Thomas Everchild’s workshop for Hastings Writers’ Group

Sussex Playwrights’ secretary Thomas Everchild delivered a workshop this week for the Hastings Writers Group, at the charming and characterful Regency Rooms bar, in the seafront Crown House, St Leonard’s.

The group are preparing for their latest in-house writing competition; a short dramatic monologue. They invited Thomas, whose set of four solo plays under the title Glimpse won a series of four star reviews at the Edinburgh Fringe, to deliver a workshop on plot and character for creating their monologues.

The event began by featuring a spot task to introduce yourself with a brief summary of the plot of a favourite book, film or play – the aim being to convey intrigue and detail in a very short space.

The conversation ranged through narrator style, tone of voice, subtext, settings and location, and the question … should the writer include stage directions to the director and actors?

We talked soliloquy and monologue, establishing that though they both have the same roots meaning ‘one’ and ‘words’, they do convey different ideas.

Several demonstrations included anecdote and impromptu short story / shaggy dog story from Thomas and an extract from Glimpse: Turning the Handle, performed by Philippa Hammond.

Top tips included imaginatively ‘casting’ well known actors or friends in the role you’re writing as a way to inspire, taking inspiration from animal behaviour and presenting the quirk – the oddity that identifies your character.

Then if you’re writing for a particular actor who’ll be playing it, taking their essence, their voice, and building that in can be a great guide.

We looked at the importance of deciding whether your character is talking to someone who is ‘there’ but invisible, or if the audience represents the character, if they’re talking to an audience … or if the audience are eavesdropping on their thoughts and observing them in secret.

We finished with a practical task – an out-of-the air location, a few story points and we were off, with seven minutes or so to write a monologue based on that premise.

Then we shared the stories and finished with a brief Q and A.

Thankyou to the Hastings Writers Group for your participation and enthusiasm – a great opportunity for Sussex Playwrights to meet and connect with you.

Philippa Hammond

 

May meeting: William Nicholson

Notes from William Nicholson’s talk at the May meeting

William Nicholson Talk SPC May 7th 2017

William Nicholson rushing in from new York started as soon as he landed at SPC. beginning with his early feature-writing at university (Cambridge) he talked with aplomb, engagement and certainly no notes of his aspiring novel-writing, thwarted for a time despite picking up an agent at university. Each was rejected. One was finally revised and published much later. He returned to his first love, novel-writing, much later but made a breakthrough in 1972 with a radio play and thought he’d made it. Not quite, not yet.

Authors’ careers are studded with false starts. you should also never study others’ success, he added, declaring the more successful authors and dramatists he knows are still obsessed with someone higher up the perceived ladder. That way depression lies. Even David Hare’s sensitive to failure and he’s a lovely man.

He found early success in work at the BBC in the mid 1970s with features in BBC2’s Everyman. This involved him in scripts and finally colleagues’ badgering him to write a short narrative that could be used as a feature play.

It was in 1984 that he was persuaded to return to an unpromising story of C. S. Lewis, and he finally saw his way through a story not generally known, that of his late marriage, a sudden joy and then having to release his wife and grief to death. Story’s the most important thing of all. No drama can exist without it. The most famous line now irritatingly attributed to Lewis is ‘you read books to feel you’re not alone.’

Hollywood in retrospect was something he’d not perhaps do now. Too much creativity wasted. Though it did discipline him as a brutal lesson in being told to rewrite and rewrite. You need to tailor yourself to the director’s vision and nothing works unless they like it. It’s not even a question of being precious that’s taken for granted. Too many scripts are never actioned and you have of course no rights to them or to reuse unless heavily doctored. SJ asked if they could be recycled and though that’s possible, they’d not notice, it’s best to start afresh.

He now regrets the ‘false’ happy ending of his next film Nell, from 1994, the wild girl speaking her own language of her mother’s stroke-speak; he suggests she’d have been hauled off to an institution.

William returned to his first love, novels and is successful but never enquires to sales, he knows that would be fatal. They clearly break even and that’s enough. He talked too of his new film Breathe. Many actors have been mentioned along the way, and this with Claire Foy, Andrew Garfield, Hugh Bonneville is just an example. He’d only just left Anne Benning to meet us….

Rob Cohen asked about Gladiator and we were treated to the original idea but bad script by David Franzoni, the work of John Logan to bring it to an infinitely finer place, but still short and his rewrite which succeeded as they went along using actors and feedback to shape the narrative the humanizing of the main character was cardinal to him, he has no interest in vengeful warriors, hence the hand gliding over wheat at the beginning a man in touch tenderly with land and soil, people.

Other questions focused on getting scripts to agents and rights over treatments. There are none. As we know. J K Rowling was lucky in part with a publisher Bloomsbury who didn’t have a film clause package, being quite small. But if your story is treated they want to make it as successful as they can. they’ll not take out the story, why bother? You have to agree that they want to do the best for the fundamental narrative locked in the story you’ve sold on. A humane witty self-effacing major screenwriter. 29 people attended. This kind of direct, wholly informal but immensely fluent and engaging narrative is just what we need.

Notes by Simon Jenner