I’m a writer based in Bristol in the United Kingdom with interests in drama writing, the psychology of writing, and in technology and popular culture.
A scriptwriter since childhood, I hold an MA in the Teaching and Practice of Creative Writing and a PhD in Creative and Critical Writing from Cardiff University.
I have produced plays at venues including Bristol Old Vic Studio and Alma Tavern Theatre and on the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. I won the Training And Performance Showcase (TAPS)[1] Drama Writer of the Year Award for my play Bacon Sandwich in 2004.
A core member of the team behind Southwest Scriptwriters, I organised and led regular workshop meetings between 1996 and 2016. I now support the group as a member of its management committee and by writing and maintaining its website.
My work with Brass Works Theatre since its outset in 2011 includes script development support for much of the new work we have produced. I also built and maintain the company’s website, managed its online booking system, designed publicity material, and took production photographs.
I created my first website in 2000, and have developed a knowledge of progressive web technologies since then.
Favourite quotations
Passionate people don’t wear their passion on their sleeves; they have it in their hearts. They live it. Passion is more than résumé-deep, because its hallmarks — persistence, grit, seriousness, all-consuming absorption — cannot be gauged from a checklist. Nor is it always synonymous with success. If someone is truly passionate about something, they’ll do it for a long time even if they aren’t at first successful.
Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg[2]
An artist is once more in rudiments an introvert, not far removed from neurosis. He is oppressed by excessively powerful instinctual needs. He desires to win honour, power, wealth, fame and the love of women; but he lacks the means for achieving these satisfactions. Consequently, like any other unsatisfied man, he turns away from reality and transfers all his interest, and his libido too, to the wishful constructions of his life of phantasy, whence the path might lead to neurosis. […] A man who is a true artist has more at his disposal […] he possesses the mysterious power of shaping some particular material until it has become a faithful image of his phantasy; and he knows, moreover, how to link so large a yield of pleasure to this representation of his unconscious phantasy that, for the time being at least, repressions are outweighed and lifted by it. If he is able to accomplish all this, he makes it possible for other people once more to derive consolation and alleviation from their own sources of pleasure in their unconscious which have become inaccessible to them; he earns their gratitude and admiration and he has thus achieved through his phantasy what originally he had achieved only in his phantasy — honour, power and the love of women.
Sigmund Freud[3]
What is writing?
It’s me, the author, taking the state inside my mind and, via the gift of language, grafting it onto yours. But man invented language in order to better deceive, not inform. That state I’m transmitting is often a false one, but you judge it not by the depth of its emotion in my mind, but by the beauty and pungency of the thought in yours. Thus the best deceivers are called articulate, as they make listeners and readers fall in love with the thoughts projected into their heads. It’s the essential step in getting men to write you large checks, women to take off their clothes, and the crowd to read and repeat what you’ve thought. All with mere words: memes of meaning strung together according to grammar and good taste. Astonishing when you think about it.Antonio Garcia Martinez[4]
Notes and references