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In #2 in my Bite the Rewrite series, I’m asking for some dogged forensic work. So are your scenes working hard enough? First draft, probably not. Sometimes you’re so deep in the playwriting forrest you are unable to identify anything specific about the trees. That’s when the old PPP can help. Plot. Psychology. Premise. This triumphant roughly aligns to ‘outer journey’, ‘inner journey’ and ‘meta journey’. Look at your first draft scenes. Without any doubt, there will be scenes there that are flabby. There may be scenes that are missing. There may be scenes that are too short, too long, too rambling, too tight-lipped. ThereRead More →

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You’ve written your play, first draft, wowie, and you reckon you have some cracker scenes and you think the whole thing is hanging together they way you thought it might….or that is until you read it out to yourself ( or worse, hear a group of actors reading it). The disappointment can be real. Suddenly those beloved characters are limp as lizards, flatter than the paper they are written on; the plot feels clunky like some old bike trundling along a pot-holed road to nowhere; the emotional life of the work is either desperately overworked or hopelessly bereft; and the whole thing is thematically soRead More →

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We all hate them. Deadlines. They have a hardline vibe that give creative people like you and me the heebie-jeebies. But I want to speak now for deadlines, how they are valuable, how we can benefit from them, and why we really should be more excited about them in general. This week I missed a deadline. I’m kicking myself. But I have some consolation. It reminded me that deadlines, even missed ones, serve a purpose. I just want to point out the etymology of the word ‘deadline’ comes from the term to describe a line drawn around a prison beyond which prisoners were liable to be shot.Read More →