When I was ten years old, I wrote a musical.
This is not a boast of Mozart-like precociousness. It was crap. I had no idea how to write songs (I still don’t), and the extent of my musical expertise was being able to play Skye Boat Song on the recorder. I basically wrote some poems and sang them to the tunes we did exercises to in my ballet class. The storyline, as far as I remember, was an Alice in Wonderland rip-off that involved dancing mice. I hand wrote it on one of those multi-coloured “Jumbo” pads that I got for Christmas, and all the tear-off pages fell out and got muddled up in the wrong order. Thankfully, unless my Mum knows otherwise, I don’t think any evidence of the incident remains.
But it is good to branch out and try different forms of writing, even if it turns out you suck, I feel like you learn something. I’m not sure what I learned from the ballet-plagiarising-mouse-musical, but I’m sure it was something. In my teens and early twenties, I was fairly convinced I was a poet. Mostly because I enjoyed writing vaguely goth-y rhyming couplets about death, rock bands, and also people I had crushes on. Most of the poetry was not good, and unfortunately some evidence of this does still exist. Please don’t look for it.
Mostly now I write short stories. It’s a form I’m comfortable with, it’s a form I enjoy reading and a form I enjoy writing. Although it’s taken me a while, it’s also a form I think I’ve become reasonably good at – or at least, in the past few years, I’ve received a bit of validation in the form of publication and competition placements so that’s good enough for me to feel like carrying on. I’ve been saying for almost two decades now that I am “writing a novel” and I am, I really am – I’ve literally finished a full 80000 word draft and I’m in the process of editing it now, but novels are hard man. Keeping track of plots that stretch over months and involve lots of different characters, trying not to get bored, or boring, figuring out how to end with a bang rather than a whimper. It’s difficult and it takes a long time when you’re also writing stories. And working a day job. And trying to keep your house clean-ish. And doing yoga. And learning how to fence because you decided HEMA looked really fun (it is).
But at least once a year I either write, or co-write a screenplay. It’s usually for the Sci-Fi London 48 hour film challenge which I work on with Diminished Responsibility Films. It’s something I ended up doing almost by accident really – I write, my partner makes films, it made sense for me to give it a go. And as always, until I tried it, I don’t think I really appreciated how different writing a film is to writing a short story. It’s really not a case of just coming up with a good story and characters. In fact, to some extent, those things feel a bit secondary.
The first thing I didn’t really get – and I realise now this sounds utterly stupid – is that film is a visual medium (I know, right, who’d have thought?). The first couple of screenplays I wrote were basically short stories, where I just put all the exposition as dialogue between the characters. This has two obvious problems:
1. It’s boring as hell. You’re not watching anybody do anything. Watching people do stuff is the main reason people watch films rather than read books. Watching two people sit there talking to each other and explain a story is super-dull.
2. Dialogue delivered properly takes quite a long time. If your film has a five minute run time you can’t really afford to have someone explain in conversation that aliens have invaded and they’re covering everything in blancmange. You’re better off just chucking blancmange over an actor and filming that.
Also, the 48-hour bit of the challenge is tricky. I’m usually quite a slow writer. I have an idea, I let it percolate for a few days or a few years, I write my shitty first draft fairly quickly, and it usually is super-shitty. Then over a long period of thinking about it and often getting feedback from my beta-readers, I redraft a lot, and at some point, I figure out that actually the piece needs an entirely different ending to the current one, which means I also have to rewrite the beginning to make it fit. Usually, my final piece doesn’t bear much resemblance to the original draft. And I actually love that, it’s one of my favourite things about writing – experiencing the transformation that happens during the redrafting process.
48 hours obviously doesn’t allow time for this, and at first that made for some really crap nonsense screenplays that didn’t transfer well to screen at all. In some cases they were partially saved by excellent work from great actors and a great cameraperson/Director of Photography – but the writing was Not Good. The past few years I’ve realised that a good way around this is to get purposely sketchy in the early stages and embrace the fact that film is collaborative. Figure out my characters and the rough relationship between them and write some general dialogue but let the actors improv around it and build their own characters (something I love watching happen), figure out a rough storyline so that we can start the filming process, but then I let it develop organically. I go on the shoot and watch it unfold, see how it looks, how the characters are relating to each other. I talk to everyone else who’s working on the film, bat ideas back and forth, make changes as we go, and somehow by the end, after Austin has done his editing magic, there’s a film. And often it feels like my contribution was actually pretty small in the end. There’s so much more to a film than story.
Anyway, I feel like a film produced in such a tight timescale is never going to be perfect, but both I and the rest of the team have got better at this over the years. We’ve gone from some borderline unwatchable efforts in some of the earlier years, to some actually not too shabby ones recently. In 2022 we even got shortlisted (with Urges – there’s a link on the main page, although, full disclosure, most of the best dialogue isn’t mine, it’s down to the wonderful actors).
Here you can see this year’s film, Conditions. Enjoy.
Lately I’ve been reading
The Shadow Cabinet by Juno Dawson This series is a whole lot of fun. There’s a specific appeal for me I think as a 90s kid who grew up obsessed with The Craft, Buffy and Sabrina (btw, if you haven’t seen the Sabrina reboot on Netflix, give it a watch, I love it so much!), but it also feels very modern (and handles important issues like transphobia without ever feeling too preachy). This is book 2 and I actually think it’s much better than the first.
Working On:
As well as Conditions, I’m still plugging away with novel edits and my ghost stories. Anthropocene the piece that won the Lucent Dreaming short story competition last year has also just been published in a beautiful print anthology, which you can buy here (it’s on special offer at the time of writing!) Check out some of their other publications too – I really enjoy a lot of what they publish.
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