I won a thing!
It was slightly surreal, but just as we were reaching peak activity with the Little Wonder Radio Play Competition I won a stage play competition. I’m certain that organising the first helped me with the second, although the two were quite different. Cité 27 wanted a 27-minute-long stage play, to be played in a 27m2 space, to an audience of 27 people, using only 3 actors. One of the organisers got in touch with me about 10 days before the deadline to say “hey, have you seen this, you should think about submitting”, and because I love a) a deadline and b) a brief, I said “sure, great.” The next day my wife went into labour.[i] Somehow, I managed to finish some sort of play and send it the day before the deadline.
A couple of weeks later I got a lovely email confirming my play had been selected. How? How could such a thing happen? Did I really write a winning play in a week at the same time as dealing with a new baby and very tired wife? Just how many chickens did I sacrifice to Satan?
Well, I can promise you that no chickens were harmed, and that it certainly had nothing to do with talent. But I do have some thoughts about what worked. Read on if you’d like to learn how to fluke your way through a play competition.
THINGS I DID RIGHT
1. Think about the brief.
27m2 is a relatively small stage and came with a brief about simple staging. Now I love a simple stage because it lets you project your imagination on it: that box is a bar, is a car, is a closet in a film stars apartment.
Three actors means you’re looking at a character piece. You can’t overwhelm with spectacle and a grand chorus. Whatever you’re going to do needs to start with interesting characters.
27 members in the audience means intimacy. The audience are going to be close to the stage, possible in only one rank.
So, don’t write a 20-person-Greek chorus. Make sure all three actors have plenty to do. Look for opportunities to be intimate with the audience. And, here’s the most important, don’t let them fall asleep. Take advantage of the fact that you’re in their face TO GET IN THEIR FACE.
2. Have a cracking idea.
A little while ago in our writing group one member asked for an idea to solve a problem, and another member, Oliver, came back with a list of ten. Boom. Just like that. The person who asked the question was terribly impressed (and Oliver is terribly impressive.)
BUT
What he did is and must be a normal skill for a writer. If you can’t have ten story ideas, right now, just like that, you’re in the wrong business.
No, don’t panic, I’m not telling you to quit. I’m telling you to practice. Get a notebook. Carry it with you. And, every day, sit down, open the book, and have ten story ideas. Two scientists discover the cure for cancer but are offered 100 million to keep it quiet. A man falls from a rooftop to discover he can fly, but only when people aren’t looking at him. Don’t pause to think. Throw the ideas down. The more you practice, the easier it gets.
The point isn’t that you’ll get good at having cracking ideas. You’ll get good at having SO MANY ideas that one of them must be worth writing. And that’s the one you write.
The same rule applies for writing jokes, by the way. You don’t get four jokes a page by writing four jokes a page. You get it by writing forty. Anybody who told you this job was easy was lying to you.
3. Get a straight line and a wavy line.
Obviously, I’m writing a comedy at this point. I always try to start with at least an element of comedy because a) people like to laugh and b) laughter establishes empathy. If the character makes you laugh, it hurts more when they turn out to be a murderer/betrayer/manipulator/killed by their best friend. Whatever. So, it is my strong belief that you should be applying comic principles to ALL your writing. That way, if it isn’t funny you can pretend it was a drama all along.
Comedy works from two pillars. The first is a strong comic premise. A character with an unusual world view – the more unusual the better – that they feel and express strongly. In this case mine was a retired secret agent who absolutely loves killing people. Not in a “I’m a psycho, eat your liver with a nice chianti” way but in a “hey, wow, I’m James Bond, this is fucking great.” She is Ethan Hunt and she fucking loves it.
The second pillar is a straight. When character A is expressing their strong comic presence – their wavy line – you need another character there who is looking at character A and saying, “what the fuck are you going on about?” The classic example is “Who’s on First” – one character gets increasingly bizarre about baseball, the other increasingly confused. The audience understand the sketch through the straights eyes and that is what makes them laugh – seeing a normal person respond to a strange person (as if they need permission before they giggle).
My straight is the secret agent’s granddaughter, who thinks her grandmother should be knitting and doing responsible grandmotherly things, not fist-fighting thugs and blowing up bars. Strong comic presence. A character with an unusual world view, and another character to be surprised by it.
4. Remember the basics
Normal world – disrupted by new activity. First attempt to resolve this leads to greater problems. Central character must change to resolve this new, greater problem, or they will lose that which is most important to them. You know. McKee. Fields. You’ve read the basic text books, right? Don’t get snobby about the basics – you can be the new Beckett once you can outwrite the screenwriter of Venom.[ii]
Anyway, what am I talking about? A strong comic premise gives you jokes, it gives you characters, but you still need to have a story to tell. This always, always, always, comes from thinking deeply. OK, she’s a spy, but what would that really feel like? What would be thing that would concern you most? What would be the worst thing that could happen to you? And the granddaughter – how does it change her view of the world? Is her identity contingent on that of her family?
And how can we make them hurt?
How can we give them hard choices?
Always go big. Always go where it’s toughest. For me, I thought about my time in the forces, and the personal and relationship sacrifices I made. What if I had opportunities to make amends? To get a second chance? For the granddaughter it was more obvious, and one that somehow people miss all the time: killing people is hard! To kill someone is to make a choice about who you are in the world. Who you are going to be for the rest of your life. Or maybe not, I’m not sure. I still haven’t decided myself, so I loaned that confusion to my character.
Point is – remember the basics and go after the hard questions. Even if – especially if – you’ve started from comedy. Remember, there’s no better way to fuck with your audience than to start with them laughing.
5. (The most important one): Blind luck.
Years and years and years ago I watched the Austin Powers movie and thought it was shit. Gave up half way and went to study. About 12 months later I was with some friends and a few beers, watched the Austin Powers movie, and thought it was brilliant. I laughed all the way through.
Austin Powers had not objectively changed. But how the audience find your script depends on a million things outside of your control. If I’m in the mood to watch spaceships exploding over a good soundtrack I’m not going to enjoy Goodbye Lenin, no matter how good a movie it is.
So, as a competition entrant, you can, should and must do everything you can to write a winning entry. And, if you lose (and even if you win), you should take a long hard look at all the things you probably did wrong (we’ll be coming to that in a moment.) But don’t forget that you need to get lucky. Yours needs to happen to be the play the judges fancy at that moment. Knowing this will help keep you going when you lose, and stop you being a dickhead when you win.
THINGS I DID WRONG
1. My first set was too complicated
I learned theatre with a company called Love Dangerously, who had two amazing, brave co-directors and a set/properties designer called Simon Edwards. Simon could build anything from foam rubber. Dragons? Bleeding Faces? Giant Mechanical Legs? No problem.
So, I kind of got started out with the idea that there was no such thing as a staging impossibility. Just a challenge that required more hot glue. And, because I like interest stage design, when I’m doing theatre I tend to put in all sorts of weird and wonderful stuff for actors to move, climb over, smash, etc.
In doing so I’m forgetting two things. First, not all directors are the same as me, and not everyone likes a complicated set – often they just get in the way of the action. I’m still not sure where I’ve come down on this one (give the set design and say, hey, ignore it if you like, or leave the script clean so as not to distract them) – but in this case the set I described was a lot of bits for a 27-minute play with three actors. I just saw something that needed more hot glue. But the set was unnecessarily complicated, and I was lucky the judges accepted the piece with the simple request that I simplify the set.
The other thing I forget is health and safety. I have no idea how that works in France and, well, I’d better find out, because I don’t think the sets I want to build are legal.
As a rule, when you’re writing for competition, the simpler, cheaper and easier to make the play will be the better your chances. I have (and will again) rejected plays that I really enjoyed because they would be too large a pain in the arse to make. Child actors. Animals. Complicated mechanisms. Extensive properties. Save them for when your famous. In your competition, simple and cheap is the way ahead. I pushed this line and suspect I almost fell over.
2. It was overwritten. Again.
A normal script works at around 160 words per minute. If you have significant action sequences that take place while characters are speaking, it becomes a lot more difficult to tell. If you are doing all this for a competition that has a very precise time limit, to be honest your taking a silly risk.
I got away with that one, but they could easily have looked at the word count, said “clearly too long”, and thrown it on the rejection pile.
So, what was the solution? Well, I don’t want to say “don’t write action plays” because then the world will be a sad place. But you need to be tight on your dialogue if you’re going to have a lot going on. Not just because of the word count, but because long confusing speeches don’t work well during fight scenes.
I overwrote. I had characters saying things twice that could have been said once. Speeches discussed stuff that had already been discussed. When they asked if some time could be taken out of the second car chase, well, the answer was. “yes, easily”, and that bugged me because I should have seen that the first time.
That’s one of my problems as a writer right now: I overwrite, and I can’t see where until after a readthrough/someone says to me “cut three minutes or we junk the play.” I’m working on it. Brutality seems to be the answer.
3. I’m not sure I gave the villain enough to do.
Without spoiling the plot, I think the bad guys plan is thematically clever and works nicely unifying the perspectives of the older/younger woman, and it’s funny, but I don’t see it making a lot of practical sense on its own. I’m hoping the male actor will have plenty of fun running around playing lots of parts and making evil speeches, but I do have this odd feeling I could have made more from him.
Again, this is a difficult one. The piece is a comedy. It has things to say (otherwise why bother) and it has some nice character development (ditto). I think it makes most sense for the play that the bad guy is a bit shallow – I won’t spoil it, but in some ways that’s kind of the point. But I always get a bad feeling when I have a character who isn’t really on their own journey – who doesn’t face a conflict they must resolve, or it destroys them. I mean, I had the seeds of one there for him, but in 27 minutes he doesn’t get the time.
I don’t know. You’ll have to tell me when you see the play.
WHAT NEXT?
If I was still allowed to drink, I’d say PARTY!!! However, I have new plays to write and a book to finish – so, like all writers, that correct answers is “next song” (to quote tenacious D). My play “Nanas are Forever” will be put on sometime early in the new year. I’ll let you know the details when I know them. It’s very exciting not to be casting or directing or any of the palaver (erm, I wonder if I’ll be allowed to have a ticket…) Meanwhile, I need to think about sets, be more brutal with my dialogue, make sure my villains are people to, and keep writing. See you on the other side!
[i] We had a beautiful baby girl, Eva, who is in perfect health and too young to be mentally scarred by the knowledge that her father is a playwright, thank you!
[ii] You know what, Venom wasn’t that bad. The obligatory CGI fights were dumb and boring – maybe the need to slot them in is holding the screenwriters back? Tough call that. Either way, plenty to be proud of for the guys who wrote Venom. Yes, I am serious. I just judged 300 script competition entries. We all need to show each other a bit more love.
