Less haste...

I apologize for the terrible grammatical errors of the last post. I'd like to say it won't happen again, but you dear reader and I know that it will. I blame my editor...

Do you doodle?

There was a small story on the BBC website today, which was talking about how doodling can effect your memory capacity during a dull meeting or telephone conversation - rather than switching off, your brain can be more focused if you also doing a very simple task like doodling. There are some marvelous statistics that show something or other, but my mind wander and lost interest in the whole thing; you can't doodle and use the interest it seems...

More interesting is what your doodles says about you - my (mostly) geometric doodles say this about me:

Doodling boxes or perspective forms shows an advanced stage of artistic development. Simple 3-D boxes show an order mind and a love of routine and a good sense of spatial relationships. Stacking those boxes indicate great stress especially if that stack is in danger of toppling. Complex 3-D boxes are usually done by artists and designers or anyone who uses technical drawing. The doodler of these are motivated to experiment with design.

...a stressed genius clearly. I can't tell you how many stacked boxes I've been drawing lately!

And the winner is...

...not me. As avid readers will recall, Save the Cat author and screenwriting guru was holding a competition on his website to write a humorous logline based on a famous movie, by changing one letter. The winners, the runners-up and the special mentions were posted yesterday, and I dear reader was not among them. It was a shocking defeat. In case you're interested, the winner was: Dr So - Only James Bond can save a mad scientist who plans to take over the world by infecting teenagers with exasperating indifference.

Not bad I suppose...

It's been a while since my last post, and there have been some changes afoot. My ex-girlfriend decided she couldn't live without me - she probably didn't say that, but I'm a writer, so I can use artistic license. Then she gets a job in london, and we came up with a plan, a masterplan, which may or may not involve a cat. Stay tuned.

Week three of the UCLA writing course resulted in favourable comments from our great leader, Alan, when I ruminated and cogitated over the One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest script. Just for you dear reader, here is a little extract. Enjoy.

McMurphy himself is wonderful character, and I think shown perfectly in the 2nd baseball vote scene. In the first vote it had been a power struggle between Nurse Ratched and McMurphy, where Ratched’s influence over the group was total. In the second vote, McMurphy initially jubilant with a perceived winning vote is soon faced with the realization that Ratched knew the outcome and is feeling cheated. McMurphy ‘fights’ back by engaging the group in an imaginary baseball game - a turning point in the film, as the group from this point are more vocal and confident.

Another key turning point is when McMurphy discovers the voluntary status of so many in the group. Again, Ratched gains the upper hand, until Scanlon and Cheswick start acting up about the door being locked on weekends and cigarettes. Cheswick challenges Ratched, but she regains control by blaming McMurphy and his ‘gambling den.’ This constant switching of power and control between Ratched and McMurphy is key to the flow of the film. It is a constant battle of wits, though the emotional intent of Nurse Ratched is kept cleverly ambiguous.

Easy as ABC...

I'm stuck at an impasse, struggling to fix the numerous holes that permeate my story, like some fat piece of rubbery Swiss cheese - how's that for a simile...or is it a metaphor? You decide, ten points for the right answer. I'm not really stuck - it's really a case of selecting the right scribbled idea, but you feel like every selection, every creative decision is like a trap door or a mouse trap or some other kind of entrapment device, which will later come back to, well, trap you.

After my last outrage regarding my tutor, it turns out, to paraphrase an old Groucho Marx joke, he hates everyone equally, as there has been a swathe of blunt criticism for my classmates. He asked the right question of my main character - why would she do it? It gives me a warm feeling inside to know that I asked myself that question about three years ago, and underlined it! That's what the audience would indeed ask - the ones in the audience paying attention anyway, not the ones scoffing fruit gums. Horror movies actively seek this reaction, as it seems to enhance the tension - in that genre at least. I've broken down in my car, do I... a) call for help on my cellphone, b) go and knock on the door of the creepy looking house and upon getting no response, go inside creepy house, or c) do B, then remember to do A, whilst man with a limp and melted face introduce you to his favourite meat cleaver.

The Milk Run

Snow bound in the house for just two days and primal forces come into play - ok, not quite house bound, as the co-op is over the road, but they ran out of milk and an Englishman without a nice cup of tea to dunk a biscuit into is always verging on the brink of chaos.

Speaking of chaos, I did manage to chip out the Mini from a blanket of ice and embark on an adventure to Waitrose to collect the afore mentioned milk....and microwave popcorn, as I had the sudden desire to watch Woody Allen's classic, Annie Hall. This week's homework, which was finally posted by my AWOL tutor, was to discover who our main character was and their key elements which define a good character. I pondered this in the extensive queue in Waitrose, whilst occasionally being nudged by fellow shoppers looking for milk.

I am currently in research mode, though I'm slightly ahead of the game, as I've previously written my main character biographies and motives, though their place in the story will have to change, as my previous main character is now my secondary character and vice versa. I'm sure my characters won't like this, but it had to be done - my AWOL tutor was right about not being sure who the main character was, I admit.

And speaking of my tutor and fellow classmates, I've noticed a distinct...hang on, have I given them this blog...no, I think I'm safe - I've noticed a distinctly American 'high-five' attitude toward each other and an even more cloying 'wow, you rock' mentality toward our tutor. Take note dear reader that I respect his experience and expansive knowledge of the industry but his opinion is only one. Maybe its just my suspicious attitude toward teachers and authority figures in general; the idea that they alone own all logic and reason. This is in fact one of the main elements of a good character - showing their attitude to life. What does it say about me?

And the winner is..?

In the first writing competition of the year over at, Save The Cat website, you are asked to think of a famous movie, and then replace one of its letters with another to form a new, preferably humorous new film title and then write a 'save the cat' like logline -the kind of description of the film you might find in the TV guide. Ladies, gentlefolk...here are four entries that I came up with when I should have been correcting colour proofs, admiring my own typographical genius...or something work related. Just in case it's not plainly obviously what films I've gently mocked, they are; One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Catch-22, Cloverfield, and The Italian Job.

ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S VEST

A violent haberdasher is transferred to a mental institution where he meets a controlling nurse intent on keeping the other patients dressed in beige. In a brief and bitter struggle of wits and woolly hats, he opens the eyes of the other patients to the wonder of denim.

LATCH-22

A U.S. Army Air Force airman waiting out the war on an Italian island struggles to understand the point of having so many latches on the door of his B-52 bomber.

CLOVERFIEND

Five heroin-starved New Yorkers with the shakes film an "alien invasion."

THE ITALIAN HOB

A hotchpotch of bank robbers get misdirected through a Turin traffic jam and have to make do stealing designer kitchen utensils.

Three little piggies

I have been remiss in ignoring my legions of Writer Room fans, but I have been squirreled away working on my first week's assignment, the autobiography of which you've already had the pleasure of...and so, here dear reader are three story ideas.

1. A psychologist working with the FBI wants to know what it is to commit a crime. A professional thief persuades her to help him steal a top secret device from a tech firm - but the company learns of the plan and hires a hitman to stop them. Set up to take the fall, the psychologist learns what it is to commit a crime. In a final twist, it is the thief who is to fail.

2. When a man believing he has a 'gift' for remote-viewing violent crime scenes through images tries to help police apprehend the murderer, he discovers that the serial killer is in him and must be stopped.

3. A hobo blues guitarist living his life by the roll of the dice embarks on a pilgrimage north to Chicago to play along side his ideal, Muddy Waters.

I have created...now let the critics destroy my worlds!

This is the life...

Asked to write an autobiography for my screenwriting course, I crafted this piece of nonsense. I edited the part about my brother taking pleasure in torturing me by suffocating me with a pillow - it's an autobiography, not a confessional. Yes, in this movie, I am put upon protagonist and my brother the evil antagonist. I still have to find a part for the cat...

I was born in Southport, England and grew up there. In its heyday it was a Victorian seaside retreat, but now it’s rare to actually see the tide come in, let alone Victorian bathers. Growing up involved events such as learning to sail with Dad in the marina lake and doomed fishing trips to the Lake District National Park. Adventures in the cubs and then the scouts - though scouts deteriorated into knot-tying club. Skateboards, grifter bikes, football in the park in the summer and air rifle competitions in the back garden, blasting lemonade bottles and paper targets printed with sillouetted terrorists. I enjoyed a sibling rivalry, an acquired truce with my sister through a mutual enemy; an  on-going war with my brother.

Never being particularly academically inclined in my junior years, it was a while before I experienced the thrill of inventing something on paper. My imagination had always been active, and my day dreaming legendary. My mother was once called into school by my teacher who was concerned about my concentration levels; that I could be a distraction to other children - in junior school, a stranger walking past the window or suddenly a fly in the room could be a distraction for the rest of the day. ‘He’s a dreamer,’ the teacher said. ‘Well, so was Joseph, and he turned out ok,’ replied my mother, as legend has it. It was a church school though I assume she was referring to the technicolor stageplay.

Whilst I never had a yearning to draw and paint, I was always quite visual, which perhaps is related to my excessive daydreaming - I never thought of it as wasted time, just time spent doing and being something else. I did enjoy technical drawing, perhaps simply because I was good at it, and maybe because it showed how things work in a visual way. Another reason perhaps why I finally settled on screenwriting as the form that I most enjoyed and identified with in my writing. A friend once told me that I had a very visual way of writing after reading a few short stories. Writers talk of finding your voice - I think I’ve always had a fairly clear idea of my voice (though not necessarily a clear idea of what to say!), but I needed pointing in the direction of the medium to deliver it.

Design college was easy, which sounds a little arrogant,  but that’s not me - I just found the work easy, then unchallenging, and then we got to develop an idea for an introduction to a TV show, a storyboard, on an extension to the graphic design course. I obviously did something right because bizarrely like a scene from a Hitchcock film, the tutor tried convince me to switch to his film course in a train carriage when I was going back home. It’s one of the moments you occasionally wonder about - red pill or the blue pill?

I now work as a graphic designer for a publishing company, designing children’s library books. It’s a creative job, which I occasionally like and occasionally loathe - like any other job. I enjoy writing for myself, pleasing an audience of one first and foremost. I’ve written short stories, poetry, the obligatory half finished novel, and a critically acclaimed sitcom - the production company acclaimed it, but said no one would buy it. Still, it was the glimmer of success that I cling too every now or then. I aim to learn a lot from this class, but the thing I hope it will do the most is inspire me to get on with it.