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In the earliest months of JUTE Theatre Company, before there were grants or programs or any certainty at all, back in 1992, the three of us had a running joke. We had many running jokes, but this one was a classic. Suellen walked through the front door of our rambling old Queenslander on Severin Street one afternoon, all grins, lit from within, and said, “Ask me what I do for a living.” What do you do for a living, Suellen? “I am an artist,” she announced. It was reckless and thrilling and slightly absurd. It was her announcement that she had stepped away from theRead More →

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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 →

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I’ve been immersed in my novel writing journey, navigating the newness of it like a bumbling inept explorer, frightfully overdressed in all the wrong gear, blundering through an intricate landscape of which I have no concept. I am the mapless, hapless, rudderless, clueless rambler. Setting off in bad weather with a set of mad ideas and a backpack full of laughably ill-advised equipment. I love it. I have to say I’m having an exquisite time. I’m not lost; I’m on my way… Much to do. I received the hot tip to check out the Australian Writers Centre online. I was looking for short story competitionsRead More →

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It is done. I have 10,000 words, many if them in the right order. The last morning of the retreat, the last morning of the 2000 word contract. Considering that the average novel has about 300 pages, and a 300-page book will have approximately 82,500 words, I’m about 8% there. With consistency, it’s possible to reach that word count by writing 500 words per day, seven days a week, for about five and a half months. That’s daunting. Even 500 words, and they also need to be the best words possible. Bookity, bookity, bookity goodness. Do I believe what I’m working on could be a novel?Read More →

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Love is a Battlefield. Life is a Highway. Death is a Mirror. Metaphors abound in songs and poems, and in literature. We love to draw metaphoric comparisons, and today I am a Raisin, desiccated and flattened. The challenge continues. The 2000 gig almost broke me today. I was pressed to the limit of my typing speed, my brain refused to spell, and I think I may have RSI (rapid story injury). Each day this is the drill: wake up early, go for a walk, have breakfast with my two villa-mates, then grab my laptop, walk off down the alleyway to a close by cafe, LaRead More →

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Today I am exhausted. I have been trying so hard. Words. Too many words. Too many words. And then to be dealing with more words. I have used all the words. I cannot be using more. Someone mentioned in the last few days that Earnest Hemmingway used to write 2,000 words a day. I was suss of this and so looked it up today. In fact, old Earnest did write 2,000 words a day – getting up at 2am and then writing til dawn, but actually he stopped doing that because he started to feel ‘the real old melancholia’. He got exhausted. So after that heRead More →

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The daily 2000 word challenge continues. I found myself at a local cafe by 8am typing the next chapter of my very strange little novel about a boy who appears to be having auditory hallucinations and whole conversations with inanimate objects. I do not know exactly what his affliction is or whether it is an affliction at all. He might be schizophrenic, or he might just being having conversations with otherwise inanimate objects. I do know that his character has emerged very rapidly, and today as I wrote a story of his life as a 20 year old, working in a local supermarket in hisRead More →

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I’m telling you now, Bali has rarely, if ever, stressed me out. But today it stressed me out two times. Good stress. I think. The first was caused by the mere matter of tippy-tapping out 2,000 words for my new novel. Yes, the novel I do not truly have a clue about at this stage. But, as I say to all my playwrights, you cannot know your story until you tell your story. I awoke way before dawn thinking about this non-existent story of which I am to produce 2,000 words by midday. There was nothing else for it but to go for a longRead More →