Mark Niel - Poet, Writer....Wordslinger!

That’s the advice you’ll hear most often when you tell people you’re a writer, and to be fair, it’s good advice. Writing is, as my friend Lucy V Hay pointed out today, a gamble – there’s no pension attached.

But giving up the day job is just what Mark Niel has done. You can find his blog – Pawhouse Boy – in the blogroll at the side of the page, and that’ll describe him and his endeavours better than I could. Mark is a poet, and a very successful one. He’s won awards, seen off other dedicated wordsmiths at slam poetry events up and down the UK. There’s very little I can say that will convey my utter respect for that ability, let alone the faith that allows him to make the jump from mainstream employment to freelance writer.

As a playwright, I like to think I choose my words, but in reality, they rush out. I think in paragraphs, hear waterfalls of dialogue. To put it another way, when I turn out my script, I’m not facing my audience, I’m hunkered in my bunker behind a .50Cal manuscript, battering the audience with a stream of words, hoping one or two will penetrate and be enough to knock ‘em dead.

The poet, particularly the Slam Poet, picks their words with care. They are the gunslingers of the writing world. The wordslingers. They use their ammo sparingly, making each word count, finding the target again and again with a scary precision.

If you don’t believe me, see Mark in action here. Try not to be deceived by the apparent simplicity of the words – think about the time and effort it took to assemble each line, to make it fit the meter and subject and the signature refrain. Poetry is hardcore. Respect!

The original production at RAF St Athan - helped along with Photoshop

It’s been a long time since my first play – about twelve years now. Not so long ago I wrote this post, which mentioned a little about how I write. This was especially true for Work in Progress, my first play.

I had joined the Theatre Club at RAF St Athan to get out of the house a bit, having spent some time as a houshusband with Eldest Weasel in her early baby days. Mrs Dim said I should socialise with people who could use entire words, so I wandered off one evening and found myself lined up for a part in the pantomime (I was Wishee Washee in Aladdin. One of my finest moments on stage.)

When the panto was done, we started looking around for a play to take to the annual one act play competition. Someone pointed out that if we took a play that the group had written, we would have a shot at the award for “Best self-written play” as no one else ever entered for that. The odds seemed good, and then someone pointed out that I was pretending to be a writer (I had just sold an article to “Mother and Baby” and a short story to “Take a Break Fiction Special”) and therefore I should write the play.

There are times in your life when “No.” is a perfectly reasonable answer but totally impossible to say. I dashed off a play in an embarrassingly short time and passed it around the group. Everyone seemed to like it and asked if I would direct. I hadn’t directed before, but hey, up until that week, I’d never written a play before. How hard could it be?

The secret at the heart of “Work in Progress” is that I had no clue what I was doing. I wrote a play about the things that really happened to me. If you haven’t read it (and it’s available to read HERE), the play is about a struggling author who can’t get the ending of his Detective novel right. While he’s trying to write it, the characters argue with him, and drag him into the action to make him see how wooden and false it all is. By seeing things from their point of view, and seeing them as real people, not cliche cutouts, he’s able to draft a more suitable story.

Yes, this is what happened to me. I was trying to write a novel, but the characters wouldn’t do what I wanted. They said unexpected things, pushed the plot in new directions. Sometimes they did dull, tedious things and I could do nothing to move them along.

Most of the details behind the information in this post can be found via the “What’s New by Category” page of the Lazy Bee Scripts web site - http://www.lazybeescripts.co.uk/Whats_New.htm

Scripts for Kids (Schools or Youth Theatre)

• We’ve published two new kids’ plays by Geoff Bamber. What’s Up, Icarus? is a comic rendition of an Ancient Greek myth, telling the tale of how King Minos tried to turn Crete into a successful holiday destination with a maze and resident monster as tourist attractions. Puss in Boots [Short Version] is more familiar as a pantomime, but this treatment is straightforward comedy without the panto baggage (or Dame, as she is usually called). Anyway, it has the usual ingredients of the tale – a miller’s son, a talking cat, a princess and an ogre. At least two live happily ever after.
• Rabbie Burns’ Night by Olivia Arieti is a children’s introduction to the celebration of the Scottish bard. No set or props required, but the odd display of tartan wouldn’t go amiss. (Seven characters.)
• Don Lowry‘s Alvin And The Queen is a (US) High School play, set in the school cafe. Alvin is your typical high school nerd, and he’s desperately in love with Barbie, the homecoming queen and beauty, who is just not the academic type…
• We’re a bit late in the year publishing Reindeer Games by Martin R. Collin – or perhaps we’re very early. Anyway, as you might expect, it’s a Christmas pageant (a compilation of many old (largely secular) Christmas traditions, including carolling and mummers’ plays, with a modern quiz show thrown in for good measure). A cast from large (we think the minimum is 22 players) to huge with a choir thrown-in for good measure.
• Despite what you might expect from the title, Dance Story by Frank Gibbons is not a musical, but the backdrop is a dance competition, so dance could be a major element. A cast of at least 11, of whom at least 8 girls.
• On the other hand, Hamelin is a definitely a musical play – Philip Bird‘s variation on the Pied Piper story with songs by Isabelle Michalakis. Written for a cast of 21.
• The Frog Princess [Version 2] by Tim O’Brien is our second musical version of the time-honoured tale of the culture clash between royalty and amphibians. A minimum cast of 23, but plenty of room for more courtiers and pond-life.
• Timothy Hallett and Nicholas Richards take us completely into musical territory with The Lambton Worm. It is accompanied by music throughout, with the tale told in a mixture of song and spoken verse. The Lambton Worm is an old folk tale from North-East England. ‘Worm’ is used in the old sense of ‘serpent‘ – so this is a story of knights fighting dragons.
• Hannah Thomas‘s Romeo and Juliet – Sped Up! is a ten-minute reduction of Shakespeare’s play (in modern English and occasional noises) for a cast of 8 or more. No set requirements, just a few props, love and death. Written for school children, whereas…

Shorter Shakespeare
I’m never quite sure whether to group Bill Tordoff‘s abridgements of Shakespeare plays in with the school plays (because they’re designed so that they can be read/performed within the bounds of one lesson) or to group them with the one-act plays because performance isn’t restricted to children.
This is the compromise – a separate category!

• A Forty-Minute Timon of Athens is a reduction of one of the lesser-known plays. In addition to the Greek setting, it has the air of a Greek tragedy, with the central character brought down by his own behaviour. (As usual, the plot, language and characters are preserved, but the text is cut to a one-act length.)

Sketches & Very Short Plays

• Diamond Jubilee 2012 is a sketch show by Ray Lawrence (with ‘an assist’ from Gary Diamond) written, as you may of guessed, in celebration of the sixtieth year of the reign of Queen Elizabeth II. It’s a revue covering the last sixty years in a series of monologues and short sketches. (Add songs to taste for the perfect jubilee celebration.) Many of the sketches are available separately. We’ve also published another of Ray’s rhyming monologues, this time it’s The Clock Mender a tale of the typical tinkerer with timepieces.
• According to Damian Trasler, It’s Not the End of the World though it does involve a surprising number of zombies. A short comedy sketch for a cast of three.
• Lorelei by Jonathan Edgington is a dramatic monologue for a young woman. Single set (three pieces of furniture) and a few props. Lorelei’s story is a sad one, of a life gone wrong and a struggle to cope with a new identity and the loss of the past.
• The reception area for a TV studio is the setting for Bob Tucker‘s Searching, a fifteen-minute comedy about the preparations for a dating show (2M, 1F)
• The typical Writers’ Group is the subject of Tom Jensen‘s comedy sketch for 2M, 2F. Will’s just had a play reading, but the news isn’t good. They think his play needs lightening-up…
• Wally Smith has delivered a couple of serious short plays. The first, Imperfect Speakers, is a 20-minute political thriller for a cast of four, whilst Holding Up A Mirror (for 2M, 1F) explores the nature of drama and the relationship between actors and audience in fifteen minutes.
• Nicholas Richards also presents a new pair of scripts, but these are light comedy sketches in the form of Doctor Sleep (2F, 1M), set in a doctor’s surgery and A New Job For The Wicked One (1M, 1 either) featuring a regular day in the Little Noddingsbury Jobcentre.

One-Act Plays

• Colin Calvert‘s Café Society is a romantic comedy of an unexpected kind for a cast of 3 (2M, 1F), set in a somewhat run-down Cafe where Pauline is looking for no more than quiet contemplation and lunch.
• What would result from M C Escher writing plays? Our reviewer reckoned it would be something like Seven Ages of Love by Robert Burns. (No, not that Burns, another one.) The history of a failed romance is explained in reverse order which, at least, gives it a happy ending. (2M, 2F)
• Establishing Relations by David Craig Smith is a one-act drama with a single domestic set in which a young man introduces his girlfriend to his parents and is dismayed by his father’s reaction. (2M, 2F)

Full-Length Plays

• Reading Between The Lines by Geoff Bamber is a farce set on the fringes of a small literary festival. The characters (3M, 5F) include an academic, a gambler, a vicar, a housekeeper, a French lady… No stereotypes here, oh dear me, no.
• We stay in village festival territory for A Fete Worse Than Death by Richard James. This time it’s a fully fledged whodunnit, but with a distinctly comic edge. (4M, 3F and a very large marrow.)
• Archie Wilson‘s The Séance, on the other hand, is a different animal entirely – a ghostly horror story (with lots of fun for the special effects crew) set in the attic of a house where a murder had been committed. (4M, 3F)

Pantomimes
Unusually, we haven’t published any new pantomimes in the last couple of months. (However, there are plenty more in the pipeline, and we already have over 200 to choose from).

Murder Mysteries
We treat these in a different way from conventional scripts (for a start, they’re in a different part of the web site). They come in a variety of formats from fully scripted to fully improvised.
We’ve got one new one this time, but there are more in the pipeline…

• They Never See It Coming by Die Laughing Murder Mysteries is the sort of piece where we provide a scenario, character briefs and ancillary materials, and the cast improvise the dialogue.

Other Things for Your Show
What else can  we offer you to spice up your show?

• We now have the third CD of spoof adverts and theatre announcements from TLC Creative – Four and Twenty Advertisements – The Third and Youngest! (I particularly like the parody that is The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.)
• How about kitting-out your cast in polo shirts, sweaters or hoodies emblazoned with your show logo?   On the clothing front, our supplier of fleeces has chosen to but an elegant stripe down the front of a popular ladies’ fleece.  It looks great, but it means we would have to stitch logos over a seam, which would tend to mess-up the stitching, so we’ve withdrawn that item.  (We’re looking for a replacement.)  We’ve also done some successful trial runs embroidering logos onto school book bags.  We’ll get those onto the web site eventually.  (Meanwhile if you’re desperate for an embroidered book bag, give us a call!)
• Or how about “good luck” or “thanks” cards for your cast and helpers?

For those and many more gems of theatrical paraphernalia, see the links from our home page.

And that’s it for now – but, as usual, there’s plenty more in the pipeline.

Please remember, although I’ve provided the links so you can see all these plays for yourself, if you wish to perform or present them, even in a classroom setting, you need a performance licence from Lazy Bee Scripts. These are not extortionate, and the rates are proportional to the setting, so please enquire through www.lazybeescripts.co.uk . You’ll be pleasantly surprised! And you won’t be hunted down by rabid playwrights, eager to rend your living flesh and stake you out in the garden with blunt pencils…..

"A Time for Farewells" performed by FEATS

Kicking off the New Year, I had to resist the urge to write about resolutions, or latest projects, or review the failures/successes of 2011. Well, if not those, what? By far the most popular viewing on this site is the gallery of pictures for “A Time for Farewells“. Not my first play, maybe not even my favourite play, it’s nonetheless very popular around the world.

"A Time for Farewells" produced by Titirangi Theatre in New Zealand

Before getting into WHY it may be so popular, let’s have a brief summary of the plot for those who haven’t read it (and if you want to read it, you can find it HERE).

Alex is a batchelor lad until he meets Sarah. She’s not looking for love, she’s looking for a mechanic to fix her car. The play features episodes from Alex and Sarah’s life, interspersed with the couple themselves discussing their relationship. It’s clear there’s some sort of ending here, that this isn’t a loving nostalgia session, but an autopsy on a finished relationship. The play covers high and lows of their life together before bringing the audience up to date and letting them in on the event that Alex and Sarah are preparing for.

The original production, at RAF Halton, with Mark Blackman and Sue Fox as Alex and Sarah.

I like to think it’s a positive play, that the underlying message is hopeful. But I don’t think that’s what brings people to perform the play. There are some very practical reasons why this is a good one to pick, particularly for One Act Play Competitions.

Firstly, the set is simple. In the original set we had three stage blocks on the left hand side of the stage that could be rearranged to represent whatever location was needed. On the right hand side of the stage we had a bedroom set – actually, just the bed. The right hand side is where Alex and Sarah are when the play opens, that’s “now”. Everything that takes place in the past occurs on the left hand side. We had a doorway between the two, but I don’t believe that’s really necessary. So the set is simple, and doesn’t require any special effects or furniture moving during blackouts.

The cast is small. Aside from Alex and Sarah, there are only two other characters, and they really only appear in cameo. It’s essentially a two-handed play, and those two actors get to really stretch their acting muscles as they run through the life this pair have had together.

There’s comedy. I think that’s inevitable in the plays I write, since there’s very little I can take seriously, but in this case it’s important. Alex and Sarah make each other laugh, and the play is about recognising the valuable parts of their history together and holding on to them – the laughter and the tears.

Finally, it’s about people. The proof that this play is universal came with the success of Alan Leung’s production in Hong Kong. Though we had to have lengthy email conversations to sort out the peculiarities of English idiom (Alan was translating into Chinese, an unenviable task. Aparrently the Chinese don’t have an equivalent for the phrase “Under the thumb” when it comes to henpecked husbands…) The Hong Kong production did so well in the competition that it was restaged later on, a tremendous complement.

One of the posters for the Hong Kong production

And after all the positive things, what about the flip side? Is there anything I would like to change? Well the one thing I hadn’t considered when I was writing the play was costume. Alex gets by well enough in a variety of shirtsleeves, but poor Sarah has to go from “stranded business woman” to “bride” to “holidaymaker by the pool” and so on. Most groups have found their own ways around my lack of vision there – in the original production Sue Fox managed to find herself a simple busness-style dress that unbuttoned quickly, and went for and equally easy to don wedding dress. There have been other, equally inventive solutions, as the pictures show.

The relationship between Alex and Sarah seems to be one that people can believe in. Perhaps it’s also one they can relate to. Of course, I’m delighted that the play is so popular, and hope there are many more performances of it around the world. If you have a production planned, or if you’ve taken part in one, please let me have some photos to add to the gallery pages.

If you have any questions about “A Time for Farewells”, either about the writing or the staging of the play, feel free to drop me a line at dtrasler3@gmail.com. You can read “A Time for Farewells” and all my other published plays at www.lazybeescripts.co.uk

Pi Theatre's homepage. Go check them out, theatrelovers!

There are days when you make silly mistakes, aren’t there? We’ve all done it, I’m sure. Well, the other day, I made a classic mistake. You’ll know from reading my letter to the Inland Revenue that I’m prone to sarcasm and verbal attacks when irritated, and when I was at a fairly low ebb (gloomy about the struggle to complete the latest play, if you must know…) I received an email from Pi Theatre.

Now this was not spam mail. I signed up for their newsletter a long time ago. They were asking for money, it’s true, but they were asking for donations to help fund a workshop to develop a play by a local emerging playwright. It’s one of the things they do there. However:

I didn’t read the email properly. I glanced at it and took in that a theatre company was asking me -  a cash-strapped, under-performed playwright -  to cough up cash so a bunch of actors could fanny about making up another incomprehensible mish-mash of a play that pleased no one but themselves when certain playwrights have a whole bunch of plays in their back-catalogue that are just WONDERFUL.

See, hardly a balanced, sane response, was it? I’m utterly, utterly ashamed. If I had only gnashed my teeth in frustration and shouted at the computer, that would have been bad enough. But no. I wrote a sarcastic, cruel and rude rejoinder.

And sent it.

Pi Theatre have a brilliant general manager called Becky Low. She would have been within her rights to cut me off from their lists, respond with a rude email of her own, badmouth me around the theatre community and make small dolls in my image to stick with pins. She didn’t.

Instead Becky wrote a careful, calm and grown-up response that had me red-faced and cringing. She was exactly as courteous and professional as I hadn’t been.

I wrote back with a much more considered apology, and thanked her for her time. She was kind enough to wish me all the best with my current projects and encourage me to stay in touch.

So, if you’re considering taking in some theatre in the Vancouver area, may I recommend PI Theatre? They have a good roll of productions, and they work hard to encourage new local playwrights, like Sean Devine . And they’re forgiving and understanding of old, crochety ones.

While we’re on the subject of Theatre, those lovely folks over at MonsterVintage are still interested in your input about using their stock of vintage clothing for costumes in Community Theatre productions. Obviously, being based in the US would be preferable, but they are wondering which plays out there would be best suited to their range of clothes. Take a look at their website and either contact them direct, or leave you suggestions in the comments below. Thanks!

Check them out at www.monstervintage.com Tell them you came from here!

I’ve been away, blog-wise, for a while now. Despite my absence, people come, they look at the blog and they occasionally leave messages. All those tags are still dragging people in off the internet like little Interdictor Cruisers on a hyperspacelane*

But this week I got a very interesting email from Annie Rose at Monster Vintage (www.monstervintage.com), an online clothing store. She had realised that her store is the perfect place for Community Theatre groups trying to source vintage clothes for certain plays. Her problem was that she didn’t know which plays, or how to reach out to the people in Community Theatre who might be able to take advantage of this idea.

I guess she found me because I drop “Community Theatre” in almost every post and tag cloud, since I would also love to be on talking terms with Community Theatre groups around the world.

So here’s the deal, folks: Whether you’re here to try and find the script for my remarkably popular play “A Time for Farewells“, or just looking for scripts, or writing tips, or you got here by accident, look up the details of your local Community Theatre group. Add those details to the comments section below. If you can, get in touch with them and ask them to come and look at this post too, and maybe leave their own comments. Because the lovely Annie has dangled the prospect of a giveaway on this very blog, but we really need to show her the market is out there. I think there’s a chance that between us we can turn this blog into a useful theatre hub – somewhere that playwrights (like me, like TLC Creative and many others) can find theatre groups who might want new scripts, or bespoke scripts, or might be willing to read new plays that need the corners knocked off.

I read too many playwright blogs that simply track the misery of trying to complete the magnum opus, or gloat about the latest fantastic review in the village paper of the self-written, self-directed, self-funded play. I know there are others out there like me, and I know there are thousands of brilliant, devoted and dedicated Community Theatre groups who would love the opportunity to improve their script base and take advantage of another source of good costumes.

Plus, I have to say, the clothes at Monster Vintage are COOL. (And you know what? No one is paying me anything to say this. I genuinely think we can all help each other here. Isn’t that what Social Media is for?)

*This is a Star Wars reference, and proves that I mostly write this blog to amuse myself.

Ever get the feeling you took a wrong turn?

It’s possibly a little over dramatic, but today is the day I stop blogging. Maybe forever, maybe just for a while. Sme friends have been kind enough to ask why, so here goes.

A couple of years ago, I was blogging under the banner “The Great Canadian Adventure.” Here was me and my family doing something brave and unusual, throwing all our possessions into a container and moving to a different continent. We were leaving behind family and friends, and blogging seemed a good way to keep everyone updated on our progress and news.

But after a year or more, it wasn’t so important. We were skyping, we were on Facebook, and folks had adjusted to us not turning up to visit. Some had even been out to visit us. I went to a seminar on blogging and how it was an essential tool for the modern writer and took a long look at my own blog. Did it do the job? I bought Kristen Lamb’s book, “We Are Not Alone” and put some of her ideas into proctice. I took her online course, making a bunch of great friends along the way, and yes, I raised the visitor stats on my blog too.

And over the last year I have checked those stats with an obsessive fervour, worrying about making my daily, weekly and monthly quota, trying to find the mystic subject that would ignite the net and get me Freshly Pressed. Should I add video clips? Should I link more per page? Am I mentioning my e-book enough?

On the other side of the Atlantic, one of my writing partners was being just as obsessive about our sales. He sends me regular updates on a spreadsheet, which showed that, while they were still healthy, in most cases sales were falling. We were selling less, despite my impressive readership. The fabled “Word of mouth” recommendation I had been chasing has not materialised.

That’s not to say I don’t believe what Kristen has been teaching. I KNOW that her methods work, that a platform is essential for an author, certainly more so now than ever. It may be entirely my fault, but the blog has not improved my situation. In fact, it may have made it worse.

Since we hooked up with our publisher all those years ago, TLC Creative have maintained a healthy market share. We produce a new panto each year, and I added to the stock of one act plays on a semi-regular basis. Sketches appeared more often than not, and we’ve even come up with a couple of full-length pieces. But not this year.

This year the only writing I have managed has been the scenes I was tasked with for our pantomime. They were late, the latest I’ve ever produced work for TLC, and far from writing more than I was asked, I scraped the bare minimum.

Since I finished my full length play “Merely Players” over a year ago, I have not written a single thing. Other than my blog.

Some of you may be sitting at your computers saying “Well, that’s just writer’s block, everyone gets that.”

I would agree, except it’s not that I haven’t had ideas. I have. I’ve had quite a few ideas trot through my brain, but I have not given them the time that I have dedicated to chasing another ten views on my blog, and that has to be wrong. The blog is supposed to be a way of connecting with people so they can be interested in what I write. It’s not supposed to BE all I write.

So the logical thing, the obvious thing, the right thing to do is stop blogging. Stop pouring my available writing time into building castles online and go back to building worlds on other people’s stages. People still find me, and the people who have been in touch most recently did not come to me via my blog. They found the TLC website and contacted me through that.

I’ll still follow with interest the blogs of my friends, and I’ll still use my wordpress id to comment and encourage. But perhaps some time away from staring at the visitor stats will allow me to make some new, imaginary friends and write about their adventures.

After all, it’s what I get paid for.

Photo via Huffington Post

It’s impossible to ignore the horrific occurances in Norway. Any murder is terrible, mass murders more so, and the mass murder of young people seems particularly hard to take, whether it occurs in a High School, or a war zone.

A natural reaction is to ask “Who has done this? And why? Why would anyone do anything like this?” These, then, are the questions that the news media rush to answer. They find as much information on the suspect as possible, throw pictures and video onto every screen. In this case, they also triumphantly brought out a 1500 page manifesto, written by the suspect.

That’s the point where I stopped reading. Like the case of the shootings at Virginia Tech in 2007, I felt the names we should be remembering, the lives we should be learning about, belonged to the victims. Their names are the ones that should be held up to the public, their achievements applauded, their potential mourned.

We hold very few circumstances to be acceptable for killing another person. Soldiers in defence of their country, or defending an ally, may kill. Defence of one’s family, or of another person in danger.  This man was not a soldier on a battlefield. He was not defending himself, or others in imminent danger. His innocence or guilt is left to the lawyers and the court, but from the basic facts available, he appears to be a murderer. That should remove any fame or publicity for his views. Whatever his motivations for killing, the fact that his targets were young, unarmed civilians should negate them.

Giving a platform to murderers, especially ones like this who have clearly prepared their material ahead of time to capitalize on the media frenzy that follows their killings, is giving them what they want.

My personal belief is that this man should be convicted, and ignored. His manifesto should be destroyed, and when mention is made of this event, it should recount the names of the victims and simply refer to him as “The murderer.”

A lot of the comments following the internet news stories talk of killing him, of retribution. I understand the anger, but think it serves little purpose. I don’t know that his death would be any comfort to the families of the victims, and let’s be honest, they’re the ones who would have most to say on the matter. I’d like someone who this man respects, someone who he looks up to, to visit him in his cell, and explain that he was wrong. That what he did was not the beginning of a revolution, not a glorious act, but murder. I don’t think there is anyone he would listen to, anyone he would believe, because to commit such an act surely shows a person has passed beyond reason. But still, while we rage at him, and villify him, and denounce him, he revels in it.

Tell him he was wrong.

I've been saving this one for years, but it hasn't helped anything yet....

The first half of this year has been a bit odd. Not in a “Two-headed dog” kind of way, but because I’ve concentrated a lot of effort in writing and publicising this blog. It’s been fun, developing a network of fellow bloggers, meeting people on purpose by commenting on their blogs, and meeting people by accident through blog strings or comments. While I know my parents would think that’s all plenty odd, that wasn’t what I was thinking about. It’s odd because this blog is meant to be my shopfront, my public face, the place where I promote my plays. That’s what it’s all about, telling people I’m a playwright, that I write good plays that community theatre groups would enjoy performing. Plays that have won awards.

The odd bit is that, thanks to this tireless work on my blog, I haven’t actually written any new plays, as such. I’ve chipped in my required scenes for the latest TLC Pantomime, “Snow White and the Magnificent Seven”, but even there I was slower than usual.

Of course, it’s easy to blame the blog, but maybe it’s something more sinister. A lot of blogs about writing discuss writer’s block. It’s a bit like the Loch Ness Monster, I think. Some folks believe in it absolutely, can tell you the history of it, show you their photographs. Others deny it exists and won’t hear anything to the contrary.

A one-in-a-million shot, I know : who do you know that still wears a cagoul?

I keep telling Mrs Dim that I’m not bothered. That if something occurs to me and I want to write it, then I’ll write it. But time’s gone by and I’ve reviewed dozens of other people’s scripts for my publisher, run others through the Script Appraisal Service, and seen friends like Richard James produce two full length plays (good ones, curse him!) in the time I’ve written…er…well, a couple of cheques and a lot of shopping lists.

And there is something I want to write. Something I’ve been wanting to write for around five years now. But it’s not a play, or a pantomime, or a sketch. It’s a screenplay. And I really, really want to get it right.

More than any other type of writing, screenplays have rules. There’s the format, where you put the character names, what gets put in CAPS, the stupid typewriter font you HAVE to use or be cast into outer darkness. There’s the mysterious three act structure, the beats, the scenes, you mustn’t give camera directions, don’t use more than four lines of descriptions, more dialogue than direction, on and on and on and on.

I’ve read about five good books on screenplay writing. They all made sense, right up until the moment when I tried to use their advice to write the story I was thinking of. My story was already too complete to fit their model, and I was too set, too determined to allow any changes. That’s why, after five years, I only have two drafts, and the second one drifts off into drivel.

Blake Snyder is my last chance. It’s a lot to ask of someone who died two years ago, but his books live on, and they’re friendly and encouraging and THEY MAKE SENSE. I’m reading “Save the Cat!”, his first book, and I think the combination of good advice, friendly tone and five years of bending the story back and forth may finally allow me to rebuild it according to Blake’s model.

I really hope so. The ever-saintly Lucy V Hay was kind enough to report on the first ten pages of draft two and called it a “very original” idea. From someone who reads scripts for a living, that’s high praise. It’s a little late in the day to be making New Year’s Resolutions (and you know what I think of them anyway – see here) but I’d like to end this year with a shiny new draft of “Tribute”, written with the posthumous help of Blake Snyder.

Ask me how I got on in January, will you?

What project has taken you the longest? Do ideas age like fine wine, or do they go rotten like old running shoes left in the schoolbag over the summer? My e-book “Writing a play for community theatre” only took a year from beginning to end, even though you could probably read it in an afternoon. If you’d like to read it in an afternoon, why not download a copy from the TLC website?

Music has always been important to me. Fashion, not so much....

Reading this post by Raelyn Barclay made me think about the role of music in the writing process. Which sounds TREMENDOUSLY pompous, so maybe I’ll start again. A lot of writers make mention of listening to music while they work. Stephen King often quotes lyrics at the beginning of his books, and I can imagine him playing the tunes as the words scurry across the screen.

For a long time I thought that music might somehow infect my brain, that I needed the purity of silence to assemble my prose. That lasted until computer technology caught up to the extent that I could play music while word-processing. After that it was always music selection before starting up the literary engines. But still I worried about words fighting words, and I plumped for instrumental pieces in the main. At least three of my short stories were written to the sound of “Rennaisance Love Songs” which I quite liked, but was completely unable to sing along with.

It didn’t take too long before I realised that when I was writing, really writing (I’d say “When I was in the zone”, but I can’t carry off phrases like that, sorry.) the music would fade away. I’d look up from the screen and realise the playlist had ended and I hadn’t noticed. And if that was true, then all bets were off and anything goes as far as music is concerned.

Right now on my go to list I have: Avril Livigne, Paloma Faith, Jewel, Iron Maiden, Guns n’ Roses, Dire Straits, Pink, Bruce Springsteen, Taylor Swift, Nerina Pallot, Natalie Imbruglia…. Don’t bother looking for the common thread there, because there isn’t one. They are some of the songs I have that I know I can listen to over and over again. There isn’t one on my playlist that pulls me out of the writing fugue to think “Oh, not this one again, skip it, skip it….”. As far as I am aware, I don’t sing along, or jig up and down, or tap my foot.

So it’s no secret, I’m afraid (unless you were surprised that I’m a fan of Taylor Swift – and why wouldn’t you be? She writes her own songs and they are GOOD! Honestly, songs that I can relate to that my thirteen year old weasel likes too? Gold, folks, solid gold.) but I like to listen to music while I write.

How about you blog reading folks out there? Are you musical writers, or do you lower the ear defenders to get enough peace and quiet to construct a world inside your head?

Sometimes my musical wanderings lead me to write plays, many of which have been published by the good folks at www.lazybeescripts.co.uk . I have ammassed so much experience in the field of writing for Community Theatre that a deputation was sent from the Vatican to plead with me to produce a guide for ordinary people on the subject. After many hours of ceaseless toil I realised I couldn’t put it off any longer and wrote a handy-dandy e-book on that very topic. Called “Writing a play for Community Theatre” it’s available for download at www.tlc-creative.co.uk and it’s a veritable bargain.