, cor, have I been writing! I’m at the 65k word mark on a comedy novel, and loving the hard graft you get when crafting a story. This is my second prose adventure (the first is…

  • Don’t wait for Santa

    Don’t wait for Santa

    All through my life, this is the book I most wanted to steal from the library. And for the second year running, I’m one of its authors (so I got it for free!)…

  • The Box is back!

    The Box is back!

    There’s two things bubbling on the go. The first is ‘FFS’, a script which emerged from the murk like an old-fashioned photo in a dark-room’s developing tray. And the other is “the novel” which has even deeper roots in my life – like those disturbing children’s molar-roots that make me think of rabbit ears (just…

  • Developing a photo very, very slowly…

    Developing a photo very, very slowly…

    Yes, this is one for you writer technique nerds out there. And if it interests or helps you, I would love your thoughts.

  • Getting Creative When You Doubt You Can

    Getting Creative When You Doubt You Can

    Inspired by an acquaintance who’d been made so miserable by her utter conviction she didn’t have a creative bone in her, I wanted to encourage some self-care in others, and to share what I wrote. You can hear me read it on Kristin’s podcast here…

  • Climate Catastrophe Satire Hits London Stage

    Climate Catastrophe Satire Hits London Stage

    News Release 1 Nov 2021 A climate catastrophe satire that was developed with audiences in Bath hits the London stage this month (November). The New Wimbledon Theatre, run by Ambassadors Theatre Group, opens Gill Kirk’s dark-green dystopian horror-comedy SKIN IN THE GAME on the very day that COP26 ends in Glasgow.  Chosen by New Wimbledon Theatre…

  • Put your Skin In The Game

    Put your Skin In The Game

    It’s been a while! SKIN IN THE GAME’S ON STAGE! YOU CAN BE A BACKER – and the rewards are genuinely great! Today we just launched our Crowdfunder with a Facebook Live – me, producer Kristin Duffy at Slackline Productions and director Sarah Gain. You can have 35 mins of our podcast-y wit here! You…

  • Buzz In & Out

    Buzz In & Out

    How DO prodigiously creative people do it? We all have the same hours in the day. We have the day job, the lovely people in our lives and then maybe stuff like making music and art and enjoying other people’s! Rather than wonder / despair and feel inadequate, the only way is to see myself…

  • Make Work. Bring something into existence.

    It turns out I am writing a novel. The first such attempt in maybe 13 years. I had forgotten – hiding in my scripts and what they demand of me – that this process plays a different instrument inside. I hear a different music. Another thing, quieter and much, much stronger, is happening. And I…

  • Muck-Up or Evil Genius?

    Muck-Up or Evil Genius?

    Was leaving politics for writing a major mistake? Have I in fact been amassing a different kind of army, preparing a stealth attack with my pen, ready to take them (whoever they may be) from behind?