Writing Life: insights, updates, and craft
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Going at a Gallop
A gallop of a post: First of all, a humungous “hats off” to Shane Morgan of Roughhouse Productions, and Jill Bennett of Theatre Royal Bath for pulling together an astonishingly good 24Hour Plays on Friday – Saturday nights. What a superb process and outcome, with six completely new short plays growing out of nothing, performed…
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Gladiators, rrrready???
An Anaesthetic for Birthdays goes into rehearsals tomorrow for its rehearsed reading on Wednesday night and I’m very excited. This will be the first time it’s been “stood up” and the rhythms and riffs between the characters will take on a life outside my head / kitchen / early hour baby feeds. Am just reading…
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And Breathe…
Wow. Draft 3 of Anaesthetic for Birthdays has hit the director’s in-box. Water’s Not So Thick has gone into rehearsal (with a superb cast). I’ve left the house, reacquainted myself with the family and email. Not the real, paper-filled in-tray, mind you…..
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Quality control
I’m in one of those “funks”, as 1950s girls’ books used to call them – a mental fuzz, blur, mash or mess where I can’t see the woods for the trees or the good for the bad. Yes, it’s Draft Two time. The story so far: draft 1: too many pages of too much talk…
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Take a big STEP
When I was about two years old, I went to ballet and tap lessons. My parents still hoot with laughter at the memory of me reciting ad infinitum, “take a big STEP, take a big STEP,” as I practised my complicated routine by striding around the living room. That’s the posting’s title explained–kind of. It’s…
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New happenings and challenges
Since the last posting, there’s been much merry activity. …The added challenge is that I had a baby at New Year and so am learning to juggle the feeding with one hand and writing with the other. To be honest, I’ve totally given up on that, and bought myself some excellent dictation software: this could…
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Keep the Buses Coming!
I have been extraordinarily fortunate the last few weeks and months to have great people working with my scripts, and I’m learning (I hope) a great splodge of stuff as I go.
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Summer Frenzy
Busy – and good – times. The summer’s being spent Getting Things Done: completing a three-hander for the Theatre West competition for their autumn season at the Alma Tavern Theatre in Bristol; trying to get a final good first draft of my long-unwritten ‘fertility play’; polishing a collaborative comedy script with a great friend and…
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A Happy Writer
Best experience as a writer so far was had this week. My absurd short, Everyone Loves A Story, was one of four staged readings in ‘Push’, a night of newly commissioned pieces at the Ustinov, Theatre Royal Bath.
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Trying the strange
push yourself – write in a new way, or about something new, in a new format, or by throwing all your norms to the four winds.
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Second Chance for bankers….
The smashing people at Bristol Folk House have picked The King Was In The Counting House to be one of their short rehearsed readings on Saturday 8th May, at 8pm. There were over 200 submissions, and the night will regale the audience with a happy six winners’ scripts. It’s only a fiver (which gets ploughed…
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Re-writes
Oh, loathsome rewrites: the most important thing, and the hardest. They’re my main preoccupation right now – even though there are many budding ideas shooting their way through, and an incomplete full-length thing which is chewing the back of my brain. But without them, without nips and tucks, excision and the bin, the thing’s not…
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Gill Kirk, writer 