Wednesday, 1 November 2006 Not such a great house tonight (17), although the audience responded more expectedly to the play. Bristol Evening Post‘s reviewer, Harry Mottram, was in and congratulated me after the show — he seemed to like it, although, as the play points out, this doesn’t necessarily mean a thing. Thursday, 2 November […]
There was a good preview for the show in today’s edition of Metro, a free daily newspaper given away on the local buses that many passengers pick up as they board. It’s well-researched and written and sums up what the show’s about nicely, and it’s illustrated with a shot taken at yesterday’s tech and dress […]
Following Saturday’s rehearsals I feel that the cast has nowhere to go except to perform the play to an audience. Sam ran the show three times at the weekend and picked the actors up on a few points, but I didn’t have anything to add. The only thing left to practise is cueing and timing […]
I joined Sam and the cast for the afternoon’s rehearsal in the Alma Tavern, which began with a run of the play. It was interesting to see progress since Tuesday when rehearsals were around a table, and I was impressed with some of the week’s innovations: Simon and Paul huddle close together during the ceilidh […]
By the time I’d hauled myself up to the Coopers’ Loft this morning, Sam and the cast were a couple of scenes into a read-through of the script, marking the dialogue for subject changes as they went. This was an interesting process because it revealed how successfully I’d managed the changes without a crunching and […]
So, I’m reminded why I don’t keep a diary or journal — even though I think it’s a great idea for a writer to do so both as a writing exercise and as a way to generate source material for projects. Every time I attempt a chronicle, I get so bogged down in detail that […]
A healthy contingent of Southwest Scriptwriters at the Alma Tavern to see Steve Hennessy’s The Inhabitants of the Moon are Noses at the start of the second week of Theatre West‘s autumn season. Steve’s play, which tells the life story of the Russian novelist, dramatist and short-story writer Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol (1809-52), is directed by […]
Arrived a little late for the auditions at St Werburghs Community Centre having caught a taxi from town. Although auditioning had begun promptly at 10am, I’d missed nothing because Sam was giving the first batch of actors a chance to familiarise themselves with the scenes he’d picked for the sessions (two, five and six). He […]
Met Sam Berger, who’s directing Salt’n’Sauce, in the Alma Tavern to talk over the script and the production. We smiled at the Alma’s eccentric pricing policy — there seems to be an aversion to round figures with the price of a pint usually coming in at a few coppers above or below the nearest five […]
Establishing that the construction of an academic discipline is a process of institutionalisation, this essay draws parallels between creative writing and the academic study of English literature. Through a historical description of progressive literary theorising, the work aims to demonstrate that theory is ultimately a redundant, circular process. The conclusion posits that creative writing and literary theory exist in opposition, asserting that creative writing tutors should resist the institutionalisation processes which befell ‘literature’.
This work approaches writing manuals through a consideration of the ways in which they might instruct and influence the inexperienced writer. Using a number of ‘how to’ books as illustrations, the essay divides the writing process into the technical and the creative, looking particularly at how these divisions interact. The work concludes with a consideration of the relationship between books on creative writing and proactive experience in the form.
This essay examines the influence of emerging media technologies on the way in which writers structure their work. It firstly explores the role of texts as artefacts building on some of the conclusions drawn within the previous essay. Through a consideration of contemporary approaches to the structuring of texts, looking particularly at works for film and television, it surmises how the possibility of audience interaction might influence this process in the future.
