A RomCom in Space – easy, right?
Dumped, my new radio play, was released last week. In this article I’m going to talk about some of the things I like and don’t like about what I wrote, and some of the techniques I used to make a romantic comedy on an exploding spaceship hold together (all of which you are welcome to steal.) But first, if you haven’t listened to the play, now is a good time – because the article contains spoilers!
Things of which I’m proud: asking the question early
Within the first sixty seconds of the play we have established they are on a spaceship, that they must stop the spaceship from exploding, and that the Captain wants to get the Biologist to start a romantic relationship with her. How will they save the ship? How will she talk round the mushroom man? And why does she want to be with him anyway?
Questions that must be answered are a foundation of good drama, and sixty seconds is about right to get them asked. How much time you have establish the question depends on the medium. If it’s something where the audience can’t easily switch off or leave (the theatre or the cinema, for example), you have a bit more time. But a podcast? Some people switch off after 10.
The audience needs to hear to question that the play seeks to answer. And they need to hear it straight away. You can be subtle, you can play games, you can pull the rug out from under their feet and the question can evolve, but there must be some sort of compelling question early on. Just for once I think I nailed it here.
Getting Annoyed with Oliver
The main reason I wrote this play was the chance to write for the insanely talented Oliver Warren, who directed the wonderful Mary-Ann Cafferkey and Dominic Kelly. He had some free studio time and I really wanted to write for him. That meant I needed to come up with something good, fast – not just because I always want to write something good, but because Oliver is a very good writer/director and I wanted to do my best for him.
Now we did four rounds of feedback. That’s well above average, very generous from Oliver and a lot of time from a director. But by four rounds you start to worry – what’s going wrong?
Oliver gives great feedback, but there was this one line he kept on obsessing over being wrong. I didn’t agree. It was a good line. I was very sure and started to get grumpy. Until, finally, on the fourth time round, I realised he was right. The thing is, the problem wasn’t the line: that was what I hadn’t been able to see. It was a good line for the original play but didn’t belong in what the play had to become. I ended up re-writing half the play – and it was much, much better for it. Our work changes in the process of writing and you have to see what it is not what it used to me.
Why does getting annoyed please me? Well, mostly because I was able to get over it and listen to what he was saying. It’s too easy to write shit because you let your ego get in the way. We’re all poor fragile writers, and even when we’re getting advice when people we know are good it can be easy to let that fragility stop us from seeing things clearly. But if you aren’t going to listen, why ask? And if you have someone patient enough to go through it with your four times, thank your lucky stars and make the play better. Also, I managed (hopefully) not to be obviously grumpy.
Oh, and remember the name Oliver Warren. Pretty sure you’ll see it on TV soon.
How to get an idea in a hurry
I had to write this pretty quick (I always have to write pretty quick) and that was part of why I struggled with Oliver’s feedback: because I was in a rush to fix a problem I didn’t understand. Central to this is how we find and develop ideas.
I’ve honestly lost track of how many plays I wrote last year, from radio shorts to screenplays to full length stage scripts. It’s probably around a dozen. I’m happy to say all but one got staged or produced in one form or another, and the one that wasn’t produced was longlisted by the BBC Writers Room Drama Competition. I even got paid for some. So, how do I come up with some many ideas?
Well, truth be told, that was a trick question. 12 or so play ideas are not a lot of ideas. For each play you write you need to come up with several ideas and pick the best one. If you write the only idea you have then you’re just asking to end up writing the same thing over and over again. It is essential that you learn to make ideas the same way you make coffee – in an endless, despairing stream as you crouch over your computer and wish you were better at maths so you could get a proper job,
If coming up with ideas is a problem for you then you haven’t written enough comedy and you need write more comedy. In a decent comedy you want four or five jokes a page – jokes that are in character, that drive the narrative, and are, well, funny! If you want four or five good jokes, then you’ve written five to ten times as many and picked the best. Or you’ve just written whatever you could come with at 2 in the morning. The point is that comedy forces you into the habit of having lots of ideas and picking the best. And that’s all that having ideas is. A skill that you can learn.
Where do you get these ideas? After you first twenty odd plays you’ve run out of those “burning plays you’ve always wanted to write” (just kidding, those keep on popping up all through your life.) After that, steal liberally. People often use their personal life, which I try to avoid. But you’ve got the news, website, radio shows, podcasts, weird things you see on the metro… Combine different people and situations. Keep on going until you come up with a situation.
The story I stole was about a lesbian couple who had each had IVF. Then, one day, one partner upped and left with the child she had birthed claiming the first of her children wasn’t really hers anyway. Which is really fucked up. The abandoned mother, having lost her second child, then went looking for the sperm donor for her first – and lo and behold, they fell in love. Happy ending. Mostly. I mean, wow, emotional turmoil.
To start with I basically did what I always do – I took the story and put it on something that was blowing up. You can’t beat an explosion for adding urgency. But then comes the second part of the art of stealing ideas and calling it creativity. You must pare it back and find the essence of the story you are telling. The line Oliver was focussed on, the line that was funny and cool but wrong, was part of the whole narrative about the separated children and the IVF and, well, in a ten-minute play it was too much. This is a story about someone searching for somebody with which they can rebuild a family, meeting someone who doesn’t believe they deserve to be loved. That’s more than enough
Once I realised that the problem with the line was that it was part of me trying to tell too many stories at once, I saw that I needed to concentrate on the most important through line and bin everything else. One line can be pivotal to everything.
So, ideas? Read lots. Steal stuff you like. Mix it with other stuff you like. Then strip it right back to the essential question. The play I wrote in the end (with a lot of help from Oliver) touched a lot of things that were important to me – recovery from the loss people you thought you loved, believing you don’t deserve to be loved, and trying to overcome those things. That’s a hell of a lot for a radio short. Steal ideas. Strip them down.
Things of which I’m less proud: too much talking.
I still overwrite. This is, in part, because I overtalk. Have you noticed from the way I write blogs? It’s also because I’m an Aaron Sorkin fan. I like characters who talk a lot and talk fast. I expect my actors to rattle through at much fast than 160 word per minute.
The problem is that this isn’t always the best thing to do (as evidenced by some of Sorkin’s works that haven’t come out so well, although he’s SO good at the fast-talking thing he usually gets away with it.) Sometimes you must slow down – if everything is at one hundred miles per hour then it gets, well, honestly, it gets boring.
Another problem, quintessentially, is that I feel compelled to explain absolutely everything. There’s a section in the middle of Dumped where the poor old Captain goes on and on and on and on about her relationships and why she likes the Biologist. Thankfully, the actor is magnificent and makes it work. But it needed to be about half the words. Girl likes boy but both have ex issues is something people can figure out for themselves from not a lot of writing.
The more plays I read, edit, and write, the more I realise that you must limit the number of speeches to an absolute minimum. By a speech I honestly mean anything more than three sentences. In a radio short you get to have maybe two or three. More and you lose the audience to the mind numbing tedium of having to have an attention span greater than a goldfish. What do you mean I hate my listeners? I love my listeners! But the truth is that all of us in the 21st century have a million things demanding our attention, and if somebody starts talking for too long (ie. more than three sentences) and they don’t have a voice like John Hurt we’re going to stop listening.
Now, for goodness sake don’t take this as a law cast in stone or throw at me a half a dozen excellent plays that break this rule. Of course it can be broken. Just be really sure why you are doing it.
Go back and look at your longer patches of dialogue. Is there anything you can cut that wouldn’t destroy the meaning of the page? Cut it. Sorry, I don’t care if you love it. Cut it. What, it’s one of your four jokes a page? Sorry, you’re going to have to merge the joke into something essential.
Conclusions: Not bad for a romcom
This is one of the better pieces I’ve written, and that’s mostly thanks to Oliver, both as a writer and director, and his wonderful actors. I’ve started noting news stories and things I see on the internet that emotional touch me – theft is an essential skill for a writer. I’m also starting to realise that romance and humour and affection are all good, important things to have in a script: I find myself wanting to be kinder than I used to be. It is so important to like characters. It is so important that they are likeable. Then, when they are faced with a question in the first sixty seconds, the audience actually gives a damn. We managed to do that with Dumped. It’s funny, it’s sweet, and it’s on a spaceship. Job done. Thanks guys!
photo credit: Onkel Ton “Nova Donostia” space tanker concept via photopin (license)
