Gill Kirk, writer

Category: Writing

  • 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? 

  • Writing without, you know, “writing”

    Writing without, you know, “writing”

    I used to catch ideas (which are so like butterflies, it almost seems cruel) by leaving myself answerphone messages on the home landline. The light would flicker at me when I got back in the warm at the end of the day: “hello,” glowed the message from a past me of oo, hours ago; “remember…

  • The Pitlochry Play #1: the sound of water

    The Pitlochry Play #1: the sound of water

    I’m here in Pitlochry, land of Pitlochry Festival Theatre and much, much more. Today’s day 3 of my playwrighting residency at the theatre and I’m rolling around like a pig in poo at the luxury of all this writing space and thinking time. I’m not here to share anything about my “process” with you, but I can’t…

  • Do Not Disturb: an arts satire

    Do Not Disturb: an arts satire

    “A satire about arts and funding in a post-BBC, post-sterling world. Two civil servants hunt a dangerous script to stop it infecting a world that’s free of disturbing theatre. They disguise themselves as theatre types and get enmeshed in the glamour. Everyone’s lying for accolades, acceptance and – er – maybe art.” This is the…

  • Wanted a Genie, found a Muse

    Lovely news – I’ve just been awarded a writers’ residency at the fantastic Pitlochry Festival Theatre to start work on a new play. And it all started because I couldn’t get to Mull and in the (relatively) short time my child was away with relatives. In July, I’d been facing the standard single parent dilemma:…

  • Glittered Knickers…

    I love it when a plan you never knew you had comes together. An old friend up at Bath Uni decided we needed an International Women’s Day entertainment night in Widcombe. It’s over 20 years since I did one of these, back at the students’ union, so when she said, “Want to do something for…

  • Glue: a short film

    I can’t believe I haven’t mentioned this. Anyway, it’s brilliant. I’ve been working since autumn with a smart young director called Isabelle Larché in Bristol. We worked up an idea. I wrote a script. She’s pulled together a cracking team and this weekend, filming began. There’s a crowdfunder (which has hit its very modest target…

  • May You Live In Interesting Times: a new age of political TV drama?

    Ah, those old Chinese curses, eh? A couple of years back, I was pitching a TV drama-comedy idea to a really cracking producer. We were both excited (I think!) about the central character – an unseated MP thrown into my old work world of lobbying, with all its grey shades and the implications for her…

  • We All Have A Magic Gun…the quantum play lives…!

    I woke up last Thursday morning feeling like a child with a hundred wrapped presents at her feet. Because Wednesday’s rehearsed reading of the quantum physics play, BOX, was an utter joy.  The marvellous audience let me record the Q&A, so I can use their feedback as I work to complete the script. Here are…