Category: Writing
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Happy News
The wonderful people at The Peggy Ramsay Foundation have given me a grant to support the writing of my new play! Now if that’s not a kick up the imagination, what is?
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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…
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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…
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Vim, vim, vim
I know. Shame on me. August? That’s the last time I was here? Alas, no. Twice I’ve got excited, blogged merrily away and the darn thing would not upload. So this will be short – just in case. I have, nonetheless, been busy. The spec screenplay has undergone a complete rewrite (this is my 4Screenwriting…
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Writing, kids and all that jazz
No, I am not in Edinburgh, catching all the top acts de nos jours (damn). I am working. Uhuh, as per that list in the previous post. I have one more week left of Daddy DayCare (teacher husband) where I can type all day. The pressure is terrifying. Before marriage, step-kids, baby “etc”, I’d do…
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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…
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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…
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Absurd journeys
Black Barn at LOST is now over. This dysfunctional circus family, scary siblings, pyromania and (understandable) reclusivity is – for now – a thing of the past. Theatre company tidy carnage did a great job with a sterling cast: Cameron Crighton, Helen Cuinn, Eilidh McCormick and Scott Reid, directed by Alice Butler with a superbly…
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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…
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Knots: undo, remake, procrastinate
Today’s one of my two days a week to write, toddler-free. And this is the state of my desk. I’m halfway through my first draft of the C4Screenwriting pilot/spec script and found some mega-weaknesses. I’m now trying to weave some irn-bru strength girders through the plot, with the help of Massive Attack’s Heligoland (a haunting…
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Living, unfamous writers: too many of ’em about?
To be fair, if you’re not receiving tax-payer subsidy or other grants that call for you to support writers that live, you can do what you want. But theatre faces a challenge. It’s competing against those guys I mentioned earlier (Cowell, HBO, the West End, film) for audiences. And it shouldn’t just be competing for…
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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…
Gill Kirk, writer 