Hannah Nicklin

Just a quick update before it fully turns into 2008 – I haven’t posted for quite a few weeks as I’ve generally been away from the computer after five or six weeks indisposed due to illness! However writing progress continues…. I got my hands on Green and Unpleasant Land just before I went home for Christmas, and it was a very welcome Christmas present – finally, my name actually and really in print – I am officially published, in a book and everything.

Progress on the full length thesis play I am developing as part of this excellent course was dogged by the aforementioned illness, but I am finally shaping up a first draft (due on the 7th Jan) and am up to speed with just over 90 pages, and about 3 scenes left to do. I’m still not wholly sure how it should end, but I’m going for the big ol’ hippy solution of seeing if the characters decide on their own. For someone who has only ever written one act, half hour pieces for casts of no more than 4, this has been a daunting undertaking- a full 90 minute (after substantial redrafting) piece for 13 characters… hm.

There’s also a 6,000 word essay due in on the 14th but we wont talk about that.

However, I am really looking forward to redrafting the provisionally titled Being Somewhere Else – it’s my favourite part, taking the rough cut and really shaping it… and I’m feverishly hoping that this makes me feel better about it as so far, getting it all out has been a lot more difficult than my other plays… at the moment I’m optimistically chalking this up to it being 3 times as long and with 3 times as many characters – just fitting it all in my head… however my secret fear is that it’s just terrible and dull, all style and no substance… only without the style too.

But I’m determined to get to the end of the draft – then do a quick check through for continuancy (important when you’re setting something in an imagined future) character voices and stupid misspellings, and then print it out for a good read, really get a feel for it as a whole, what it’s trying to say- and how to angle it all…

Having said that, I’m still not sure about the structure, and may overhaul that too…

Oh yes, and the essay.

Shush.

Happy New Year!