10 Years, 10 Projects: Development of a Writing Style
To those that have visited my old website, this will look a touch familiar. There are some posts from my old website that I’m just not ready to say goodbye to. One of those is a retrospective on the last decade of my life and the writing that got me through it.
Rather than waste my time (and yours) with posting each of those five reflective posts again, I’ve consolidated them into one MAMMOTH of an article, which you can read here! Again, if you’ve read them already then I won’t hold it against you if you don’t want to read again. If this all looks new to you, though, you’d best read it as it’s all perfect(ly amateur).
10 years, 10 projects: part 1
On the 14th September 2014, having scraped my way through my A Levels, I moved to Cardiff city to study BA Scriptwriting at the University of South Wales. My goal? To be the next big thing in TV before my three years were up. My plan? Probably to bump into Steven Moffat, give him my killer idea for a Doctor Who spin off, and make my fortune.
Ten years, two jobs, two degrees, and a global pandemic later, I’m still waiting for Mr Davies to option my fabulously original idea.
My relationship with writing has been a tumultuous one. I’ve fallen in and out of love with it routinely in the last decade, but I can still confidently say that writing is what I want to do with my life. Through all the changes in my late teens and most of my twenties, that’s been one thing I’ve always been committed to.
So, to celebrate spending nearly a third of my life in one place, I thought I’d look back at ten scripts I’ve written since my undergraduate started. I’ll be honest, they’re mostly dreadful. I’m not showcasing them as a form of self-flagellation, but to highlight just how far I’ve come in the last decade. From beating nuanced topics with a naïve sledgehammer, to finally understanding what it means to ‘write what you know’, every script is a showcase of who I am, who I was, and what I’ve learned.
That said, and to save your eyes, I will only upload an extract from each piece, depending on their length. I’ll even do a little write-up on each one so, if you want, you don’t have to read the scripts at all (please take that option – they’re so bad).
Without further ado, here are the first two extracts.
a court room
Written in my first year of University, A Court Room was a short theatre piece about a father put on trial for the murder of his daughter. The twist? He’s dead too! The court? Overseen by angels! The courtroom? Purgatory! And to top it off, gasp, the daughter is a closeted lesbian.
Jokes aside, I do actually like the concept of this theatre piece. The notion that purgatory is a literal court where souls are judged before being passed to either Heaven or Hell is a concept with limitless possibilities. Well, I say limitless, this particular story might be one of those…
This was the first piece of theatre I ever wrote to completion. I’d dabbled in high school for Drama or Theatre Studies homework, but this was the real deal. We had a whole lecture on creating a stage play format preset in Microsoft Word that I still use. So, whatever the shortfalls, I learned a lot while writing this.
The ward: episode 03
That’s right, episode 03. In my second year of studying, my course was introduced to the concept of a writers room. Two projects were written, if memory serves. One was a radio series about the son of Death who is disowned and sent to Earth. Sort of a Thor meets The Sandman. That comedy series became the bane of my life as, in our youthful, naïve, and ambitious minds, we could of course produce the thirteen episode series. After all, it’s only radio. When we realised it was an unreasonable ambition, it became my job to edit the series from thirteen episodes down to a workable six (which we still didn’t produce all of).
However, that’s not the series I’ll be presenting. No, no, you’ve had one poorly executed, high concept script already. This time I’ll be showing a story set in a children’s mental health ward! These colourful and sensitively drawn characters have one hell of a journey over the course of the series. There’s romance, intrigue, only one doctor, and more dodgy parents than an episode of Tracy Beaker.
I loved writing this episode. Not because of the content, but from working in a writers room environment. Creating an arching narrative as a group, ideas thrown around, judged, and either adopted or dropped. This module developed a humility to my writing and began to foster my love of giving and receiving feedback. Realising that last nights solo genius is today’s collaborative punching bag is humbling and necessary both in writing and in life.
10 years, 10 projects: part 2
Bonnie
For my final project in my undergraduate degree, I wrote my first ‘full length’ script. Full length is obviously a relative term, so the faculty wangled it to mean ‘full length’ depending on the medium. A poem is not the same length as a feature film. I, however, wrote neither.
My final project was a pilot episode of a murder mystery. This was in 2013 to 2014, so Broadchurch fever had taken hold of the TV landscape, and the drug ‘spice’ had made its way onto the streets of Cardiff. This percolated in my mind for all of ten minutes before I came up with a brilliant idea: What if the creator of spice owned a café and was murdered?
The resulting project was, by BBC Writersroom Open Call standards, pretty damn good. I got to the top 13% of entries with a second draft entry. To my own standards eight years after the fact… not so much. The dual stories of the jaded detective trying to identify and prosecute the creator of this new ‘legal high’ running alongside the story of Cass as she tries to find her sisters murderer work relatively well. After all, who would expect the manager of a failing café to be the country’s most up-and-coming drug lord?
Again, I seem to be so obsessed with working in a core ‘queer’ angle, the piece loses a lot of focus very quickly. But it’s not a bad piece of writing, all told. Cass is underwritten but ultimately a protagonist with a lot of potential, and the narrative structure is pretty sound.
This project holds a special place in my heart for a few reasons. Chief among them, of course, is that it’s the piece that rounded out my undergraduate degree, a time in my life I still consider to be the most fulfilling. It’s also the first full-length project I ever wrote, with a view to write more. It was a humbling experience using part of this script to be performed as part of my final major project. The script was also a massive ego boost, having expected nothing back when submitting to the BBC’s Open Call, only to be told my writing was considered among the top fifth of all entries.
After finishing my undergraduate, while thanking my lecturers, they asked what our plans were for the future. Some were off to take a year abroad, others returning home to see what life brought for them. But, when I said it was my aim to carry on working on my projects, I received some of the best advice anyone has ever given me:
Don’t.
Go and live. Get a shit job, have some shit relationships. Go and live. The writing will still be here.
So, I did.
Cam
Living, it turns out, sucks.
After getting a job in THAT pub chain, and having a whirlwind summer of working, drinking, and working while hungover, I almost forgot about writing. Even if I’d remembered, I wouldn’t have had the time. It’s funny how a 16-hour-a-week work contract can look more like 40+ hours in practice while management constantly try to ‘save hours’.
Eventually, thankfully, I remembered that I had in fact got a degree, and I should maybe try and do something with it. The three previous projects showcased have all been tonally and thematically varied, so I decided to mix things up this time. After writing a murder mystery series with a queer angle, I decided to stretch my wings and write a murder mystery series with a queer angle.
This time, the victim was a gay sex worker. The detective was new to the job, and gay himself. The police force was stuck in its homophobic ways. The outgoing detective, just about to retire, was the first female detective on the force.
Cam, as it became known, was my first foray into a slightly sluttier tone to my writing, probably reflecting my lifestyle when not working. I worked in hospitality, being slutty is a survival technique.
I never quite got my head around this script. Again, there’s nothing wrong with the story itself, but as I tried desperately to make the damn thing work, I realised two things: I haven’t done enough living to provide the right texture to this story, and I’ve got nobody to help me work it out.
The pub where I worked had become my entire life. Pursuing a promotion that I was never going to get had become my sole goal. The people I worked with were also the only people I knew.
Then, just as I got a new job that would provide me the stability and opportunity to put myself out there professionally, the pandemic hit. As the pounds piled on thanks to a Tesco Express around the corner from my house, and the depression I’d been ignoring suddenly reappeared in an ugly way, Cam and the prospect of writing anything fell out of my to-do list. Like many people, the pandemic was one of the single darkest points of my life. But, not to lose hope completely, I enrolled in a course that would change my life forever.
10 years, 10 projects: part 3
party
What to say about this play… it’s very slutty. When I enrolled to do a Masters in Creative Writing, I’d initially set out to broaden my horizons, maybe write some prose. However, as the first term rolled on, this story picked at my brain and wouldn’t let me go.
The story of a sexually liberated gay man in his early 20s terrified of moving back to the country with his ‘normal’ parents seemed to speak to me… for some reason. The resulting script is a little trite, but it’s not a complete shambles. The structure is tight, the archetypes are clear, and the motif of Alex’s slutty statues work pretty well.
parTy was my attempt of tying together pieces from previous projects into something I could relate to in the moment. After a trip to the National Theatre introduced me to the play ‘chemsex’, I’d become somewhat obsessed with the practice (academically). What is it like to deviate from the deviants? What happens when, after experiencing such extremes, you’re forced into a more mundane way of living? Folding that into my own fear at the time of potentially leaving Cardiff, this play was borne.
And subsequently died.
As I say, there’s nothing particularly wrong with this script. Another draft or two and it could be pretty good, but subsequent stories and scripts have borrowed elements of this play and used them in far more interesting ways.
Writing this play was one of my favourite writing experiences. Weekly feedback sessions, constant mentorship, and a strict deadline were all welcome after years of drifting. It also taught me, above all my previous stories, that the ‘normal world’ of the protagonist can be as extreme as it needs to be. It’s normal to the protagonist, not the audience. If being a pass-around-bottom is what’s normal to Alex, then so-be-it.
The local
If I could, I’d include this story twice. However, that would make this a list of 11 projects and that makes no sense for this series. The draft I’m going to include here will be the draft I submitted for my final project on my Masters degree.
At the point of writing the script, I’d been out of hospitality for nearly two years. Ample time, as I thought at the time, to put my experiences into a narrative context. The result is a narratively tight pilot episode of a comedy series set in a pub after acquisition from a fictional London pub chain. The mixture of local expectations and brand compliance is a great source of conflict and comedy, but upon reflection this was not the way to do it.
Life working behind a bar, especially one such as I was writing, is extreme. Telling this story through a straight single-cam scripted set-up is not commissionable. The language alone would pale even the most amenable of Channel 4 commissioners. However, at the time of writing the script for my degree, that’s exactly what I did. The result is a script that is fine. Just fine. People who haven’t worked in hospitality that have read it have enjoyed it, but upon reflection it’s not a fully honest depiction of the kind of life bar staff lead.
This is a story I have returned to and will return to again, but for now here’s an extract of The Local.
10 years, 10 projects: part 4
How I lived Before I died
Back to something a little sluttier, but also a little more depressing.
After finishing (but before graduating) my Masters, I realised I was in an incredibly reflective period of my life. I’d lost one grandparent during the pandemic, and another during my Masters degree. My own living situation had also drastically changed. My housemate of five years had bought a house, meaning I was considering a whole different way of living.
I was also, perhaps unsurprisingly to some, exceptionally depressed.
All these things culminated in a script that was never a serious project, operating more as a narrative stream of consciousness. In all honesty, I don’t remember where this script was going to go, if anywhere. I have vague memories of a diary motif, an angle involving an actual depression plotline, and crippling sexual fear. Yet, somehow, from that, this sweet scene was borne of two friends that know each other so intimately they can speak without words, and when they do speak, they are free to do so without filter.
So much of this project influenced another one further on in this list, but it’s still a nice read (at least for me).
Madala’s Grace
I previously mentioned that I’d initially intended to use my Masters to push my writing into other mediums, chiefly prose. While I ended up writing a play, I haven’t let my prose idea go.
Madala’s Grace will, time and talent permitting, be my fantasy epic. The world of the story changes with each passing moment, but the core character of Paterik and his ultimate journey have remained the same. Based partially on Greek myth, but warped into a completely fictional world, the story of Madala’s Grace is intended to be told on an epic scale.
That means, of course, it’s going to take a lot of bloody work to get right. I haven’t drafted anything new in quite some time as other projects (I’ll come on to them) have taken priority, but here is a brief excerpt of my most recent draft.
10 years, 10 projectS: part 5
Untitled series
A project without a title? We must be coming to the end of the list! Quite right, dear reader, only two projects left to conclude the decade.
This script has actually been put on hold at present, but is one I can’t wait to return to. Currently intended to be a six-part light drama series, the scripts will chart the living arrangements of a grandfather and grown-up grandson after the death of the family matriarch. As the grandfather struggles with his own domestic ineptitude, he instead chooses to try and ‘liberate’ his fruity grandson from his own unmanly domestic prowess. It’s a war of old man vs young man. Masculinity held under a microscope.
It's also heavily inspired by my own grandad, who passed away earlier this year. At 89, weeks before he passed, he finally admitted he’s “getting old”. The man was an enigma. A staunch promoter of the patriarchal way of living, he was also a deeply emotional man. That dichotomy as a writer is fascinating, but perhaps a little raw to focus on as a grandson.
When the time comes, this currently unnamed series will be insane. Raw, funny, tough, unflinching, and real. Death is horrible, but when certain people get involved, it’s also bloody hilarious.
As a writer, I had begun falling back into old traps. A play I’d been writing simply wasn’t working. I’d beaten it and begged it to work for over a year, but nothing was sticking. Just as all hope seemed lost, along came ScriptClub, a writing group based in Cardiff that was looking for new members. So, from May until August, this series became my sole writing focus. It was an opportunity to liberate myself from the constraints of the play and gave me the space to grieve in a healthy way; something I hadn’t done after the deaths of previous grandparents. It also, crucially, gave me a space to discuss my writing.
But, didn’t you do that Masters?
I did! I met some wonderful friends and peers doing the Masters degree. After graduating, though, they all went off to have their twenties and to the ‘living’ that will be so important in their future careers. ScriptClub offered me a chance to get real-time feedback with writers who make their living in script departments, and others from all walks of life. This is a network of people that have made writing more than a hobby, and more than a job. Writing is who ScriptClub are. For that, I’m immensely grateful, and those monthly meetings are now the highlight of my calendar.
Enough glowing about all that, though. Here’s the opening scene of my currently unnamed series.
I have sinned
So, that play I couldn’t get to work?
I figured it out.
In August this year, I went to Edinburgh with my family for a few days and lost my Edinburgh Fringe virginity. What a week. The performances I saw were nothing short of exceptional. Chief among them, and the play I found most affecting on a fundamental level, was Good Boy.
Good Boy charts the completely true story of the writer and performer as he discovers his then boyfriend, his first boyfriend, is a paedophile. It’s a vital, important, impactful story from its subject matter alone. Subject matter isn’t what makes Good Boy so fucking brilliant, though. It’s one man, on a simple stage, performing and showcasing a very specific strand of his life. There’s no mention of his family life, of his school, of anything that doesn’t service this story. It’s a masterclass in storytelling, and it’s exactly what I was looking for.
I Have Sinned, the play I’d been writing for over a year, was too big. I knew it would be a one-person play, but good Lord there was a lot going on. There was a funeral, the protagonist was a therapist, there were flashbacks and flash forwards, it was a mess. The most powerful moments of Good Boy took place in a bed made of two chairs and a pouffe.
The absolute writing fever that took over me after leaving Good Boy ended on 21st September. In one month, I rebuilt the play from the ground up. Everything was stripped away, and the resulting play is, in my opinion, the best thing I’ve written to date.
I Have Sinned is a culmination of everything I’ve learned since coming to Cardiff ten years ago. There are elements in this play that echo almost every other project on this list. Like Court Room, this play puts me on trial. Like The Ward, it is a journey of self-discovery. Like Bonnie and Cam, there’s a core mystery to solve. Like parTy, it deals with the consequences of sexual deviancy. Like The Local, it explores a form of nihilism. Like How I Lived Before I Died, it includes the fallout of a life poorly lived. Like Madala’s Grace, it confronts a loss of faith, and like my unnamed series, it is a story with melancholy at its heart.
Finishing I Have Sinned has been liberating. This story that has been fighting to get out of me for a decade is finally on paper. Is it perfect? No. But it’s no longer just inside my head. Now I can give it to others or consider trying to perform it. Prior to my undergraduate, I loved being on stage.
This chapter of my life is over. Whatever the next chapter is, I am entering it with one goal: to live it to the full.
