First Person: Playwright Nicholas McInerny

Nicholas McInerny is Chair of Script.  He has written 35 episodes of TV series, over 30 radio  plays, and had plays produced at the Soho Theatre, The Orange Tree, Croydon Warehouse and The  ICA, amongst others.  He was the Creative Arts Fellow at Wolfson College, Oxford – and has taught extensively throughout the UK.

Here, he discusses a recent workshop of his new play, LAZYeye.

Last year I wrote a play. It was the first original theatre piece I’d written for a long time, maybe as long  as five years, although I had started many times with great determination only to flounder after  several scenes. So finishing LAZYeye felt like one long sigh of relief. My sense of accomplishment at actually finishing something – anything – that didn’t owe its very existence to a commission in which I was trying to anticipate the demands of others, was considerable. And I found, when I very apprehensively started to show it to others, that I had certainly written something which had ‘potential’. In fact several friends – and writers too – felt it had more than that. I was excited and invigorated. A little of my precious self confidence as a writer returned.

I showed it to Sarah Dickenson, a very accomplished dramaturge who did a lot of work with new writing. She was enthusiastic and I sensed a genuine sympathy, not just with the subject matter but the way I had approached it. We discussed a number of options for LAZYeye – one which involved drawing together a consensus on the play so far and embarking on a second draft, the other a workshop. Luckily for me Sarah was the literary manager for Theatre 503, so there was space available. Once again, I was keen to actually get the play up and see how it sounded – there really is a limit to what one can learn by staring at shapes on a page. And once again, this was a luxury denied me for many years – in both TV and Radio rehearsal is practically unheard of. I eagerly jumped at the chance.

We ran the workshop on the 13^th April. Sarah had cast three excellent actors – Michelle Bonnard, Trevor White and Benedict Taylor, who very kindly gave of their time. Pushing open the door at the back of the theatre, flicking on some stage lights, and walking down the aisle, I felt a sense of assurance. Whatever would happen during the day, it was going to be alright. Better than that, it was going to be a small revelation.

The act of creative imagination is many things – and some of those are, in the final analysis, quite mysterious. You start writing consciously, and unconscious things start to push themselves to the front of your mind –  and you feel compelled to respond to them. This is then reflecting in the process of working on a new text – a process both of discovery, and of evaluating exactly what it is you discover. For a workshop on a freshly minted text there must also be both a set of preordained questions which you hope will be addressed, and a reckless uncensored free-for-all in drawing out everyone’s initial response. If you can’t say anything then, when it’s all up for grabs anyway, when can you?

So Sarah and I had gone into the workshop on LAZYeye wanting  to work on the play in the context of several big questions. These included the journey arc for the two main characters – Murmygan and Prentice –  and specifically the circumstances under which they met. Also we had an imbalance in the play – was this a play about a struggle between two world views represented by Murmygan and Prentice in which each point of view was to be given equal weight, or was it a play in which Murmygan was central, and Prentice and the third character, Clare, reflections of the journey he was going on? Related questions around testing the emotional truth of key moments in the play were absolutely dependent on these bigger decisions. I wanted to leave that workshop which a much clearer idea of how to resolve them.

The actors brought two crucial skills into the workshop. The first is their self-absorption, by which I mean their concentration on their ‘character’ and his/her role. So whilst I found myself, for example, trying to explain motivations over the telephone beforehand to one actor who professed himself confused, that fug of confusion started to clear as he played through the role and saw himself in relation to the other actors on stage, rather than to the written play on the page. That also meant all the actors reacted instinctively to the material  – and often their unmediated reactions were extremely helpful. The actor playing Clare, for example, made an observation that a lot of what Clare said was reported rather than experienced – a key reminder of the ‘Show, don’t tell’ of theatre. I made a mental note.

The second skill the actors bought was their concern with what was workable, as  performance. This can often be about practical things – pragmatism takes over art very quickly when everyone’s concerned not to bump into the furniture. But to a writer it is a powerful reminder of what is possible in the theatre – a default which is hugely useful when deciding how far to challenge it. If you’re going to break the rules first of all you need to know what they are.

The format of the workshop – a reading of the play, followed by discussion, followed by another reading – was one we arrived at by intuition as much as design. Sarah had originally conceived of something different – possibly some improvisation – but once the actors got their teeth stuck into some of the issues around the characters, it seemed much more profitable to let them run with it, whilst taking copious notes. I often had to explain myself, and just occasionally felt the pressure to provide insight when I genuinely felt unsure as to what that insight might be – an example of my desire to provide answers. But gradually, as the day wore on, I became less concerned to do so – and to appear to do so. I began to trust the play itself.

For me the workshop on LAZYeye has been hugely helpful. I collated notes after a few days away from it – allowing those thoughts to settle – and after a long conversation with Sarah  – fell empowered and eager to start the second draft. I know I won’t solve everything in the play – indeed have an instinctive distrust of any drama that seeks to tidy up all the loose ends – but know I need to find the space to be alone with those notes and apply myself. I told Sarah in a state of post workshop euphoria that I wanted to go away and make LAZYeye a really good piece of writing. Right now I believe that I can.

Nicholas McInerny.

From 3G to 3D Storytelling

This article was originally published by Twelvepoint.

This article by Claire Ingham grew out of the Script/Red Room Films workshop 3G to 3D Storytelling, part of Birmingham’s Hello Digital Festival in October 2009.  The workshop, led by Claire, included sessions with novelist and games writer Graham Joyce and producer/online drama writer Neil Mossey.

Screenwriters are great at thinking about and writing film – and great at thinking and writing television drama – but start talking about the digital world and the temptation is for many writers to thing that this whizzy, weird stuff doesn’t really apply to them yet.

The important word here is ‘yet’, but with the UK and media industries already generating nearly £6 billion a year – equivalent in scale to the UK financial services industry – the digital age is already revolutionising how screen stories are told, produced and distributed.

So for the next few minutes, avoid looking at your email, put your mobile to silent, minimise your Facebook, ignore Twitter, pause the game you play when you’re ‘thinking’ (procrastinating), take out your iPod earphones and reflect how that word ‘digital’ applies to your life already and then think about how it might affect your screenwriting as well.

Se7en: New Line

Whatever size screen things are seen on, everything starts with an idea and a script and, as digital media develops, opportunities for writers are growing.

Film and television programmes are already being developed, produced, distributed and sold online. They can be watched on computers, iPods and phones as well as on television and cinema screens. There has been a rise in the development of games to the extent that the commercial value of the gaming sector is now worth more than the DVD and CD markets put together. Online innovation fund 4iP is funding development of writing-related public service digital projects like Newspaper Club (a tool designed to help people create their own newspapers) and mobile creative writing game Allwrite, which aims to get people writing anywhere. Producers are developing drama and drama spin-offs designed to be experienced online. We can even have comic book cells delivered to our mobile phones if we want them. Amongst all this, convergence also means that stories from one medium can quickly become properties in another.

While the rules of production and delivery are changing, there’s an exciting opportunity for writers and producers to innovate and experiment. We can re-think how we work with narrative, re-examine how stories are structured, and look afresh at the psychological reasons that we find narrative satisfying. We can challenge, stretch and break the rules to surprise audiences and subvert expectations.

Let’s go all the way back B.D. – Before Digital. At one time, the only way to experience stories was via telling and listening in real time. Storytellers in oral cultures spun tales for their audiences around communal fires and every time the tale was told, it altered slightly. Listeners could interpret, the teller could digress or embellish. The story was not fixed. The communal nature of telling and sharing stories had whole families and communities experiencing narratives together. It was a phenomenon that Peter Fincham centuries later, when he was controller of BBC1, echoed in the label ‘3G’ – 3 generation entertainment.

Why were communal stories told? To help us understand the world and fulfil wishes via heroes who were able to experience and achieve things their audiences would never be able to experience in the course of everyday life. Long, recited myths like the Ghanaan Bagre guided the community through rites of passage. Stories taught lessons about how to survive and in collected groups of stories like the Arabian Nights and the Decameron, the process of storytelling was offered as a literal way to hold back death.

 

 

 

The Wire: HBO

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Through history, plays and drama continued to be communal storytelling forms with societies playing out the tensions of their age on stage. With the birth of the printing press, stories became more intimate and ‘fixed’ on to a page, guiding the reader, flowing in one direction.

Later, with the birth of the movies, shots of trains chugging towards the audience quickly became situations and sketches that evolved into longer ‘fixed’ stories, structured and punctuated by captions. What we recognise now as film structure began to emerge as several reels of film accumulated to make one story.

Whether you subscribe to the theories of McKee’s Story, Truby’s 22 Step Structure, Vogler’s mythical Hero’s Journey, Blake Snyder’s 15 step Beat Sheet or any of the other systems that Hollywood gurus offer to help explain how stories work, on the simplest level our understanding of narrative structure starts form the way we understand life. Three-act structure – beginning, middle and end – is an extension of the way we make sense of our lives: we’re born, we live, we die. Dissecting this further though might be useful so that we can consider what might form a simple ‘baseline’ narrative.

In most simple linear structures we’re introduced to the ordinary world of the main character and invited to appreciate the status quo – how things are for them – how they understand their world. Then the hero is usually presented with a dramatic problem or question – a dilemma (taken from the Greek, which suggests a proposition that could go one of two ways) – that forces them to take action and choose a path to travel.

As we move into the mid-section of the story, the choices and problems for the main character become more difficult and the hurdles higher to jump over, through a series of progressive complications until we reach the midpoint.  Here there is a switch or shift, a false victory or a false defeat that spurs the main character on. As we move through further progressive complications towards the end of the mid-section, events begin to build towards a crisis. At this point, the main character has to look back at the decision they made earlier – the choice they made to solve their dilemma – and decide whether they are going to continue to try and solve that problem in the same way or whether they are going to choose a different path.

The choice they make leads to the climax (another word taken from the Greek word for ladder – literally climbing up rungs to the height of the story), the story’s moment of greatest intensity in which the main narrative culminates before the resolution. In a ‘world in balance’ resolution, order is restored and the world set back on an even keel.  In a world ‘out of balance’ ending, the world has altered irreparably and things will never be the same again (e.g. Se7en).

With the development of television, screen stories continued to use the principles of this traditional, simple narrative structure. Stories were still ‘fixed’ in a recognisable pattern sa they were on film and in books, still guiding the audience down one predetermined path. The number of stories that could be delivered to audiences via television increased though and these could be repeated and developed into sequels or series much more quickly than movies.

Gradually the pace of narrative on television and film became faster, too, as audiences began to understand the rules and conventions of screen storytelling more clearly.  The number of narrative threads being woven into each single film or television drama grew (a recent analysis of The Wire in Prospect Magazine suggested that a single episode contained 21 stories) and writers realised that stories within television episodes didn’t always need to begin and end at the same time.

Series drama allowed writers to play around with greater numbers of characters and different points of view – and to spin stories out for years – until even writers (as with Lost) begged to know when they could head for the climax and resolution.

Innovations in film and television structure have emerged as writers have found opportunities to stretch and subvert the rules of traditional storytelling. They have found alternative ways of designing and building on the kind of simple baseline structure outlined above, as well as ways to make audiences do more work in putting together ideas and linking characters. Now, flashback structures and complex linear narratives make use of shifting time zones, as in Amadeus, The English Patient or Lucy Gannon’s The Children. The writers of Groundhog Day use a circular, ‘plot disabling’ structure in which the central narrative keeps looking back on itself before the main character can move on. Quentin Tarantino uses an episodic, time-shifting structure in Pulp Fiction. Like most continuing television series though, his distinct stories don’t close before they move on. Unlike most television series though, the stories of Pulp Fiction don’t occur in linear time either, with the last story belonging to a time before the first story is played out. Experimental films like Memento are structured in reverse – and ‘associational’, ‘mosaic’ or ‘theme and variation’ structures like Crash, Lantana or the recent television event Collision, link several stories by theme, image or central event for cumulative effect.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Groundhog Day: Columbia Pictures

 Point of view has also become an area for innovation and experimentation. Frank Cottrell Boyce’s script for Hilary and Jackie offers first one point of view of events and then subverts what we have seen by offering an alternative view. The result is a richer, more complex story in which structure is meaning. Showing alternative points of view teaches us that the over-arching story is not fixed; there is more than one version to appreciate.

Experiments like this make us question who is controlling a story and whether it it always desirable to be and/or identify with the hero. In Star Trek this need and desire is taken for granted. by the scriptwriters and the show’s characters.  Members of the crew relax on the Enterprise’s ‘holodeck’ where they can be the hero of any story and in any worlf they wish. In our ‘real world’ narrative games, however, the notion of this kind of hero is also being challenged. As games grow in scope and sophistication, writers are playing around with point of view asking us to consider what it would be like to be the villain or the sidekick instead.

At a basic level, the inclusion of narrative and story in games provides an incentive to play and offers a reward that goes beyond simple point scoring. Game developers know that adding story deepens the experience and keeps playing longer.

Writing for games involves working out the overall story arc and deciding how that fits into a game’s environments and skill levels. However, with writers often still joining development at a relatively late stage, this has been likened to trying to write a screenplay around an existing set and group of characters.

Games writers also suggest that the design of narrative has more in common with television that film writing, with developers requiring the equivalent of ‘bibles’ with character biographies and ideas about ‘episodes’ before the process can move on to executing scenes and dramatising game characters.

At a structural level, games theoretically have  a number of different entry and end points that provide the chance to experience the story on offer in a different order than might have originally been intended. This obviously provides narrative challenges. Can plot hooks be created that will make sense ifd the story is not ‘fixed’? How many ‘progressive complications’ can be offered to spin out the ‘mid-section’ of the story before some sort of resolution is necessary?

Whilst playing the game, it is true that the player/main character does not (yet) have a voice and cannot interact with other characters via dialogue. The story has to be driven by secondary characters who urge you/ the main character on from level to level with emotional appeals or via sequences that provide fixed story links. Call of Duty allows playwrs to become involved in recognisable character stories by allowing them to stay within one mission or ‘vignette’ at a time, with comrades who become part of the emotional playing experience. Alternatively, the game can progress simply and chronologically with a player choosing to play through battles year by year.

Games are also becoming part of drama and online experiences – taking narrative into a ‘three dimensional’ world – where situations and characters can be experienced on many different platforms at the same time. Spooks,  in its early television seasons, offered access to an online ‘spy academy’ where players could take part in missions and activities to see if they ‘had what it takes to ba an MI5 operative’. Similarly, the teen television series, Dawson’s Creek, offered access to a 3D world where a viewer could puzzle their way through a quest to gain accerss to ‘Dawson’s Desktop’.

There, they could read the leading character’s latest screenplay or find out about the other characters in the series through fictionalised newspaper reports and diary entries.

Online drama has continued to develop in an interactive, ‘3D’ way. Dubplate Drama – originally the story of an aspiring MC trying to make her way in the music world – billed itself as the world’s first viewer-led interactive drama. Viewers were able to decide the outcome of each show by voting for one of two options about what the character should do next or what choice should be made, and discussion pages offered alternative story developments.

The forerunner of Bebo’s Kate Modern, lonelygirl13, began as a writers’ experiment to try out a character on the web to see if their creation had appeal to the right audience. Then, Kate Modern took on board the lessons learned from the lonelygirl13 experience and used them to create a drama that stimulated audiences to become directly involved, suggesting storylines, dialogue and locations for shooting.  The simple conceit that the drama was made up of the video diaries of its characters allowed for quick shooting and day-long ‘stunts’, which the audience could also attend and watch, thus becoming part of the on-screen experience as well as part of the show’s web-based community.

Online drama is continuing to develop, finding its feet and chasing funding from advertisers and broadcasters.  The BBC has developed its own online spinoff or Eastenders. However, will shows like this, in which the web is effectively being used as a simple broadcast medium, be as popular as those dramas that develop as new material is added and community users begin to add their own thoughts, characters and documents? Will the web and games consoles become straightforward broadcast/ delivery tools as more people watch television and film content via their computer screens?

The BBC is reportedly doing a deal with Nintendo to test the iPlayer on the Wii, whilst Microsoft is already developing programming for the X-Box.  Does this mean that games on these consoles will become secondary to broadcast content or that, for younger sections of the audience, games will become the primary experience, with 3D narrative drama spinning off from games instead of the other way round?

Whatever size screen content is shown on, writers now have exciting opportunities to develop new narrative structures, design 3D story concepts that expand the experiences of their ideas, test characters on their intended audiences and experiment with new points of view that will engage viewers in surprising ways. To some extent the core idea of a story will always be fixed but how far that story spreads, in which directions and to whom it spreads, is now almost entirely without limits.

Claire Ingham is a producer at Red Room Films, currently developing a slate of film and television drama projects.  She has an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia and began her career at Granada Television in 1992, when editing was still done on 1 inch tape! Claire has worked as a script reader and editor, screenwriter, director, as Creative Producer of Children’s ITV and as Head of Drama Development for Impossible Pictures. She is a consultant for Midlands writers’ charity SCRIPT, for the Indie Training Fund, and regularly leads workshops at home and abroad. She also has a passion for fairytales from all ages and cultures!