Lee Kemp

I found all manner of things to keep me from writing today, like tidying your desk again when you should be revising a day before your final exam. That was my day today but I got through it and added two lots of three pages to my short. The first lot got written. I didn’t need to re-read it to realise they were pump but they’d got me to where I had told myself I wanted to be when I stopped.

But I didn’t stop. I simply carried on, deleted the three crappy pages and made the transition work. I suppose problems can be like free standing walls. They will fall over if you run fast and hard enough at them. Especially when you can’t work out how to get over them.

I’m feeling quite pleased with myself. Who knows if the new pages are any good but the hard part is always getting to the end of the first draft. Then you can decide what its about and go back through and make it really about that.

I sometimes find that a struggle if I know where the story’s going. In this case I know what I want it to be about but I don’t know the story yet. A weird situation but I feel so good about having got here I’m not even gonna proof read this I’m just going to publish and be damned and read a bit more Cryptonomicon before I fall asleep. That boy can write!

Finally thanks to James Hull at Story Fanatic. Not only did I discover a great resource today that informed my writing but I found it because he linked to my blog. I couldn’t find an email address to say thankyou properly.

Another day’s shooting in London tomorrow.

Writing’s hard. I guess everyone knows that but it always surprises me just how hard it can be sometimes.

David Eddings, whose books I adored as a teenager, once told me that to be a writer you need to write a million words. Then crumple them up, throw them away and start writing properly. (When I say he once told me, I mean I read it in a book, I just always assume famous people are talking directly to me, otherwise why are they talking??)

Unfortunately I don’t have time to write a million words of shit because I’m pretty busy so i’ve decided not to bother with that and crack on with the good stuff (if there’s an global shortage of arrogance you know where to come looking). My plan to make four films this year has fallen by the wayside somewhat because i’m unfocused, ill-disciplined and a bit whingey sometimes. But i’m back on the boil. Here’s where it went wrong and how it relates to my experience of writing.

I have three good short scripts in my head. One of them complete to a standard i’m happy to share with others. None of these would make a good first short film. Each is 20-30 pages long and somewhat complex. So I needed something smaller to get my teeth into. Something that I could keep the whole thing in my head. If some kind person finagled into giving up their weekend to help me make a short film were to approach me with a question on set I could fire off a decent, well thought out and well reasoned answer built on a foundation of intimate familiarity with the concept and script.

I wanted something small. Lars Von Trier says “love your boundaries”. He doesn’t really make films I like but he makes films so he’s worth listening to. So I had something small, two people, one room, a topic of interest, a neat little twist and boobs. I could make it in a weekend with very little money. I’ll call it Socks because that’s one of the names it had during its troubled upbringing and i’m referring to it again later. Can I make the thing work? Can I bollocks. I’ve been arsing around for six entire menstrual cycles. Half a dozen full moons have gone by without success. Every time I try and write I write that. Whenever I’m laid in bed at night and i’m not thinking about the Battlestar Galactica finale I’m thinking about Socks. It’s subtly niggling away at my conscious and subconscious minds like an axe in the face. I took it to my writer’s group recently and everyone recognised the obvious problems. Then they started making suggestions; try this, done it, try that, done it, have you considered, yes, you could try this but its the most ridiculous contrived and cliche’d technique imaginable, yeah, tried that too. Then last time I pitched it to another writer who responded with “hmmm, not sure, sounds a bit shit”.

So when do you stop? Does the idea not work or am I simply not good enough to make it work? Has it been worth taking six months on a ten page short that probably doesn’t work? Have I learned from the experience?

Don’t know. Don’t know. No. No.

Then there’s the one i’ve written that I really like. I wrote it during a period of particular annoyance with Socks, the five good pages mocking me from a corner of my hard drive, insinuating it shouldn’t be hard to fix but also the obvious gaps taunting me. The new one was twenty two pages long and it flowed out of me most of it coming in a single weekend. I’ve reached another peak of annoyance with Socks and started writing something else. It’s not coming as fast but its coming out well. Really well in fact. Thanks to Matt Lund who said “why don’t you write about that?”

He was probably right. But its not the kind of thing I can make in a weekend. So it’s true, writing is hard. Except when it’s easy.

Writing, yay.

This blog has been very quiet recently so for the 8 of you that do subscribe, my apologies. Mostly it has been due to work which has been extremely busy recently. I spent a week in Amsterdam shooting tractors for AGCO with DoP Ed Moore and camera operator Phil Wood. There are more details of this over at Ed’s website The DoP Diaries and on Fullrange’s website and work at Fullrange. I had another shoot with Bedford County Council for Bonfire Design. That’s a company I’ve been trying to do work with for about 3 years now so that was a little bit of a victory. Then we managed to get a competition in the Birmingham Post giving away three films and loads of other exciting stuff. So yes, busy.

The second reason I haven’t blogged is that I had a particular blog post in mind and it’s taking a little bit of time to put together as I want to give the season 5 and series finale of The Wire a really good close up look. Subconsciously this became one of those ‘big jobs’ that just seems bigger and bigger the longer you leave it. But i’m going to make a start this morning.

Finally I want to mention that the writer’s group I was talking about a little while ago launched last Thursday. I’d had it booked in the diary for a while so I was disappointed that the Birmingham Filmmaker’s group launched a midweek fixture on the same night and I couldn’t go to that too. I met with another writer, David Wake, who has previously run another very successful writer’s group called PostSCRIPT and we put together some ideas for what we would like this one to be. Our aim is to provide an open, honest forum to critique each other’s work, learn from each other and I would hope that eventually we will be able to give the members a sense of community. It was decided that we should keep this group small until it finds its feet.

I was fortunate enough to have one of my short scripts analysed. I had put forward one that is a finished first draft that I’ve had two working screenwriters that I know look at. They’ve both given me good feedback, pointing out flaws but being encouraging of my abilities as a writer so my ‘magical shield of self belief’ was in place. As it turns out it wasn’t needed. We went round the room saying one thing we liked and one thing we didn’t. It’s a useful exercise to enforce both parts of that. Then we began looking in detail at 9 point story structure and applying the various break points to my script. Here’s where the fun started. Two of us couldn’t agree on where various break points were and in the ensuing discussion it became apparent that there were two areas in which the script could be improved quite dramatically. I didn’t have to agree with what was said but it so happens that I did and I’m looking forward to making those changes.

The group meets on the last Thursday of every month so we’ve decided to call it Last Thursdays and once the feet are found, i’ll start inviting people.