So you wanna be a writer?

So life got in the way and I haven't posted on here for an age. Long time no blog! I shouldn't really say life 'got in the way' - life has been happening at a mile a minute and much of it very positive too.

I have been working hard on my first professional commission as a playwright, with theatre collective Bread and Goose. A case of blood, sweat and tears...or perhaps more accurately tea, Snickers and late nights...but it has been a thoroughly brilliant experience. Working to a deadline, to a particular specification, attending rehearsals and devising then re-writing on the basis of work done in the day, it really has been an invaluable experience for me as a writer.

If you are reading this, and there's a little part of you thinking, "Well, I do like to write, but I'm not a writer", read on. If you're serious about this writing lark, I urge you, start calling yourself a writer. And start now. So, you might only have a half-typed script tucked away under "Writing" in your My Docs. Or a half-baked idea for a novel scribbled in the first few pages of that swanky Paperchase notebook you were certain was going to mean a masterpiece. We've all been there. And, these pieces only existing in draft form, you wouldn't dare call yourself a writer.

Let me tell you - until you do, that notebook will only gather more dust. Calling yourself a writer when you are at the beginning of your career or development as a wordsmith will, inevitably, make you feel like a fraud. Don't worry about that. Think of yourself as a spy, infiltrating the world of word craft through the back door, and without a dictionary to boot. You'll feel a thrill of excitement and anxiety the first time you answer that favourite of all ice-breakers, "So what do you do?", with the 'W' word. A bead of sweat or a twitch of the eye will surely give away that dreaded 'day job'...they'll know that I make my real money serving beer / behind a desk / selling tickets at the Royal Court / teaching 4 year olds how to dance...how will I ever get away with it?

You know what? It's totally cool. You don't need to be defined by what, financially, you must spend the majority of hours in your week actively doing to make your bread money. One of Britain's most eminent and successful contemporary playwrights, Simon Stephens, wrote his first Royal Court play in fifteen minute snatches each evening, after finishing work as a secondary school teacher and putting his children to bed. Would he have called himself a writer at that point? I don't know, but I'll hazard a guess at a yes. Would he have felt like a fraud? I'm almost certain he would. Think about it this way - a playwright working nights in some dingy East End boozer with godknowswho propping up the bar? Well why don't you just let the play write itself...the characters you need are there in front of you. The idea of a writer sat like the Lady of Shallott, high in some medieval turret, quill in hand, waiting for the muse to descend, is, you will be pleased to note, pure fantasy. Getting out there and working jobs where you meet people and see the world only makes you more of a writer - not less.

Calling yourself a writer (without any qualifying "Well a bit but really I work in a pub" tag-on) is incredibly motivating and a sure-fire confidence boost. And motivation and confidence lead directly to opportunity. I did two playwriting courses this year and finished a draft play, which is still a working document and yet to be performed (if ever - that's fine too by the way!). After the second course, I decided to call myself a writer and really mean it. What followed was an opportunity from Bread and Goose theatre collective to join them as a writer. Four months after my decision to call myself a writer and I have written two pieces of performed theatre, the second of which is my first professional commission.

Introduce yourself as a writer and people talk to you in a different way - and opportunities present themselves unexpectedly. Feel the fear and take those opportunities by the horns. My first professionally commissioned piece opens tomorrow - come watch, I hear the writer is going to be there tomorrow...

http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/201318.

Fire and Tears

Yesterday I went to see On the Record in the new(ish) Arcola Theatre space on Ashwin Street in Dalston. The play was created by Ice and Fire, an amazing company committed to exploring human rights stories through performance. The play was a part-verbatim, part-dramatic re-enaction performance piece about a number of iconic independent investigative journalists from different parts of the globe including an American photojournalist specialising in war photography, an Israeli woman, a Mexican woman, a young Russian woman, and two men from Sri Lanka. Again, the piece has a huge relevance and contemporary edge as it comments on the mainstream press, the way in which so little is reported with integrity and honesty, and the battles that these particular journalists focused upon in the play have to fight simply to be allowed to report with integrity and honesty. Unfortunately, I think that this run is now completely finished, it was certainly the last night at the Arcola, but do check out their website, at http://iceandfire.co.uk/ to find out more about this excellent company. I am certainly going to be following their work very closely from now on.

Also, as a result of watching the show, I was alerted to some interesting sounding books and websites to check out. There is a news channel called Democracy Now which provides a far less biased and less PR-spun news programme daily, and is available to watch online at: http://www.democracynow.org/ .

Having learnt from attending the post-show discussion with the Ice and Fire artistic director just how much of our current media, even the so-called "proper" papers, our beloved broadsheets, are just churnalism, it has made me want to seek out alternative news sources.

This isn't supposed to be an indictment on current journalists, though of course the buck has to stop somewhere, as from what I learned yesterday journalists working on broadsheet dailies are under enormous pressure to produce, produce, produce, which means that unchecked and poorly researched press is released and printed as fact. But it is good to be aware of this.

As my friend said, if you are an intelligent person, you do know, somewhere in the back of your mind, that what you read even in the broadsheets is not necessarily the truth of the matter, but it is easy to get lazy, to just accept what is printed without questioning because it takes time and mental effort to really question and interrogate what you read.

Also, mentioned in the Ice and Fire programme, is the book Flat Earth News by Nick Davies (http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=flat+earth+news&x=7&y=22), which is apparently an excellent account of the truth behind broadsheet reportage in the UK. I only saw the play yesterday but this is a book I intend to buy and read so thought I would share it on here.

I spent a lot of this play in tears and was left in my seat crying at the end it was so powerful. I sometimes feel ashamed of my ability to cry at the power of a theatrical piece with real and heartfelt tears, and then continue to be relatively unaffected by it a few days later. But, that said, we all do have to live our lives, we can't save the world single-handedly, and it does little good to anyone to wallow in a mire of middle-class self-loathing. So what I believe watching this play will do, for me, is encourage me to question what I read in the media more deeply, and to seek out news sources that do not rely on commercial funding, from advertising, because they have the freedom to be more objective and take more time over their journalism as a result. So I think raising this bar of media awareness in my mind is a great positive and something that the theatre company should be proud of and that I feel is something active I can carry with me, rather than just dissolving into tears and misery about how unfair everything is.

Thanks for reading, over and out.

Tweeting in Hackney Wick

Been to see two shows this weekend - in the absence of being in Edinburgh, trying to support London shows and assuage my envy at not being in the arts heart of August. But no fear! There are still fantastic things happening here in London, not all of our talent has been National Railed up to bonny Scotland for the summer.

On Friday night, I went to The Yard in Hackney Wick and saw Imagine You Are Everywhere At Once And Everything Seen, Heard, Said or Done Is By And For And To You (http://the-yard.co.uk/site/?page_id=10) . The play was a response to the persecution of artist Ai WeiWei (who painted all the sunflower seeds for the Turbine Hall at the Tate Modern) and was inspired by Ai's use of Twitter. It was definitely an intruiging and engaging piece of theatre - we sat in the stage space and watched the actors in the audience, which worked very well considering the cast was about 40 people strong and it meant we had a good view of everyone involved, and also created a strong visual impression of all these people, from different spaces and places, connecting via social media. The acting was excellent all round, was very impressed with everyone's delivery and tone, keeping the interest up even though the only movement in the entire piece, apart from at the very end, was people standing up and sitting down again. It was certainly very topical and acutely relevant in light of the rioting this past week because towards the end the play moves into a protest and a discussion of uprising and reaction against governmental persecution of Ai.

I think that the play was really well written, impressive for a first play, would love to chat to the writer about his process. I suppose my constructive criticism would be that, if the play were done again, it could be interesting to explore the use of some movement and physicality, to make the play a more firmly theatrical experience and really make use of the medium that is theatre. It was a little bit too static for my tastes, but then as I understand it from friends involved in the process, it was put together in a day, so understandably no room for putting in much physicality.

I suppose my other comment would be on the price - my friend and myself booked online and got charged a bit of a whopping booking fee, and considering the performance was script in hand, I thought it was a bit off. I understand that the venue needs to keep going and it isn't easy, but I think people are likely to be more generous if you give them the option to pay what they can or similar. You see, the following day after seeing this I saw a fully professional, off script performance on a pay what you can price, so I think that pop-up venues should be considering things like this. That said, I do appreciate the difficulties in funding a venue. But I think that the ethos of the venue should match its pricing - if you want to attract the local community make sure you are welcoming them, and that is so often a financial thing. But anyway, a lot of that is my own personal politics and I have not been a part of running a pop-up venue so I have no true idea of the costs involved.

As me and my friend left the industrial estate, we heard a really beautiful tweeting bird which seemed to be coming from a mess of metal and MDF...was quite surreal.

Accessibility

Just a quick one - I am trying to make this blog accessible to people with a visual impairment by using black on white, point 16 Arial font, and putting pictures in sensible places so screenreaders don't go wild, but if you are reading this and you have a visual impairment and you are finding it tricky, can you please post some feedback for me and I will see what I can do? Thanks so much!

About Me

Hi all,

My name is Kate, and I'm an inclusive arts practitioner. For those of you who don't work in this field, it basically means that I facilitate workshops, co-run and lead on arts projects working with groups of people who do not necessarily have easy access to arts provision, or are often excluded from mainstream arts work.

I have been thinking for some time now that I would like to start a blog, to document and comment on my own work, to muse, and also to potentially create a space for debate and discussion, though I mustn't get ahead of myself! So this is my first post, definitely sparked by the response to the rioting in London. It is a desire to discuss difficult issues and create an active response to what is happening in the society around me. It is all very well, and necessary, to discuss events over a cup of tea with housemates in your own kitchen, or exchange bewilderment on a park bench with a friend, but I have been grateful to read people's online comment and join a wider debate, to help me make sense of things. So it is an understanding that I would like to contribute and discuss things in a public context.

I have called my blog Long Time No See for a reason. It is the name that I am hoping to give to my own arts company. I have been considering for some time setting up my own arts company, but currently I am still learning about myself as an artist who flies solo, and I don't feel quite ready to set up shop and go limited just yet. But it is a name that I like because it expresses something about how I feel about inclusion. I think the phrase long time no see, for most people, conjures images of meeting up with an old friend that you haven't seen for years and your pleasure at this reconnection. For me, this is the experience I hope to create through my arts work. I want people to watch a show with a cast entirely of people aged over 65 and suddenly see people that they have been walking past on the street, queuing behind on the bus, brushing shoulders with in the market, and realise, "Wow, I never noticed them before", and to feel some connection, to feel a sense of pleasure and excitement at making this connection. Long time no see.

I think my work is about making people visible who are often invisible, about establishing everyone's equal right to a stake in our society, to be heard and valued in the same way. And I would like to believe that, perhaps, all it takes is a bit of eye opening - it isn't that we don't or have never seen marginalised and isolated community groups, because they are physically there, and we needs must have contact with them because they live in the world with us. It is just about having lost touch with them - we need an opportunity to reconnect and to say, "Long time no see".

And also, importantly, the name sprung out of humour. I do a lot of work with visually impaired people, and in response to the threat of a group I work with having to close, I decided to investigate starting my own organisation so that the work could continue. And the name Long Time No See sprung into my head. I think that a sense of fun and vitality is vital in inclusive work. It doesn't always have to be issue-based, political and heavy. Sometimes simply working with a particular demographic and putting them on stage or giving them an opportunity to have a voice is a political act in and of itself.

Thanks for reading and welcome to my blog.