Tag: 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
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)
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
“The Pitlochry Play” #2: ‘Skin in the Game’
Due to some unexpected cancellations in the diary, and some jiggling about of other stuff I am a major over-achiever: October’s expenses are begun, there’s mugs soaking in the bubbles, and here I am. I’ve just sent another thank you letter to one of my funders for the “Pitlochry Play”, and as I wiped the…
-
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…
-
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…
-
A Song & Dance for your details…
A much-loved but unproduced theatre script, A Bit of a Song & Dance, made the BBC Drama Script Room long-list! They had a record number of entries, and a phenomenal amount to read, so I’m especially pleased – and grateful! As all writers out there know, there’s subjectivity in all of this, too, so I’m…
-
1 year on; 3 new screenplays & a magic cauldron
Ha, make em laugh, eh? More like, make yourself laugh. I just spotted an old post from a year ago: The Awful Art of Unwriting. It’s a confessional, where I admit to not having done a new spec screenplay (as opposed to a play) for about 5 years. In the last year, I’ve written three: one comedy…
Gill Kirk, writer 