The Biro of Destiny!

Your call is important to us

2011-01-13T15:22:00.000-08:00

I've written two profile pieces for The Skinny in the last two days, which should appear on their site fairly soon. One of them was an email interview - I wrote some questions, he sent me back some replies. It sounds easy and I have to admit that copying and pasting does save a lot of typing. But what you end up with is this kind of weird join-the-dots puzzle, where you take all of the interesting and amusing quotes and weave them into a single narrative. Of course, I had a rough idea what shape the thing would be and I had structured my questions accordingly, but there was still a bit of patching up to do.

The other one was a terrific phone interview which went on far longer than it was meant too. Without a doubt this is a more enjoyable experience than emailing, but afterwards you have to do a lot of filtering and the more verbose the interviewee, the greater the chance that you'll have to chuck your original plan for the article in the bin.

Oh, and it helps if you record the call properly as well. Otherwise you have to rely on near-illegible handwritten notes. Doh.

I haven't done any face-to-face interviews for The Skinny yet but I'm dying to have a crack at it. It's been a loooong time since I've done one of those. Glasgow Comedy Festival is coming up in March, so I might get a chance then.

What have we learned?

2011-01-10T16:25:00.000-08:00

In terms of writing, 2010 has felt like a little bit of a disaster, enough to really get me down.

Of course, thinking rationally, it's been anything but. Let's see: I've finished my Creative Writing diploma, won a place on a really good screenwriting course, written about five short stories and a 30-minute comedy pilot, finished out the year by doing a lot of comedy reviewing for The Skinny, and the supersecret project I mentioned is actually still going full steam ahead. The Skinny stuff in particular I should be proud of: I've graduated to the paper edition, interviewed Russell Kane and earned probably the highest readership of my career to date.

So why do I feel down? Well, it's two things. One is that 2009 was for me, as a writer, probably the best year of my life. 2010 pales in comparison.

The other thing is that I've never really felt on top of things in 2010. A lot of the good things in 2010 have been down to some excellent people helping me out, nudging me on and giving me things to work on. I'm deeply grateful to them, but I haven't really felt much initiative behind me this year.

A lot of this is to do with the demands of normal life. I was discussing this with my writing buddy on Saturday, who is now going through a swanky novel-writing workshop run by Faber. She's in the same boat as me, struggling to balance writing with the demands of parenthood and having a full-time job.

(She has twice as many kids as me but she's twice the writer I am, so our burdens are roughly equal.)

The thing is, we've both been doing this balancing act for the last few years. We both frittered away enough time to write a dozen novels during our twenties; we've both written our best stuff while under enormous pressure from our personal lives. The demands of domesticity are not a good enough excuse for not writing.

Writing can be done anywhere at any time. Your office is in your head. The challenge isn't finding free time, the challenge is keeping your office organised and getting some work done.

So. A wobble in 2010, but back on course for 2011 is the plan. I've got a list of ideas, some little and some laughably huge. There will be successes, there will be some spectacular failures. Will I be happy this time next year? I will, if I can look back and say that I've given 2011 everything I've got.

Blind items

2010-10-03T15:46:00.000-07:00

Two strange things happened yesterday:

First, one of the acts I gave a positive review to during the Fringe took the time to email me and thank me for the review. Which was lovely and unexpected. I never felt that reviewers were doing anything other than provide a little publicity, but the act involved (I won't name names) seemed genuinely pleased that someone rated their work so highly.

Second, a close friend rang me out of the blue and asked if I wanted to be involved in writing something. It's unpaid and it probably won't come to pass, but if it did then the project would be overseen by one of my favouritest writers in the whole universe. If anything does come of it, I'll post it here.

Today's been a far more normal day. I've got an idea for a lengthy project which is still at the brewing-in-the-back-of-my-brain stage. We'll see.

For the write fee

2010-09-16T13:32:00.000-07:00

So, in amongst all the Fringey stuff there has been some activity in the world of fiction, with another rejection letter bringing me thudding back to reality. It was from the In The Write Light people mentioned previously, and I will not be getting to spend a weekend up a mountain in Spain with Nell McCafferty. Awwww. Seriously, I would have loved that, even if I was slightly worried she might beat me up.

The rejection email came with an offer to return three pages of feedback on the submission which is of course an interesting offer, feedback being like oxygen to any hatchling writer. I emailed them for details and was quoted a price of €50. Not a huge amount, but fairly eye-watering to someone as skint as me.

I wondered if I was getting hustled (my Pavlovian response to any email asking me for money) but I realised that this probably represents better value for money than a lot of other writing competitions. So many of them have entry fees but offer no kind of feedback service for losing stories. It's possible to spend €50 in a few months without ever getting anything more than a few brief rejection letters.

So in fairness to the Write Light guys, it's probably not a hustle (although I'd need to see their feedback to see if it's worth €50). But there are plenty of other people out there willing to shake down new writers. The only guaranteed defence against them is to not have any money in the first place. It's worked for me so far.

Reviewing the Fringe: a review (Part IV)

2010-09-15T07:19:00.000-07:00

Part IV: Leading the cheers

And so we bring this fascinating thread of blog posts to an end by looking at the good stuff: four and five star reviews.

Trying to figure out the difference between a four and a five star review was one of the big headaches of the Fringe. A good headache, and one I suffered often because I was lucky enough to see some cracking shows.

My first review was Sarah Millican. She went on to be nominated for the Edinburgh Comedy Award, so her show can’t have been that bad. I really enjoyed it and was extremely impressed by her stage craft: underneath some fairly ordinary material is a world-class understanding of how to keep an audience laughing. I debated about whether it was a four or a five star show and ended up consulting the editor. I told her the show was “guaranteed great time” but not “show you’ll tell the grandkids about one day”. She recommended four stars. The Skinny set the bar pretty high.

(I had a very brief Twitter exchange with Sarah about this review. I told her that I thought she was phenomenal and she replied with “Phenomenal is 5 stars”, which I’m choosing not to interpret as snippy)

Once the bar is set though, it’s still a judgement call on whether you give 100% or hold something back. Often, I ended up comparing shows to each other. For example, Alex Horne and Helen Keen both had similar shows this year, Odds and It Is Rocket Science, involving multimedia and a lot of science. I loved them both and wouldn’t hesitate to recommend either one. But Odds felt slightly like an episode of a TV show, while It Is Rocket Science felt really fresh and original. So Alex gets four and Helen gets five, but there’s not really much in it.

I was similarly fond of both Jason Cook and Paul Sinha. Again they had similar shows, using dramatic experiences from the last 12 months as a framework, with lots of general stand-up thrown in the middle. But Jason used his experience as a theme, while Paul constructed a quite brilliant essay on intolerance in modern Britain. I came out of Pauls’ show feeling like I had witnessed a really important new voice emerging, so he got the five stars.

It’s random and arbitrary, but that’s the nature of reviewing, which is probably why artists hate being reviewed (unless they’re getting unqualified praise). But in some ways, this problem is the most enjoyable one faced by reviewers. I said before that I think reviews are at their best when they’re subjective and personal; making that decision between four and five stars give you that option to say that you really, really loved something and you desperately want to share it with others.

*

Thanks for reading all of this, if you have. Of course, I’m not remotely qualified to give definitive advice on reviewing. I just wanted to record some of my thoughts, which should also make a handy set of notes if I’m lucky enough to be doing it again next year.

Reviewing the Fringe: a review (Part III)

2010-09-12T16:08:00.000-07:00

Part III : Stuck in the middle with several of you

So, previously I linked to an article by Alex Horne because it namechecked me and included a mortifying use of the phrase “OMG”. But there’s a line in there which really irked me and caught the eye of a few other reviewers. It’s this:

“Precious performers like me tend to sniff at the traditional reviewers’ star system, whereby newspapers give a show a mark out of 5 and thus can dismiss a year’s work with a simple 3 stars (or worse).”

A dismissal, eh? I’m going to cite myself here, and include some quotes from the three-star reviews I gave during the Fringe:

“For anyone with any kind of interest in comedy, this is an unmissable experience.”
“Extremely funny, but also observed with the painful honesty.”
“Borders on brilliant”

I mention these because they hardly count as dismissals. Sure, the reviews also include some negative things which is why they are three stars rather than five, but all of the three-star reviews I gave had something nice to say about the show. The same is true of most other three-star reviews I read, and therein lies the problem:

Nobody reads three-star reviews.

It makes sense, of course. During the Fringe, people are as bombarded by reviews as they are fliers and they have to exercise quality control. A one-star review will get a read because everyone likes a good bitch; a five-star review will get read because people want the hot tips. But a three-star review often may as well not exist.

Sometimes this is really frustrating. A couple of acts like Robert White and Nat Luurtsema had huge potential but slightly unpolished acts. I’d like to have given them four stars in the hope of encouraging people to see them, but they didn’t really deserve it. So they get a useless three-star review. (The ironic thing here being that the 0-star review White got on Chortle was probably a bigger profile-builder than any single review printed over the whole Fringe).

Speaking to other reviewers, there’s a general consensus that three-star reviews are the ones that really make you feel like people are only looking at the rating and nobody’s reading the copy underneath. It’s quite grim, because reviewers are writers and all want to be read.

Of the acts I reviewed, I only discussed my review with one: JoJo Sutherland. I met her on the very last day of the Fringe and accidentally let my name slip. She looked homicidal for a moment and I was about to launch into a defence of the three-star review (basically everything above, except delivered with a greater fear of being murdered). She smiled and gave me a huge hug, and thanked me for the nice review. She had actually read it and considered the text. That, folks, was probably my favourite moment of the whole Fringe.

Reviewing the Fringe: a review (Part II)

2010-08-31T16:46:00.000-07:00

Part II : Execution Style; some thoughts on bad reviews

Bad reviews are when writers really get to strut. I’ve done some movie and music reviews in the past where I’ve gone giddy with delight while giving something a kicking.

Yet this Fringe I’ve only given one bad review, and that was a 2-star job. So why’s that?

One reason is simply that I had a good Fringe and enjoyed the majority of shows I saw. Another reason is the editorial policy of my kindly publishers, The Skinny. They basically warned us all that if we saw someone die on stage, it would be uncool to dance on their graves (they’re very anti-strutting).

But I do worry that I’m a bit too nice to comedians. Without breaking into autobiography, back in the 90s I got to spend a lot of time around comics and I learned two things about them:

1) They’re generally quite nice, warm people. The post-Tony Hancock myth of comedians being miserable gits offstage is generally nonsense. Comedy is a very tiny world and being able to get along with people is an essential survival skill.

2) It is impossible to overstate how important Edinburgh is to them.

I admit that whenever I’ve watched an act at the Fringe, I’ve been very aware of these two points. In this rather eye-catching, zero-star review of Robert White, the reviewer says “The reviewing convention is that a comic gets one star just for showing up and doing their show”. Not for me. I give two stars for completing the act, and deduct one if the act really annoys or offends me. (I gave Robert White three stars, by the way, but he didn’t walk off when I was there.

Is this the right way to be? I don’t know. My two-star review could have been a one-star. It was an act called Silence Of The Trams, a sketch troupe made up of what felt like a bunch of jobbing local comedians (I later discovered that they were… jobbing local comedians).

It was funny in places. It was boring in more places. Some bits were just excruciating. One sketch, portraying a first-time London comedian dying at the fringe, was so unknowingly self-referential that it made my toes curl. I checked my watch at one point and swore out loud when I realised there were fifteen minutes left.

So why didn’t I go for the jugular and shred them? Editorial policy; the fact that there were some good bits; the desire to reserve the 1-star rating in case I saw an act I really hated. But I do know that a part of it was simply the fact that I liked the guys. I liked them for pulling a show together and making an effort, even if it didn’t come off.

I wonder about how reasonable that is. If it was a movie, I would have stuck the boot right in.

The second bad act I saw were an Australian outfit called The Nelson Twins. I saw them on the first day of the previews, and wished I hadn’t bothered as they ploughed through a tedious set of one-liners delivered in a monotone and mainly dealing with incest and beards.

I chickened out of reviewing them. I had paid for my ticket so I was under no obligation, so I decided to just pretend I had never been there instead of slamming them. Some else did though, and you can read their review here. Worryingly, I still reckon I would have given them 2 stars. They seemed like really nice guys.

Reviewers should, in my opinion, be massively subjective. Trying to be balanced makes for dry, dusty writing. Better instead to be completely true to your own opinions. Be passionate and hope that your voice connects with people. I adore Mark Kermode, not because he’s always right but because he’s such a devoted cineaste.

But maybe it’s a little too subjective to feel respect for anyone willing to stand up and have a bash at making me laugh. I would probably be a better reviewer if I didn’t pull punches.
Not that I’m certainly not going to go seeking out bad shows just so I can practice being nasty. I’ll keep doing it my way for as long as The Skinny will have me. And of course, this means that if I ever do give a 1-star review, you know I really hated it.

In part 3: a discussion of the worst possible review for comedians, reviewers and readers – the three star review.

Twit

2010-08-27T17:56:00.000-07:00

Due to popular demand, I'm writing another lengthy blog post on this year's Fringe (and by 'due to' I mean 'in spite of') but I though this was worth capturing. Here's an article on the Esquire website by the very funny Alex Horne on how the nasty old media is being replaced by lovely, democratic twitter:

http://www.esquire.co.uk/2010/08/alex-horne-at-the-fringe-%E2%80%93-its-been-emoticonal/

One small problem with the article is the tweet he mentions as his favourite. It turns out that this particular tweet was written by a reviewer as he was leaving the show. I know this because it was me.

My Alex Horne review, in case anyone's interested:

http://www.theskinny.co.uk/article/100425-alex-horne-the-pleasance

Reviewing the Fringe: a review (Part I)

2010-08-26T17:01:00.000-07:00

Part I : Who are you to judge?

The Fringe is huge. There are around 2,500 shows here, meaning that it’s physically impossible to see everything without access to some form of time travel.

For the acts, most of which make a heavy loss, it’s hard to stand out. So it’s understandable that they’re desperate for anything that will give them the edge over the competition. As soon as a good review comes along it gets stapled to the flier for that show and soon the cries on the Royal Mile change from “Come see our show – 2 for 1 tonight!” to “Come see our 5-star rated show!” Performers don’t dread bad reviews as much as they dread no reviews at all.

That’s a bit of a problem when even the most dedicated review will get to less than a hundred shows over the course of the Fringe. So where are all these stars coming from? The same place as porn and Maddy McCann jokes: the internet.

People at the Fringe don’t seem too bothered where they’re getting their stars from, as long as they can put something on their flier, which is why they're happy to cite minor websites and a lot of promotional material reads like somebody’s Firefox history. This new trend has upset The Scotsman, who published the slightly snotty article “With all these reviewers, everyone is seeing stars”, and The Stage, whose “The proliferation of critics and star ratings in Edinburgh” amply demonstrates just how big a stick Matt Shenton has up his arse.

The gist of both of these articles is: who are these people and what qualifies them to review? It’s tempting to respond by saying 'welcome to the 21st century, granddad'. This is the age of Blogspot and Twitter, and never has the phrase 'everyone’s a critic' been more accurate. In fact, the people running these websites deserve respect simply for having a longer attention span than most of the rest of us.

But the serious journos do have a point, kind of. I fully respect the right of individuals to run review blogs, and often those blogs have more insightful analysis than the pros, but there are some cowboys who seem to willing to give 5 stars to anyone who can stand up for an hour without dropping their microphone, and this will inevitably lead to star inflation. If every show has a big ***** on the flier, then what’s the point of having reviews at all? Does anyone ever pick a movie just because it says ‘OUTSTANDING’ on the cover, or pick a book because another author has said, ‘An important new voice’ on the dust cover? No, because we’re all media-savvy enough to know that these are soft reviews. Fringe audiences will cotton on, if they haven’t already.

The question of where these 'soft' reviews are coming from is interesting. The two articles above pin the blame on amateur reviewers saying nice things about their friends. Again, welcome to the 21st century, granddad. Bloggers don’t have friends.

The real problem is the circular nature of this publicity machine. After submitting a few reviews to The Skinny this year, I noticed something about my reviews. When I gave four or five stars, my reviews would be blogged, tweeted, linked to, put on posters, stapled to fliers and pinned on the wall of the venue. When I gave three stars, even a good three stars, the review tends to sink without a trace.

I don’t run The Skinny, so I’m not too bothered about how many readers we get, but it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that if you run a small website and give a lot of good reviews, you’ll in turn get a huge amount of publicity, making yourself a name on the scene and ensuring entry into the big venues at next year’s Fringe. So the motive is definitely there to inflate your ratings a bit. It’s clearly already happening on some sites (one has already jokingly earned the nickname fourstars.com for its refusal to give a bad review) and it will happen on others.

There’s no way of stopping this. A good review is always going to be promoted by the act being reviewed. It’s an evolutionary thing. But audiences are smart and the internet is a powerful tool for weeding out this nonsense. Instant user reviews on Twitter are gaining as much standing as published reviews, and sites like comedy.co.uk run excellent review aggregators, allowing a side-by-side comparison of each opinion. It's easy to see who's attempting proper journalism and who's taking the mick.

So my advice to amateur reviewers – and yes, I feel qualified to give advice after a whole three weeks of experience – is to stay objective. Don’t panic if your site is only getting three hits a day. Work on your style, keep the reviews consistent, be honest and try to build a rapport with your readers. If you blog it, truthfully, they will come.

In part II: writing bad reviews, and why I’m actually the worst person in the world to review comedy.

More reviews

2010-08-13T13:54:00.000-07:00

Two more reviews up on the Skinny, with another three waiting to be published:

David O'Doherty
Norman Lovett

The Sarah Millican review went down well. It's the most popular item on The Skinny right now, which is probably more to do with Sarah than my writing skillz. Sarah linked to the review on Twitter and I had a brief twitter-chat with her about it. It's things like this that make me exclaim "we're living in the bloody future!" at least once a day.

Everyone I've seen so far has been pretty decent, which is good because I don't fancy slating people any more. I'm getting mellow in my old age. I did see one bad act on the first day of the Previews, but I was out on my own nickel so I neglected to file a piece on it.

All jolly good fun. I'm hugely enjoying the Fringe and I recommend you all make time to come next year, if you're not attending this one.

In review

2010-08-11T14:24:00.000-07:00

The first of my Fringe reviews appeared in The Skinny today. It's been a while since I've had my name in print, so that's nice. The fact that I was reviewing the excellent Sarah Millican makes it better.

Click here for reviewey goodness.

More reviews hopefully forthcoming.

Fringe interests

2010-08-03T14:51:00.000-07:00

So today was OU results day, and the final result of my final creative writing course is: Distinction. That's a good thing. I now own a Diploma in Literature and Creative Writing, which means that I'm fully licensed to write. Now I just need to sort out my tax and insurance.

July was a very frustrating writing month. Mainly the Red Planet thing mentioned previously, the idea for which completely failed to spark. It now lives in a drawer and will possibly get picked up some time later this year.

Also no word about the Guardian competition, so I think I can put that in The Pit of Despair. I've sharpened up the story and I'm submitting it the other competition linked to in my previous entry.

Good thing though, which has just happened: I've wangled a gig via a friend to do some reviewing work for The Skinny in Edinburgh. A double whammy of awesome, as not only will it mean getting some stuff in print, but I'll also get to go to some comedy gigs for free. Good times.

Silence willl fail

2010-07-05T16:21:00.000-07:00

Previously on The Biro of Destiny... our protagonist is working hard to finish a 30-minute script, before taking a much longed-for break from everything. Can he achieve his goals?

Well, I achieved one. Pennycakes is done, dusted and delivered as a university assignment, with the grade due back at the start of next month. Next step on that road is to look at it as a commercial project and see if I can tart it up a little. As soon as I put it in the post, I had about 15 new ideas for it, so it should be promising.

Didn't quite manage to have a break though. I lasted up until about the 12th of June, at which point I discovered that the Guardian's Summer Short Fiction competition had rolled around again. And the deadline was only a week away. I decided that the smart thing to do would be to pour myself heart and soul into writing something for it, and the end result is a story called 'More Than Trees'. I was happy with it and I sent it off to a few people to read. At about 9pm on the night before the deadline, one person emailed me to tell me that they hated the ending. So I stayed up late on a school night writing a brand new one. I think it's not half bad, and with a bit of tweaking it could really be something.

Ah well. Honestly, I was bored off my skull during my break anyway.

Since then I've been in Ireland, trying to draw creative inspiration from the green and blessed land on which many poets and dreamers have found inspiration (okay, actually I was just drinking a lot, but it's the same thing really). I've got something now and I've started working on a 60-minute. Which shall be all edgy and dark and stuff. Pennycakes was quite cuddly and gentle, so I'm looking forward to do something which will hopefully be very unsettling. I'm aiming for the rather oarsome-looking Red Planet Prize which closes on July 31st. Might be a bit tight, but the 60-minute script is something I want to do anyway.

And there's more. It's short story competition-season with loads of interesting competitions (good luck to those entering Bridport, I know there are a few of yo). The one that caught my eye is the In The Write Light competition, where the prize is a few days stuck up a mountain in Spain with Nell McCafferty. I honestly can't think of anything I'd rather do.

Oh, and finally Write Here, Write Now came and went. Ah well. Vicki and I will attack Black Gate Tours with a mallet and a hammer some time later in the year and see what we can do with it next.

Professional jealousy

2010-04-19T05:48:00.000-07:00

I don't suffer from professional jealousy. I don't think most fledgling writers do, really, even when another fledgling writer has a notable success. If they're good, you feel happy for them and look to see what aspects of their work you can emulate. If they're not so good, you say, 'well, I can write better than that' and you get cracking.

But bloody hell am I jealous of people who get to write full-time. Seething, green jealousy. I took a week off last year to work on a project and it was one of the best weeks of my life. The last couple of weeks have been the opposite experience, with work and family being so demanding as to leave me unable to devote any time to anything else. I have all kinds of strategies for balancing things out so that I can get at least an hour or two a day to work on stuff, but sometimes it just can't be done.

That said, I've managed a couple of thingsover the last few weeks, mainly based around my Creative Writing course. The short story "What's He Building In There?", a 2,500 word piece about time-travelling plumbers, is finished. Needs a bit of rework before being ready to send for submission, but it's got a good heart.

I've written the first five minutes of the sitcom pilot I'm doing for my final project. It's now called Pennycakes although that's likely to change again. Next couple of weeks will be spent exclusively on that (work & family permitting). I'll be approaching this in a more organised way than I usually do, in order to test drive some of the techniques I picked up at Screen Lab. So first step is a treatment, then a scene-by-scene, then the writing of the actual dialogue. Hopefully it might even be funny.

Speaking of sitcoms, myself and my writing partner did managed to do a patch-up job on the opening of Black Gate Tours. By cutting out half of the characters, we managed to make the opening 15 pages feel like the first half of a 30-minute piece (rather than the first quarter of a 60-minute piece) and ship it out to BBC Scotland's Write Here, Write Now competition. Not holding our breaths on that one, but it's good to be in the mix.

(Speaking of BBC, very proud of my friend Marianne who managed to blag a spot on the CBBC Screen Lab. She belongs in the category of "good writers that I would like to emulate")

The CW course has given me lots of things to work on, so once I've finished Pennycakes, I'll be on my own. I have an idea for a feature and I'm planning to spend the summer on that, with the ultimate aim of having a 30-minute, 60-minute and 90-minute script done before the end of the year.

Before that, I might just take a couple of weeks to read books, watch movies and catch up on telly. That might sound like skiving, but I haven't made time for these things over the last few months and it's actually really difficult to write when you're not engaging with the writing of others. Any recommendations, feel free to stick 'em in the comments.

Attack of the Mamets

2010-03-27T19:01:00.000-07:00

This is great:

David Mamet's Master Class Memo to the Writers of The Unit

What's interesting to me is that he's just restating the same rules of writing we've all heard before. New writers hate these rules. Just a few hours ago, I was reading a discussion elsewhere on the web where an established screenwriter was advising most dialogue needs to be trimmed down. Within seconds, he was hit with lots of new writers saying that Woody Allen and Tarantino write long passages of dialogue, so how come only new writers have to obey the 'rules'?

I've got no problem with the rules. The rules are based on thousands of years of trial and error by the writers who came before us. And yes, the first thing anyone genuinely creative wants to do is to break the rules. Which is great, if you can find a way of breaking the rules that's revolutionary and inspired. But most of the time your rule-breaking manuscript is actually just going to be boring rubbish, because the main point of the rules is to stop you making an eejit out of yourself. In fact, if you condense all the McKees and Fields and Mamets down to a single aphorism, what you get is this:

'Don't be boring'

And good luck to you if you think you can get around that rule.

Razorblades

2010-03-15T17:13:00.000-07:00

I've just finished a piece of short fiction for a uni assignment. The limit was 2,500 words with a tolerance of +/-5%. The first draft clocked in at 4,800 words.

Which is good, in a way. This is the first thing I've done in months which I've really, really enjoyed writing and I could have stuck with this character for another 10,000 words if I had the chance. But trying to hack away almost half of the story afterwards is a nightmare. There's only so much rephrasing you can do. Eventually, you get into a situation where you just have to put the different story elements into the ring, let them fight each other to the death, and rebuild your story around the things to survive.

This is where feedback is vital. My most valuable asset as a writer is the large circle of clever people I have around me who are happy to give up there time to tell me exactly where my first drafts are sucking. I've had pages and pages of notes from people, all really insightful, and from them I was able to figure out how to re-jig the story so that it fit that 2,500 word limit.

I know some writers hate the idea of letting other people touch their work before it's done. If you can work like that successfully, then I tip my hat to you. Me, I'm always going to be dependant on my mates to help me out.

Day 3

2010-03-03T14:43:00.000-08:00

It's pretty easy to walk out of a course like Screen Lab feeling that you're mere weeks away from your first Oscar-nominated original screenplay. That enthusiasm wears off pretty quickly. I find it's usually gone by the time I get home and log into Facebook. So what effect has Screen Lab actually had.

Well, the sitcom I'm doing for my uni project is feeling much more in hand. Turning the original idea into a one-page pitch has shown up some weaknesses which I've been able to address. I also realised that I putting too much plot and not enough story into a 30-minute script, so I've now stripped it down to basics and I'm layering the detail back on.

(If you're interested in the one-page pitch approach, you should buy Adrian's book. The proceeds all go to Childline. Basically, if you don't buy it, you're a bad writer who hates kids.)

While walking home yesterday, I had a random idea about letting agents. I did a bit of work on it last night, writing another one-page pitch. I was able to nail down the idea far quicker than I ever have before, quickly identifying my main character and the type of story I wanted to tell. That's gone in a drawer to be further developed when I have free time, but it's also spun off into another idea for a short story which I need to write (again for Uni) before March 19th.

I've critiqued about four other pieces for other writers, researched some local groups that are supportive to screenwriters, read some scripts and generally been a hyper-productive monkey. I love it. Being busy is actually more relaxing than being bored. I make a to-do list at the start of each night and tick things off one by one, then go to bed happy.

So still buzzing and positive about the course. Hooray.

In other news, I need to put more stories out to market. I've got one about teachers which I need to find a home for and I've finally accepted that the magazine which accepted "Don't Let Go" is now defunct, so I'll have to try and rehouse that. Still really want to do a new version of the Indiana Jones story, which I think could be great with some tweaking. And there's a new On The Premises competition coming up at the end of the month, so I'll be having a crack at that.

Back from the Lab

2010-03-01T15:23:00.001-08:00

How was Screen Lab? Why, I'm glad you asked.

Quick recap on this blog the last few months: I took on an insane deadline in October, co-writing a 60-minute pilot in under three weeks. It got nowhere. I've been a bit quiet since then.

There are a number of reasons including family and the day job, but I have to put my hand on my heart and say that my confidence took a bit of a knock. I was proud of the work (I still am), I was happy for the experience and I knew that you have to take the ups with the downs. But something about this one got to me. I think it was realising the gulf between where I am, which is a guy scribbling in the box room in his spare hours, and where I want to be, which is someone out there getting work published and filmed. Success felt like it was on the other side of the galaxy, and that thought drained me a bit.

Getting selected for Screen Lab 2010 was a big boost. It was just nice to have someone say that they thought I had something. The free screenwriting course was a nice extra, a good chance to sit around and be writerly for a few days. What harm could it do.

I've just come back from it. I don't think I've ever felt as upbeat about writing as I do right now.

Our tutor was a guy called Adrian Mead. His whole approach was tremendously straightforward and not at all what I expected. He's a no-nonsense guy with a lot of experience and his approach was exactly what I needed to hear. No gimmicks. Just the very sensible advice that if you work hard, you're organised, you're prepared and you have a strong story to sell, then you can get people interested.

I shared the course with ten other writers, all very talented, all with something different to offer. I think we all connected to the same degree to what Adrian was saying. He managed to find just the right balance between being an artist and being a businessperson, because none of us want to schill but neither do we want to write screenplays that are just going to sit in a drawer somewhere. It was amazing to talk to the other guys during the breaks and hear them say, "I've just cracked that idea I've been working on for the last few years, I think I know how to pitch it". I felt the same way about my own projects and wanted to run home and get to work.

We had some cracking guest speakers as well. Peter Hynes, who does a lot of kids telly, came by to talk about his work. I spoke to him afterwards and managed to ask him sensible questions like who to contact if I want to work for Cbeebies, and I completely avoided saying all the stupid stuff I was really thinking like, "Can you say hello to Timmy from Timmy Time for me?"

Two actors also dropped by, Paul Cunningham and Hazel Ann Crawford, to talk about their relationship with a screenplay. But first, and with Adrian's gleeful assistance, they ganged up on all us poor writers and punished us for writing terrible stage directions by forcing us to try acting some of them out. For example, I was asked to have a crack at "She looks at him unsympathetically" and I just ended up looking like a pervert having an aneurysm. I now understand why badly-written stage directions hurt actors and I solemnly swear to never do it again.

Hazel, Paul and Adrian then workshopped our scripts which was probably the highlight of the weekend. There were great insights into delivery, organisation and pacing, but the simple process of seeing a flat piece of writing turn into a live performance was inspirational. Seeing actors perform your work... well, a man could get addicted to it.

We got to spend some time with Clare Kerr, the other half of Mead Kerr Productions. It's reassuring to know that there are producers who are intelligent and passionate. There wouldn't be much point in bothering with all this if the guys who actually get the movies made weren't really into movies. The next day we got a great talk from Morag Kerr, who also took the course with us on people skills and how to speak at meetings (both of which are also very useful in my day job - I can't believe I didn't have to pay for all of this).

So, the whole event was rounded off with an appearance by Maggie Still. Maggie is someone who had done this course previously, managed to get a crew together for no budget and shot a short in her house. We got the world première of "Mr. Scott", her short movie, which is just bloody brilliant. I still can't quite believe that it was made for nothing but goodwill, favours and a bit of blagging. Maggie gave us tons of tips for getting out there, meeting people and getting involved.

Basically, Maggie's role in the course was to remind us that there is absolutely no excuse...

It wasn't all shop-talk over the weekend and I admit to having spent far more time in the pub than can be healthy for a man my age. The chat was really great and I happily could have stayed there for another week.

But it winds up, you finish your pint, you say goodbye. You swap cards and promise to Facebook people. And then you go home and you're faced with the same problem as before. A blank page in need of words. So how has this helped?

What I got, what I feel right now, is a sense of empowerment. I don't feel any more like this is something I can't do. I don't feel like it's going to be easy - Adrian did give us a pretty honest oversight of how the film & TV industries work. But I do feel like I'm back in control of my ideas again, that I can start getting the most out of them, I can believe in them and I can share them in a professional way. The course didn't teach me how to be a good writer; it showed me how to sort myself out so that I can give my writing a 100%. The rest is up to me.

So yeah. I enjoyed it. Thanks for asking.

Screen Lab

2010-02-11T15:15:00.000-08:00

Hooray, huzzah, happy days, hallelujah. Shirley's Mum has won me a place on Screen lab 2010, a screenwriting course hosted in Edinburgh by Adrian Mead. There's no charge and there's even a free lunch, thereby dispelling a popular myth.

In other news, going up to random people in a pub and asking, "What would you do if you won the lottery?" has provided me with a new concept for a sitcom. More on this soon...

Not dead, just resting

2010-01-26T15:23:00.000-08:00

Writer's block is a terrible affliction. It doesn't cause you to just stop writing, it also stops you looking at the world like a writer. Everything seems flat and lifeless, like you've taken off the 3D glasses halfway through the movie. Not fun.

it's a time when you need your friends and I've been lucky enough to have a few people behind me. Some threw random prompts at me and got me to write random things, just to get the muscles working again. Somebody else spotted a very interesting competition that got me thinking. Another person helped me to remember how to take a rough idea and turn it into something with a little life.

So in response to this - Screen Lab - I've written a three-minute screenplay called Shirley's Mum. Once that's off, I'll start on the next thing and then the next until we get a bit of momentum going.

Martin Amis said recently that writers tend to go off when they reach 70, so I have loads of time. Better get cracking.

Bum note

2009-12-21T14:03:00.001-08:00

So, avid readers will recall that a couple of months ago, I went hell-for-leather in a collaborative effort to produce a 60-minute screenplay for a BBC competition. In the space of 24 days, we went from vague, back of a beermat-style idea to the fourth draft of an hour-long TV pilot. And I do mean drafts - we not only managed to fit a lot of writing into those 24 days, but an awful lot of rewriting as well.

First prize was £1500, second prize was £1500, with twenty runners-up prizes of a BBC screenwriting masterclass. The real prize was contact with the BBC new drama team. A good idea and an exciting script could open a door or two, and who knows what that could lead to.

Results finally have come out after being dragged out for an interminably long time. And we got...

Nothing. Absolutely nothing.

Won't pretend that I'm not crushed. I've never worked so hard at a creative project in my life, never produced that much text. To be honest, I've never had that much faith in something I've produced (although a lot of that faith is due to the sterling work of my wonderful writing partener).

We knew competition would be ferocious. The length of the script would scare off most of the chancers and part-timers and our competitors were likely to be people with a real track record. Indeed this is the case: of the three people identified as winners so far, two of them seem to be professional writers. But still, with 22 prizes up for grabs and only 150 entries received, we really fancied our chances, especially as both of us had scored in seemingly bigger competitions.

So yes. Crashing and burning on this has been a punch in the guts and not a great way to end a year of writing which has completely exceeded any expectations I had in January. Doesn't help that I've had a severe dose of the dreaded writer's block since having a severe dose of the dreaded flu last month.

What next?

You get back up. You carry on. I still love what we wrote for the BBC and I have a lot of faith in it. We're going to try and bash out a 15-minute spin-off for another competition, then rewrite the whole thing in the New Year from an entirely different angle. Keep trucking with other projects. Try to force my brain to start producing text again.

I've realised that I've been a bit cocky about the Advanced Creative Writing course I'm doing at the moment. The above incident highlights that I shouldn't take a good grade for granted. More importantly, I realised that I was missing out on a chance to learn some new tricks and work with my tutor, who's a very successful playwrite when she's not tutoring. Also, the assignments coming along next year are good excuses to produce some work which might be of use outside the course, especially the 30-minute screenplay I have to write before May.

2009 was all about actually getting writing, figuring out how to turn a blank page into a story, building up a collection of work and maybe even getting published somewhere.

2010 is going to be about really exploring how writing works, how to speak about the things I want to speak about, and how to do it in a way that really captivates readers. Kurt Vonnegut said that writers should "be good dates on blind dates" and that really sums up the effect I'd like my writing to have on people. I'm not there yet. I think I might get there after an awful lot of slog. Only one way to find out.

Back to work.

Babies

2009-11-15T02:43:00.000-08:00

And so, "Cot" staggers into the world, battered and exhausted. I've never worked so hard on a short piece. I am very, very proud of it. And without wishing to sound like a broken record, it would have been impossible without the assistance of the On The Premises guys who seriously deserve some kind of award, or at least to have a really nice sandwich named after them. I'll allow them to introduce the story:

One contestant sent an entry that had serious flaws, but a story idea that blew our minds. After the winners had been chosen we contacted this author and asked if he'd mind being an unpaid guest writer, on the condition that he rewrite the story and fix the flaws. He agreed, and so...

GUEST WRITER: "Cot" by Bernard O'Leary

Time spent #3

2009-11-03T15:33:00.000-08:00

Last but not least! Stuff has appeared in print!

There's a poem in the new edition of First Edition! Hooray! Enjoy it while it's there, because it'll probably be a very long time before I write poetry again. Not available online, sadly, but you can buy the magazine if you're really keen.

"Sit, Stand, Kneel" appears in Southpaw issue 3! Hooray! This is available online, so do have a read and read the other stories too because they're ace.

"Don't Let Go" has been accepted by Read This Magazine for issue 20, but no idea when that's appearing. Still, they're very cool and Edinburgh-based like myself, so they're worth an exclamation mark. Hooray!

Time spent #2

2009-11-03T15:31:00.000-08:00

So the On The Premises thing. Another competition I had hoped to win, but knew my submission was a bit rough.

OTP emailed back with quite an unexpected response. Basically they loved the story, but felt it contained a number of fatal flaws. They couldn’t enter it into the competition, but offered to help me work on it and said that they would run me as a “Guest Writer” in the next issue.
Which was a blessing and a curse. I knew that ‘Cot’ was imperfect. I really wanted to fix it, because I felt it was too strong an idea to let slide. But I also knew that I had no time, not a single second, to spare. So I did what I always do in these situations.

I said yes and decided to worry about the logistics later.

It was a nightmare, but I did finally manage to produce a new draft, with a huge amount of help from the OTP guys. It’ll be appearing in the next issue sometime next week. I’m very happy about this.

By the way, if you’re like me and you’re just starting out on a writing career, please look at On The Premises. There is no other publication on earth that offers the kind of support and feedback that they give. The fact that they occasionally pay is just the cherry on the cupcake.

Time spent #1

2009-11-03T15:21:00.000-08:00

I’ve been quiet over the last month, which might indicate that I haven’t been doing much writing, but OH MY GOD is that the opposite of the truth.

My fingers are down to bloody stumps, I’ve barely slept and my coffee intake will probably result in a huge rise in the GDP of Kenya. The main thing is this script. At the time of my last post, my writing partner and I had a rough concept and sketches for a couple of characters. A week later, we went and did some actual research. After that, we pulled out all the stops, working 4-5 hours a night on the thing. There were several distractions: I had to sit a big exam, my erstwhile partner went swanning off to Manchester to be nominated for a big literary prize, and I went back to Ireland to see my mum.

3 weeks later, we had finished the fourth draft of the script just in time to DHL it down to the BBC in London. Yes, London, for a competition being run in Scotland. Also, BBC, what on earth is wrong with email? Oh, only kidding Auntie Beeb (please hire me).

Will we win? Hard to say. There’s definite potential and we’re going to keep working on it, win or lose. The version we sent away has some rough edges that would have been smoothed out if we just had a little more time. Still, you have to be in it to win it, and we are definitely in it.

Nobody but the baby

2009-09-30T15:41:00.000-07:00

So, the infamous Russian baby lady story has been finished and put out to market. It's now called simply "Cot" because the original title ("The Oubliette") sounded a bit stupid in context.

I'm not 100% happy with the final version. I think the pacing is a bit shot and the language is too flat in places. I would have liked to have spent a bit more time with it, but I really wanted to get it in for the next On The Premises competition, which closes tonight. Oh well, we shall see.

It would really mean an awful lot to me to win one of the OTP competitions, for the record. It's a great site with some really exciting fiction. If you're reading this and you're an emerging writer, please please please keep an eye for their next competition. You won't regret it.

How do you like me?

2009-09-22T14:41:00.000-07:00

More success! I'm really happy to be able to say that hyper-trendy new literary journal Southpaw has picked up my story "Sit, Stand, Kneel". Very pleased with this. Southpaw, like On The Premises, is a small publication which I stumbled across and instantly wanted to be a part of, just because I really like what they're doing.

Southpaw issue 3 will be out at the end of October, and will be my first ever piece of fiction to appear in old fashioned ink and paper. Happy.

Do It Again

2009-09-21T13:16:00.000-07:00

Oh, also got an email from First Edition today saying they'll run another poem of mine next month. It's called "-phobic". Cheers, guys!

Rolling

2009-09-21T13:09:00.001-07:00

So to be fair my film-writing project was a bit daft to begin with. A week is no kind of time to do a whole draft, especially when you've done absolutely no planning. It was bound to fail...

Ha! Just kidding. I did it! I'm incredibly proud of myself and completely insufferable to all of the unfortunate folks around me. In the space of seven days and five hours, I managed to bash out a 120-page first draft and didn't go completely insane. Although I have accidentally grown a beard. The weirdest thing of all is that I really enjoyed it. Sure, I started to run out of steam as I approached the end, but I've done NaNoWriMo twice and both times I've found myself praying for a zombie holocaust to break out so I wouldn't have to finish my novel. This time, I actually really enjoyed it and found myself giggling and smiling a lot just because I was having such fun. At one point, after finishing a particularly key scene, I even jumped out of my chair and did a really embarrassing victory dance. I'm glad you didn't see that, and you should be glad too.

Now begins the hard part, which is editing. There are a lot of flaws in the first draft and I'm expecting to do at least a dozen drafts before it gets into shape. I'm going to pull a figure out of thin air and say this will take... six months. But after that I'll start looking for an agent and then all I have to do is write my Oscar acceptance speech. Right? Right?

Stanza by yerman

2009-09-14T06:15:00.000-07:00

Well, I'm now a published poet. My contributor copy of First Edition popped through the letterbox this morning and there I am on page 57, next to a vampire story and above a non-sequiturial factoid box about animals called muticoids. Good to see my name printed on actual paper with actual ink, so a big thank you to the lovely First Edition people. Also nice to do something with the poetry I wrote last year. I honestly can't see myself ever writing much poetry ever again, but I do have a sonnet sitting in my unpublished folder which I may send to a specialist poetry magazine called 14.

Movie project is going really well. I've written 30 pages which puts me ahead of schedule. The only problem is that I'm sitting here now and finding it very hard to concentrate. I can't work during the daytime. I may just spend the next few days working through to 4am and sleeping during the daytime, just like my new vampire buddies.

BAFTAs or bust

2009-09-11T02:36:00.000-07:00

I'm about to embark on a writing project that will make or break me.

I've done NaNoWriMo twice now - once in 2002 and again in 2007 - and while I think it's a good way of stretching your authorial muscles, I'm not convinced it's a good way of producing quality stuff. On my second attempt in particular I found that the pressure of writing 1,600 words per day distracted me from giving thought to how the plot should develop, and the end result was almost unreadable. I guess NaNo could work, but only if you've done a huge amount of planning beforehand.

So with that in mind, my intention is to sit down tonight and start writing a movie with the intention of having a finished first draft in ten days time. I have done almost no preparatory work for it, apart from having a rough idea of the four main characters (only one of whom has a name), a vague plot arc and a notion of around seven scenes that I'd like to see in it. I've taken a week off work to devote to it, but no idea what I'm actually going to write.

The lack of planning is annoying. I had intended spending this week sketching it all out, but other commitments distracted me. It has occurred to me to give up or at least postpone. But I'm not going to. It's perhaps immodest to say that I'm on a roll at the moment, but there definitely is a momentum there which I've never felt before. I've also set myself a fairly realistic target, which is to write 25 scenes altogether, working out at less than 3 scenes per day. I don't think this will be enough to fill a feature (I think it'll be about 70 pages altogether) but even getting an outline of something which I can spend the next six months filling in is going to be a massive step forward.

Oh, it's all so exciting and scary. There's every chance that by Monday evening I'll have given up and I'll just spend my week off sitting in my underpants, eating ice cream and dreaming about what might have been. But you never know unless you try, eh?

Verse things could happen

2009-08-31T04:22:00.000-07:00

There's soon to be another addition to Publishing Successes: First Edition have picked up my poem "Still" for their next edition. I'll add it to the list when it appears. Quite pleased to finally have my name appear on something in paper format.

On the writing front: story about Russian lady and her many babies has temporarily been shelved. I'm going to write a very short piece involving a mathematician and a train station tonight, hope to get that done in one go. And still gearing up for big writing project in the middle of next month. Should be fun.

Met Douglas Coupland at the book festival last night. He tried to offer me encouragement in my writing endeavours, but I turned into a dribbling, giggling fanboy and I can't remember anything he said.

Back on the horse

2009-08-12T15:23:00.001-07:00

Resubmitted "Don't Let Go", this time to a small Edinburgh-based journal. I think I'm just getting addicted to rejection letters, like a lonely old lady who signs up to mailing lists just so they get some post now and then.

{Best:Worst} of times

2009-08-11T04:58:00.000-07:00

Two emails from editors today:

* The Human Genre Project rejected my story "Don't Let Go". The response was encouraging, but the editor felt it wasn't sufficiently connected to the project for inclusion. Oh well. I'll move it to The Pit Of Despair and try again.

* "Sit, Stand, Kneel", the story rejected previously by the Edinburgh book Festival folk, is being considered for the next edition of a small literary journal*. They won't let me know for sure until September 26th, but the email from the editor was really glowing and encouraging. If they do pick it up, it'll be my first time getting something printed on paper. Even if they don't pick it up, it's a really nice boost. Interestingly, they said that they don't mind simultaneous publication, so if the other journal pick it up the the story could be printed twice. Hmmm.

*(Not naming this journal yet, because I'm not quite sure of the etiquette of these things. I'll certainly name it if we get a definite yes)

Count on me, I'm going to win the race

2009-08-09T06:29:00.000-07:00

I write purely for publication these days. It makes me feel ever so slightly prostitute-ey, but it's really the only way to get myself going, otherwise I will just spend six months staring out of a window, abstractly thinking that maybe this great idea I'm having should be written down on paper before I get distracted by something shiny and forget it.

So today I submitted "Sit, Stand, Kneel" - the piece of flash fiction which was rejected by the Book Fest people - to two smaller London-based publications. Neither of them pay, but both print stuff on paper, which is the next milestone I want to reach. Fingers crossed.

I also need to tidy up two other stories I have lying in the drawer. One just needs an extra paragraph to make it work, and I already have a home in mind for it (small online publication that caught my eye). The second story was my final year project for the Creative Writing course. I had though that the final version submitted kind of sucked a bit, but I scored 90% for it so it can't be that bad. I think adding three new paragraphs and changing the final two paragraphs (maybe tweak the whole thing to include a smidgen more humour) and it will be ready to submit to my Great White Publishing Whale: Interzone magazine. When I'm in Interzone, then I'll be a real writer.

This story about the Russian woman and her babies is going well. It's the only thing I've written in some time without having a definite home in mind for it. I think it could be really good though, so it's going off to a paying, paper-based publication when it's ready.

I'm taking a week off work at the end of the month, just for the hell of it. I'm thinking of using that for focusing on scribbling down a hasty first draft of a screenplay. Could it be done in a week? Only one way to find out.

Then there's the Darwin anthology and the next On The Premises competition, both of which have deadlines in September. Finally, a very talented writer (much better than me) is interested in collaborating on something for BBC's Scotland Writes contest. The other writer is so bloody good that we may have a chance of winning. Who knows?

So loads of stuff on me plate! Maybe I should just chuck it all in the bin and start working on a novel...

Here I am, rock you like a hurricane

2009-08-02T15:21:00.001-07:00

Well, it has appeared, I am in print (kinda), and I even have my name in the URL:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/aug/01/short-story-stations-bernard-oleary

In that same section, you will also find work by Dave Eggers, William Boyd (who judged the competition) and David "no, not that one, the other one who's a famous novelist" Mitchell. It's a hell of a thrilling thing and yes, I did get a bit drunk when celebrating.

Now then, what's next?

The first cut is the deepest

2009-07-31T13:52:00.001-07:00

Oh no! We have our first occupant of The Pit of Despair! The kindly folk at the Edinburgh Book Festival decided that the world didn't need my dulcet tones reading my work aloud to bored passers-by.

Oh well, there's always next year. Pressing ahead with getting a final draft of Human Genre thing mentioned below, plus looking at collaborating with an extremely talented writer on the Scotland Writes competition. But first, I've got this wee short story that I'm itching to get out of my head and onto the paper...

What's next?

2009-07-25T17:32:00.000-07:00

Well, no resting on laurels here. I've just written a first draft of something for this very exciting online anthology:

http://www.humangenreproject.com/

It's gone out to my trusted readers for a first review. Having intelligent people who can give
detailed feedback is one of the most fundamental things to my writing. I don't trust my own opinions (frequently with good cause) and I need to see things through the eyes of others.

What a fool believes

2009-07-23T14:10:00.000-07:00

So the expected deadline for both competitions mentioned below came and went. I was a little sad, but mainly just frustrated that there was no communication to confirm that I hadn't made it. Last night, I was ready to move both competitions to The Pit Of Despair, but decided to hold off in case there was a last second miracle.

Today, the frustration was too much so I decided to scour The Guardian website for hints that the competition might be closed. It was then that I checked the rules and spotted that the closing date wasn't yesterday, but in fact today. A classic Phileas Fogg moment. But why get your hopes up? I decided not to.

Then, at around 3pm, I received an email.

From the features editor of The Guardian's Saturday magazine.

Saying I was a runner-up.

Out of 2000 entrants, in a competition judged by William Boyd and Julie Myerson, I've placed in the top six. Only the winner gets printed in the paper, the five runners up have their story published on guardian.co.uk/books

Today, my friends, today is a good day.

The Not Knowing

2009-07-21T03:15:00.000-07:00

The big difference between entering a competition and submitting for publication is that competitions have results dates as well as deadlines. It's absolutely stomach-churning to sit there, refreshing your email every 1/8th of a picosecond, waiting to see if you've been selected.

What's even more frustrating is that so few people send out rejection emails. Instead of being mercifully put out of your misery like a racehorse with a broken leg, you have to wait for the deadline to pass. Even then, as the results are not usually publicly announced for a couple of weeks, a brief flicker of hope is allowed to persist. Are they just running late? Are they sitting up until the wee hours of the morning, holding your manuscript in one hand and somebody else's in another, saying, "damn it, I just can't decide"?

I'm in two competitions right now, both of which will be announcing by tomorrow at the latest. I have chewed through all of my fingernails and I'm beginning to bite my toenails now.

My chances of winning the Guardian competition are so thin that they should be on a runway during Paris Fashion Week. I'm really proud of my entry though, and I'm very confident of finding a home for it if The Grauniad don't want it. On the other hand, even getting a runner-up spot in that competition would make my decade.

My entry in the Book Fest competition stands a much better chance, but even then it's still the longest of shots. I'd love to earn a spot though, I really would In both contests, the competition is ferocious.

Oh well. Just have to keep my nail-less fingers crossed...

Story Shop

2009-07-19T16:03:00.000-07:00

The Story Shop is part of the Edinburgh Book Festival this year, and the brief goes like this:

"We are looking for new, emerging writers to read their work as part of Story Shop at the Edinburgh International Book Festival this August.

Story Shop is a free, un-ticketed event produced by the Edinburgh UNESCO City of Literature Trust and takes place in the Book Festival’s Bookshop. It is a showcase for new writing and new writers from Edinburgh. Each day features one author, giving them a ten minute slot to read either two 4-5 minute ‘flash fiction’ pieces or one 8-10 minute piece of fiction. The idea is to give a free taster of your writing to a new audience."

Which is a dream come true for any budding writer. I've entered, and although I'm not 100% happy with my entry (see below), I do think it's a good piece of writing and I hope that it will be good enough to win me a spot.

Finger crossed...

Fall ye bombs

2009-07-19T15:47:00.000-07:00

I've moved house recently.

This impacts writing in a number of ways. Obviously, there's the time spent on the move. Then there's the time spent on helping my daughter to settle in. She's two, and she reacts to change by acting like she's auditioning for a baby version of The Exorcist. Very stressful, very tiring. Not conducive to great art.

But the big disruption is simply the breaking of established routines. I'm jealous of people who are so consumed with the need to write that they regularly have to scribble sonnets and descriptive passages on the back of bus tickets and cigarette packets. I'm more of the Ursula LeGuin school (she once described writing as the only job where you'd rather be cleaning the toilet).

I love the daydreaming bit of writing. I love staring abstractly out of windows and allowing ideas to play out in my head. I have millions of them. What I hate about writing is the writing part. It's really hard to sit down and force yourself to write. It's even harder to force yourself to keep going when you know that you've just written 2,000 words of useless garbage. The worst Emo kid is not as whiny and neurotic as a writer who has written a bad first draft.

The best way around this is routine. You set times, you set targets, you force yourself to meet them. You use brute force to get through the sticky patches and you force yourself to keep going until you start to find fluency. It's the only thing that works.

And the teeniest disruption to those rituals can wreck everything.

My new house has a fantastic office space. It's the best writing space I've ever had: nice desk, big bookshelves, even a skylight so I can gaze at the heavens for inspiration. But it's not my space yet. So I've been sitting here for the last week feeling horribly uninspired.

I tried to get around it by taking something I wrote a couple of years ago and retooling it. My first attempts were awful and sheer nausea forced me to stop. Over the next few days I worked on it until I thought I had something decent. I sent it to a friend for review and she said (without knowing there was a previous draught) that the old stuff was good but everything I had added was rubbish.

Cue a big crisis of confidence. I've stayed out of my office since then.

Fortunately, there's one other thing that gets a reluctant writer writing: a deadline. I had to have my entry in for the Story Shop competition by tomorrow. This morning I forced myself back into the office. This time, I took another piece, a more recent one with some obvious flaws, and I reworked that. The final product is, in my opinion, not my best work, but it is much better than nothing. So off it goes.

I sometimes use arty-farty terms like "blocked" and "fluent" when it comes to my writing, but deep down I don't believe in those concepts. I think it's really just a matter of momentum. At the moment I have none, so it's time to get the ball rolling again. The only way to do that is to work.

Your name in lights

2009-07-13T16:03:00.001-07:00

And so, I'm now a published fiction writer.

Tell me now, how do you feel?

Hmm. I suppose you could say that it's a little anti-climactic. There's no big cinematic Free Willy moment, no punching the air and whooping, no round of applause from your friends who then carry you out on their shoulders, no freeze frame of you shouting with joy, slowly fading to the credits. I just checked the On The Premises website, then told my wife, then spent an hour trying to get my daughter to sleep.

I do feel that kind of joy, but instead of being condensed into one great moment of joy, I've had several little ones: hearing that I'd made the short list; hearing that I'd made this issue; getting really nice emails from the editor; checking out the proofs; and finally seeing the finished version. It's a great feeling, but it's more of a gentle glow than a flash of lightening.

And the real thought is "Great, now what's next?". I've entered the Guardian Short Fiction competition. I chomping at the bit to rewrite my science fiction story. I have a literary piece set in Spain which needs an extra scene in order to really work, and then it's ready to go. I need to knock something together to enter for a competition running during the Edinburgh book festival. And - most pressing of all - a really strong idea has popped into my head, completely unbidden, and is asking me to give it some thought.

So what's next is more work. And the difference between being a published writer and an unpublished writer is that I now know that I have absolutely no excuse not to get to work.

Minor details

2009-06-30T15:43:00.000-07:00

Another email from OTP contained two firsts. I was asked to review the online proof of my story, which was a very odd experience. It's there on the web, hidden on the OTP site, and it looks the way it will look when it's published. Yet it's not quite alive. It's almost unsettlingly motionless. Can't wait to see it walking and talking.

Also, I had to write a bio of 50-75 words. This one stumped me. I love talking about myself and will normally do so at the drop of a hat, but the bio is not just a chance to big myself up. It's kind of a marketing job, a chance to set out your stall and let the world know what you're about.

I wrote more drafts of my bio than I did of my story and eventually settled on something that was a little jokey without being too wacky, I hope. It contains the main facts that most bios contain: I am a writer; I hope to write more; I live in a fixed location; I have regular contact with my family. I debated whether or not to include a link to this blog but decided not to. This blog is still not "live" and won't be until I have a little more content.

In other news, when I finish moving house I'm going to do a final, final, final draft of my story for The Guardian's short fiction competition. I don't have any real hope of winning it, but it's always worth a shot. Then it's on to another short piece. I hope to have around five stories at final draft stage by the end of the summer.

Interacting with a real editor

2009-06-19T15:16:00.000-07:00

The editor of On The Premises emailed me today with a list of suggested edits for my story. His covering email was overwhelmingly positive and made me a bit giddy, to be perfectly honest. The changes he suggested were all very reasonable, mainly addressing my rather laissez-faire attitude to grammar.

I didn't accept all of his changes, however. I made three suggestions for improving the text which differed from his and sent it back to him. Nerve-wracking. There's no reason to believe that anyone would be offended by me contributing to the editing process, but as this is my first encounter with an editor I'm worried about coming over as being precious. Being a first time author, I don't care if they translate the story into Swahili as long as my name gets mentioned somewhere.

Everyone's a critic

2009-06-18T14:50:00.000-07:00

Writing is a little like giving birth. Well, okay, having attended one birth I can promise you that writing is nothing like giving birth. There's no blood and screaming, and no-one offers you a nice cup of tea afterwards. But I think most writers know what it's like for an idea to take hold in their mind, and grow and swell and develop, and eventually become so big that you think your head is going to burst. Ideally, this is the point where you sit down and start to write, and a torrent of words gushes from your subconscious onto the page.

I had this feeling recently. I used an online writer's toy to generate the prompt: "In a splendid petrol station, a green-haired teenager contemplates suicide". The questions raised by the prompt (How can something like a petrol station be "splendid"? Would it make her more suicidal or encourage her to live?) generated a story which grew and blossomed in my mind. Everything came together: the characters, the plot, their voices, even a strong sense of underlying moral purpose to the story. When I was ready, I sat down and poured it out. It was a short one, only 2,200 words, but looking back on it I knew I had done something special. I had written something great. I sent it to a couple of other writers I know and braced myself for the tsunami of praise that was coming my way.

The first response I got said, "This is an excellent outline for a very promising story". Then someone said that they'd prefer to wait for a proper first draft before offering opinions. A woman I know seemed slightly offended by how generic my female character was.

Of course they were all spot on in their assessment. I was just exhausted and so closely connected to my first draft that I couldn't see its glaring flaws. That happens all the time. What often happens next is that I'll swing too far the other way, declare my first draft to be garbage and chuck it in the bin. That doesn't do either.

Learning how to take criticsm on board is vital. It's been the most important part of my development as a writer over the last twelve months. I've come to treasure criticism. Writing is hard. Redrafting is even harder. So when somebody gives you a set of instructions on how to improve a piece of writing, you should relax and be content that somebody else is doing the hard work for you.

You're a winner!

2009-06-13T16:14:00.000-07:00

I got an email from On The Premises today informing me that I had earned an Honourable Mention in their next issue. To explain: OTP print five stories per issue, and name them as 1st, 2nd and 3rd prize winners, plus two honourable mentions. Woo hoo!

The issue appears on July 11th, and I'll be sure to post a link here.

Replies and Revision

2009-06-10T15:54:00.000-07:00

I received a generic email today from First Edition regarding my poetry submission. It looks like a form email which is sent to everyone who makes a submission, and essentially says "Don't call us, we'll call you". They don't offer individual critiques, which is a bummer, but they also don't even confirm rejection, instead suggesting that you wait for 5-6 months, and then take it as read that your submission has been rejected.

It's not an ideal system from a writer's point of view, but I think I understand why they would do that. First-time authors can be a little sensitive about their work, and a rejection email might naturally prompt a "Why have you rejected my MASTERPIECE?" reply. Easier not to engage in that kind of dialogue unless you absolutely have to.

I've been reworking my final submission from my creative writing course, trying to bring it up to submission standard. It's a science fiction piece, which is not a genre I'm totally comfortable with, but I think the story has a lot of promise. The original draft was 4,500 words, which feel like the right length for the story, but my assignment had a max wordcount of 2,500, so I had to butcher it considerably. The redraft I'm doing at the moment is actually a full rewrite. I'm now up to 2,500 words, and haven't even reached the halfway mark in the story yet.

Verse than death

2009-06-09T14:44:00.000-07:00

Continued the attempt to re-home my Creative Writing assignments today by submitting my poetry to First Edition, a magazine dedicated to new writers.

It's not just a matter of dumping my old stuff (well, maybe a little). The work I did for the course is extremely polished, having been drafted and drafted again, and then critiqued by my tutor. I probably put more effort into the poetry than any of the other assignments, even writing some lines in my head while being attacked by my dentist, so I would be glad if I could let it see daylight in a magazine like First Edition.

I'm also quite keen to see how the FE submissions process works. They seem to be quite good, and have received great feedback from the other writers on my course, many of whom managed to place work there. We shall see, and of course I'll keep you all posted here when I hear back from them.

Ya down wit OTP (yeah you know me)

2009-06-04T15:13:00.000-07:00

Part of my final assignment in my Creative Writing course was to target a publication, write something specifically for them and then submit for publication. It took me a month to find the perfect publication, during which time I probably looked at every magazine mentioned in the Million Writers Award (which doesn't have a million nominees, but still has an awful bloody lot).

On The Premises jumped out as soon as I found it. It just felt a little different from the others: slightly unpolished; slightly chaotic; very passionate; totally unpredictable. So I cobbled together a story in the space of about a week and sent it to my tutor, who gave it an A, my first of the course. I edited the story a little to take account of her suggestions, and stuck in an email to OTP.

Yesterday OTP emailed me to say that, out of the 232 submissions received for this issue, I had made the final 10. This means, according to the OTP people:

"One of two things will happen. You will EITHER:

(1) Win some money and have your story edited (with your input) and published, OR

(2) Receive a detailed critique that explains why your story came close, but did not win a prize."

Hooray! Huzzah! Let there be champagne and cigars and women of questionable morals! I feel slightly sorry for the other 222 people (try again next month!) but I'm pretty pleased for myself. The only thing now is that I'm not sure whether I would prefer (1) or (2). Being published is obviously what I'm doing this for, but getting detailed criticism from an expert is like oxygen to a developing writer. Either way, I'm going to be a very happy man when they get back to me on June 14th.

Things I've had published

2001-01-01T12:01:00.000-08:00

* divers Edinburgh Fringe reviews in The Skinny, August 2010
* Shirley's Mum (short film), not produced or published, but won me a place on Screen Lab 2010
* "Cot"(short story), On The Premises Issue 9, November 09
* "Sit, Stand, Kneel" (short story), Southpaw issue 3, November 09
* "-phobic" (poem), First Edition Issue 9, November 09.
* "Still" (poem), First Edition Issue 8, October 09.
* "Stations" (short story), The Guardian Summer Short Fiction Special, July 09 (runner-up in a competition judged by Julie Myerson and William Boyd!)
* "A Good Beating" (short story), On The Premises Issue 8, July 09.

The pit of despair

2001-01-01T12:00:00.000-08:00

Some of my more notable rejections:

15-09-10 In The Write Light did not offer me a free place at their retreat.

31-07-10 A submission to this year's The Guardian short fiction contest got nowhere. Ah well.

14-11-09 Black Gate Tours, a co-written 60-minute TV pilot, got nowhere in a BBC competition (update: same story with BBC's Write Here Write Now).

12-08-09 The Human Genre project said my story "Don't Let Go" was good, but didn't fit their brief.

31-07-09 Edinburgh Book Festival's Story Shop decided that they didn't want me to read at their event. My submission was a piece of short fiction called "Sit, Stand, Kneel"