Getting your worst ideas out of the way (a few thoughts #9)

Between writing projects, sometimes I feel as if I will never write another thing. Or I come up with one idea, get absolutely excited about it, then when it comes to the sitting down and doing it part freeze, paralysed by the pressure I put on myself.

Every writer feels these things. To continue as a writer, you learn how to accept or to deal with these feelings. Here’s a small technique I would encourage anybody to try when they find themselves stuck or paralysed before starting work on a new play. 

Continue reading “Getting your worst ideas out of the way (a few thoughts #9)”

Comparing Trees to Plays (a few thoughts #8)

I’m a dual citizen of Australia and the allegedly United Kingdom. However, for the time being I’m back in Melbourne with my young family after over a decade in London, and I’m returning to the idea that I am, for better or worse and wherever I reside, an Australian playwright. This is where I was born and became established as a writer. I learned an incredible amount being – and remaining, I hope – in London’s industry, but wandering around what is now my local park has got me thinking about how our environments might shape our attitudes to the most basic of things without our consciously knowing it.

For I have to say, some plays that fly for audiences in Australia seem to be impenetrable for audiences in the UK. In my time reading for UK theatre companies, I listened to other readers express their incomprehension at some writing from Australia that I loved (and knew that others in Australia also valued). There’s a book by the drama critic most important to the New Wave of 1970s Australian drama, Katharine Brisbane, that goes by the name, Not Wrong Just Different, the title taken from one of her reviews where she celebrated a newly-emerging and self-conscious difference in Australian drama. What contributes to this difference?

And, so, my tiny hypothesis is to do with trees.

That’s right. Trees. But why? Continue reading “Comparing Trees to Plays (a few thoughts #8)”

Three Easy Ways to Improve Your Playwriting (a few thoughts #7)

Okay, there’s no easy way to improve apart from working at writing drama, but I’ll give you a few practical ideas in this post.

1. Concentrate on writing scenes, not lines or structure

First things first: great plays are made up of scenes, one great scene followed by another. Individual lines need not be wonderful examples of prose. Lines are there for actors to act rather than appreciate. Continue reading “Three Easy Ways to Improve Your Playwriting (a few thoughts #7)”

In support of Make It Australian campaign

All nations need to promote and protect the ability of their storytellers to share stories and to create new dreams.

Today, the Australian Writers Guild is holding a national day of action in the fight to keep Australian film and television production safe from a free trade deal that would only help those pushing cheap content already produced in other countries. The deal would also lead to the end of kids’ TV quotas, which have helped to spur on the production – and to international acclaim – of kids’ Australian TV classics such as Bananas in Pyjamas, The Wiggles and Round the Twist.

The AWG President, Jan Sardi, says:

‘As many of you will know, the right to tell our own stories from our own perspective and in our own voice is not something that just happened, it’s a battle that was fought by the Guild and the industry in the Make It Australian campaign of the 1970s. The battle was won, but the war to keep it Australian has never ended and it’s now entering a new, critical phase. Commercial TV broadcasters want to walk away from any requirement to create children’s content and are lobbying the government to abolish local content quotas. New players like Netflix, YouTube, Stan, ISPs and Telcos are making billions of dollars from the Australian market with no obligation to create local, original content for the Australian audiences it exploits.

If we let this happen there will be no more scripted drama, no kids’ TV and our screens will be flooded with foreign content and reality shows. We will lose our jobs, our unique Australian voice and our culture and because of the Free Trade Agreement, once it is gone, it is lost forever.

The time has come to fight again!’

Obviously, I agree with him.

I hope you have the time to support the campaign here.

 

Kill Your Exposition, then Hide the Body (thoughts on playwriting craft #6)

Playwrights who have taken any of my classes in the last two years may have this commandment scribbled somewhere on a notepad:

Any information that no character has fought to get or tried desperately to hide does not belong in your play.

There you go. It’s a pretty simple injunction, but if you follow it you’ll write – and rewrite – stronger plays.  Continue reading “Kill Your Exposition, then Hide the Body (thoughts on playwriting craft #6)”

There Be Dragons in this Writing Post: Id, Ego, Superego and Real, Imaginary, Symbolic

Amateur Zizek-inspired post alert…

Last week, Alison Croggon wrote about encountering and making art in dark times at the (for now) scratch website, Witness (which will be going full steam ahead in 2018.) The full post is here. It’s an inspiring piece of writing and I’m particularly taken with the penultimate paragraph:

When meanings are destroyed, I turn to the making of meaning. I look for what will answer my anger and grief. I need to awaken in myself and to see awakened in others the possibilities of laughter, beauty, courage, joy, resistance, delight. I need the resources of imagination and knowledge that art can bring to bear on human experience, in all its complexity and contradiction, in all its fullness.

The key word here is meaning. Art actively creates meaning, i.e. meaning is the thing made in the moment of artistic elements coming together, not some previously immanent truth uncovered. For anyone who’s taken a longer playwriting course with me, they might guess the next place I’m going because of this. It’s my probable misreading of Slavoj Zizek’s reading of Lacan’s reading of Freud, in terms of something called triads. Go on to the tough stuff

Six Yoga Poses on Setting (thoughts on playwriting craft #6) 

The spark for this week’s post was to discuss the importance of the ‘where’ of dramatic writing. What follows is my thoughts while meandering around the streets of my inner-city village, less instructional than previous posts. (For a terrific introduction to thinking about the ‘where’ of a scene and how to combine it with characters, story and a provocative image, check out the books in this post here, particularly those by Wright and Van Itallie.)

1.

I started this post walking around my gentrifying neighbourhood. Where there used to be garages and places where mechanics worked there now lie pilates and yoga studios.

2.

This is no accident. The body has now become our vehicle, the thing to be worked on rather than in; a thing that we can repair and display rather than feel is us.

read the rest

Write Your Play with the help of some recommended books

I used to be paranoid about the number of playwriting manuals I bought, borrowed and read. Now I’m vaguely proud of it, partly because of the help many have given me to think around as well as within playwriting craft.

Below is a growing and curated list (with amazon links) of the books I recommend that I think could unlock different parts of any playwright.

Continue reading “Write Your Play with the help of some recommended books”

Make your characters anxious with some ANTs (thoughts on playwriting craft #5)

Writing isn’t therapy, but it can be therapeutic. When writing drama, though, if the therapeutic bug takes hold you can end up with a draft in which your characters live a bit too happily.

If you have ever tried some cognitive behaviour therapy to help sort yourself out, you might recognise things called ANTs, Automatic Negative Thoughts, that are best to avoid. Anxiety, depression and burnout aren’t fun or productive, despite what the stereotypes of writers say.

However, these bad thinking habits can be great for characters.

In fact, if your story so far seems a little cheery or flat, giving at least one of your characters one of these types of thoughts as a habit can give your dramatic writing the push it needs.

Continue reading “Make your characters anxious with some ANTs (thoughts on playwriting craft #5)”

Embrace the joylessness (a few thoughts on playwriting craft #4)

Even strangers will tell you that doing something creative must be amazing. Writers can hear it often enough that we put a lot of pressure on ourselves. Not just to write amazing things but to feel amazing while doing it. If the brain surgeon and the removalist at the party said it must be amazing, then who are we to argue?

The problem with that is, that a lot of the act of writing feels joyless. When we deny this reality and encounter the mundane in the act, we want to. give up. We don’t finish.

Go on – finish this!