Phil Parker listened to my screenplay...and part of me wishes he hadn't.

You can always tell when my life is going crazy, because I lose track of my blog.

Diarists of old have recorded all the interesting events of history, and I wonder why it is that when really interesting things happen in my life, or around me, my inclination is to enjoy the experience rather than record them.

Makes me a pretty shoddy writer, I'd suggest. As a real writer, my first response to events SHOULD be to write them down. That is, after all, rather the point of starting this blog.

Well, for another hint that maybe I'm not as great as I thought I was, let's turn to Phil Parker.

I went to my regular meeting with Bristol Screenwriters www.bristolscreenwriters.org, a long arranged fixture where there was to be a reading of my screenplay. Now you have to understand that normally they read shorts and then there's some feedback from all of us and it's all very civilised. The month before they'd read a feature by the marvellous Virgina Bergin and were feeling kindly disposed to me. We were lucky enough to have Phil parker, screenwriting guru, in attendance. He gave a short talk and then my reading started.

Oh. My. God. It was ENDLESS.

The reading was HORRENDOUS. I mean really truly dreadful. God, that story takes AGES to get going. You could see people losing the will to live, going pale and twitchy before me...

At the end they all applauded wildly, more out of relief that it was finally over than from any sense of enjoyment. And then they all tore it to bits - slow, stereotypical characters, plot that didn't work, too much talk, too many characters.... you name it, really.

Then they asked Phil for his impressions. He was unbelievably impressive. he had such a bird's eye view of the thing, he remembered every scene just from one reading, and the name of every character, even the ones who didn't say anything.

He told me:

a) The THEME of the story is the creation of order out of chaos. he advised that once you have identified the theme of the story, you should make sure that every scene has in it that theme in some way.
b) Several of the people in my group had complained that this was a two-hander and therefore it was not clear whose story we were examining. Phil said this didn't matter as long as you knew what the ENGINE of the story was. In my case the engine of the story is the relationship between two grannies. What follows from this is that there must be no scene which doesn't feature one of the two grannies, and their relationship with each other and the others must be at the heart of every scene.
c) Some felt there were too many CHARACTERS in the piece. Phil didn't think so, although he did say that characters shouldn't be weighted too equally; some of them should recede into the background more, whereas some should assume more of a function in the piece.
d) In terms of the functions of the the various characters, as I've said the grannies are the ENGINE of the piece. One character is the CATALYST; by which I mean that it is his actions which effect the central problem. Another is the OBSTACLE to what the grannies are trying to achieve.
e) He liked the idea of my initial set-up but felt it needed to be dramatically cut from about 30 pages to 10. He thought the last thirty pages were great and should stay. WHich leaves me without a second act. But now I know what to do with that.
f) To objections about stereotypical characters he said he didn't think it mattered because it's comedy and there is a great tradition of streotypes in comedy. Thinking about the comments I think when people talk about 'stereotype' they mean 'cartoon', which I'll plead guilty to.

In addition there were certain pieces of advice about the actual process of writing which I think are worth mentioning.

a) Phil referred throughout not to scripts but to PROJECTS. I think this is important because that word 'project' has a sense of continuity about it, whereas to me a 'script' is something finished.
b) He also said that you should keep a copu of every draft of your project. And he would expect any 'finished' script to be the productr of about thirteen drafts, and that they would not be progressive, but that finished version would probably draw on elements from each draft. I've not done this - every 'draft' has been a rewrite, and my initial version has been changed each time, without retaining the original or earlier form. I can't therefore go back thinking, 'let's take that relationship out of version 4'. So he works in new drafts, rather than rewrites. He didn't use the word rewrite at all.
c) His advice was to start every new draft afresh, rather than cutting and pasting, in order to retain energy and freshness.

I@m deeply grateful, but I'm taking a couple of weeks to digest all this and regather my enthusiasm.

In the meantime I'm working on the novel I put on the shelf a few months back. I read it through and was enthused.

Maybe I have to accept that this is just the way I work. I've always known that I have a low boredom threshhold.