Since last time I have had: three major Ugly lock ins, many nights of insomnia, a cold that won’t go away, a development day with Caroline Mitchell on a spec TV project called Northern Souls, mild conjunctivitis, several creative sessions in school experimenting with baked beans and many many bags of Bombay mix. As such, as of today, this is how the land lies with Ugly:

I have a completed draft 1 and am three quarters of the way through rewriting this into draft 1.1.  I should finish this today.  By Friday 29th of Jan I plan to have completed another full pass of the script.  This will be Draft 1.2, which will then confusingly become known as Draft One.  This will be the draft that gets emailed to Red Ladder while I shut my eyes and pray…

So here we are on the brink!  The play is in its dieing days of being my own private play zone.  It’s about to start the process of…

Going public…

But right now, it’s still just me, in my smelly old writing hat (no for real!). And this private immersed world though lonely has become a very safe place to be. At the beginning when I was starting to write Ugly I was desperate to be through this stage, but now that I’m only days away from finishing draft one, I suddenly want to stay in my bubble forever.

Hey kids!  Lets explore this paradox a little further.

Dramatic writing (plays, telly, films, radio) is about going public. For me, it can’t exist if it doesn’t get performed.  This kind of writing involves standing up and saying ‘Here is my work.  This is what I think and feel. What do you think?’  I am driven to do this. I think understanding is the only salvation that human beings can hope for, so I want to be part of the conversation…

But while to go public with an audience is essential and addictive it is also terrifying.

For here is the minx of it:

Most writers I know on some level or other (OK I’m talking about myself) are passive aggressive arseholes who write because they are unable to actually communicate or control things in the real world in a way that works for them.  Many of us (ie me) are struggling to be decent people despite this.  Many of us (still me) long not to be seething masses of self-hate / general hate.  Many have even managed to lead their entire adult lives with no one around them actually knowing that privately inside their hearts and minds, their only desire is for the world to totally submit to their will (Actually, I don’t think I’ve hidden this last one so well myself).  Which is why the private hidden phase is so seductive.  When it’s just the writer and the page there is control and unknown promise.  There is the desire that the work will be great… There is a mad hope for one pure moment of perfection… It is all possible because it has not happened yet… Only the day must come for sharing.  Sharing!  With those inconvenient but all too necessary people (actors, directors those kind of people)… And it is a dreadful day because it is a day when suddenly their opinions count! For God’s sake!

You see where I’m going with this?  I think the word is ‘conflicted’…  Very very conflicted. Handing in that first draft and having it read (even by incredibly supportive people like the folk at Red Ladder) is a heart stopping moment…  Because it is the moment that I have been working towards yet dreading.  It is the moment where I know that not only will my work be judged but also that I must start to come out of my cocoon and find a way to work collaboratively with other people damn it!

Only hang on!  Not yet I don’t!  I have 5 days grace. And weirdly, probably due to sleep deprivation, I’m feeling very very calm.

I think in fact I’m enjoying myself!

It’s still just me and my Ugly baby.  I’m still working stuff out.  I’m still cutting chunks here and adding stuff there.  I’m still wondering why everyone swears so much in my plays?  I’m cutting cunts and fucks left right and centre.  I’m still tweaking the tone, trying to get the moments moving between action, dark humour, absurdity and pathos to segway together. I’m still playing with the form of it, I’m still wondering if on some level I might be a bit strange for wanting to write this play?  Will people think I’m odd?  I’m still tinkering with the rhythm of each characters speech patterns to make them sound unique, I’m still pushing the meanings and finding new ones.  Still checking myself trying to avoid polemics.  Still in short, trying to challenge myself to write the best play I can.

It’s gone beyond fear.  It’s just my every waking thought now.

It’s weird.  I never feel this calm.

Besides Writing Ugly this month I have been:

Tweeting:
Search:  @emmabob3

Seeing:
Not one single film or performance of theatre!  That has been the sad ‘lock a way’ reality of my life this month.  Next month things are changing big style.

Researching music for the play:
Paul Mauriat and Ludwig Van Beethoven.  You can listen too!
On Spotify:
Paul Mauriat And His Orchestra – Un Homme Et Une Femme
Ludwig van Beethoven – Symphony No.6 In F: 1St Mvt.

Or Youtube:
Un Homme Et Une Femme:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=heXdjrS7QD8
Beethoven Symphony No.6 in F: 1st Movement
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OC-EPsvdi6E

Thinking about:
A significant minority of the year 6 children I was working with last week (that’s 10 and 11 year olds) when asked about what they thought 2050 would be like, came up with the following: ‘We will be dead’, ‘The world will be all polluted’, ‘Mother’s will scream losing their babies’, ‘All the animals will be dead’… How can it be that we allow our children to be living with this kind of stress?  Are we as adults perhaps guilty of running away from the ecological disaster we are helping to create and leaving kids (who feel powerless to do anything about it) to do the worrying about it for us?

There are things we can do!
http://www.greenpeace.org.uk
http://fish2fork.com
http://www.ethicalfashionforum.com/
https://www.adbusters.org/