Making Money from old Scripts

I was having coffee with a friend of mine, another playwright, whom I hadn’t seen for fifteen years.  He was telling me about the success he was having with online publishing and recommended me to try it.  I don’t mean vanity publishing, I mean publishing through a proper online agency that collects fees and royalties on the writer’s behalf.  Jamie, my friend, told me that he was making a bit of a wedge from it.  So I thought I’d give it a go.  The problem I have is that a lot of my saleable stuff is from the days long ago before I had a word processor, let alone a computer.  I have rows of potentially juicy income generating scripts sitting on my bookshelf but how am i going to get them into a digital format for online distribution?  The simple answer is to type them all up word by word.   After all, I will need to make revisions and format them differently for current readers. But, do you know, that’s a lot of work and I’ve got other things to do with my life.  There is another way, however. Optical character Recognition (OCR from now onwards).  You scan your hardcopy and OCR converts the scan into actual words in a text file.  Brilliant.  But where do i obtain such a piece of wonder software?  Without paying for it, of course.  I trawled the online chatrooms and i found that the soft ware most recommended by writers was a Microsoft own brand which is part of the Office 2007 suite.  Wait a minute, I’ve never seen it there.   No, because its one of those many features you pay for when you buy MS Office but isn’t activated.   To activate it you have to go through quite a rigmarole to find it in the program files (If you want the technical stuff I’ll put it in the comment section below) and, yes now I have OCR which works a treat.  It’s not 100% reliable but that’s fine because I still need to go through the material to edit it but it’s certainly taken the drudgery out of the process.  Except that now my scanner has blown up.  Back to manual labour.

Why Sci-Fi?

 As part of the Sci-Fi debate, as started on the Today programme on BBC Radio 4 and as the "Out of This World" exhibition opens at the British Library, I thought I'd reprint this article I wrote earlier this year for the Cypruswell website.

"I love Sci-Fi, reading it and writing it. Being a child of the nineteen fifties I suppose that isn’t unexpected. Sci-Fi was the standard school boy interest in those days and the very first story I had published was a story about the after effects of nuclear war in the school magazine.
The whole point about science fiction is that it provides the ultimate “what if?” literary and intellectual playground. “How would the world look if this or that scientific theory was a reality?” In science fiction one could examine the consequences of various scientific or technological discoveries. For instance Science fiction writers were examining the possible effects of global warming (and cooling) long before it became an issue with the general public. All the possible horrors of space travel, dystopian futures, alien contacts, robots gone mad, computers taking over the world, global conflict have been explored. The crucial thing is that the great works of Sci-fi explore the relationship between those possibilities and human individuals. Philip K. Dick (possibly the greatest of all sci-fi writers – certainly the architype) centred his stories on the little guy struggling against greater technologies and forces. “Blade Runner” was a great film but the original novel by Dick – “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” was greater because the hero was an ordinary put upon man rather than a Hollywood superman.

The only rule for good Science Fiction, if there should be any rules at all, is that it should only posit one technological or scientific elaboration at a time. We may have faster than light travel in a story but everything else should be as we would observe it in the real world. Apart from the faster than light gizmo the science should be accurate and so should the humanity and psychology of the characters. We should be able to understand the motivations of the characters even if they are being held captive by green and purple creatures on the planet Zaargg. I mean, how would you react in those circumstances?
Fifty years ago when I was reading Sci-Fi for the first time, the year 2000 was, literally, the far distant future. So the “what if?” in my stories is the “what if the year 2000 was as we imagined it then?” I’m exploring that idea in the series of stories about ‘Jimmy –the Boy from the year 2000’ on my blogsite. As the lurid book jackets might have said back then: This week! A thrilling new two-parter titled “Quantum Entanglement”. Read and enjoy!! You will never be the same again!!!"

Are we Living in a Sci-Fi World?

The Today Programme on BBC Radio seemed to rubbish the capacity of Sci-Fi to predict the future.  It seemed to imply that while it could tell a good yarn, the things it predicts are marginal and most never have, or could have, come true.  However, that's not the point of Sci-Fi.  Its really about the world now as we live in it and the fantasy elements are meant to throw this into perspective.  The debate centres around whether technological advances that first occurred in Science Fiction and then happened in reality were cause or effect. Did scientists see things that were described in fiction and then go on to puzzle out how to make them, or does Sci-Fi offer some real prediction about how the future will shape itself.  We will probably never know unless we could invent a time machine and go back to experiment with the past and see how things work out.....  Now there's a story.

Quantum Entanglement (2) The next instalment of the story of the Boy from the Year 2000

The next day Jimmy was back in his garden waiting to see if his entangled pair would turn up again and, sure enough, about three o’clock, there he was. Running cross the lawn beside him.

“Wait.” Called Jimmy.  But as soon as they got to the fence it, or he, disappeared.

Jimmy pondered for a little while and then thought what Mr. Smith had told him.  If they were both part of an entangled pair, then it stood to reason that their quantum states must be exactly similar.  Jimmy also remembered what Mr Smith had told him about Schroedinger’s cat some weeks before.  It was impossible to know two things about a quantum state at once.  You could know where it was or you could know its momentum, but not both together. That must be true for both parts of an entangled pair.  Jimmy could only be sure he would know where his pair would be if he stopped running.  

So Jimmy started running up and down the lawn at full tilt hoping to capture his entangled pair but after half an hour he was exhausted.  Jimmy’s mother opened the window.  “If you keep running up and down like that, you’ll wear the grass away.” She smiled as she said that because she knew that their genetically modified Evvagreen grass would never wear out.  Sometimes she secretly wished for the days before the year 2000 when things were simpler and grass grew if you watered it and mowing it was something you had to do as a simple pleasure.  “Would you like an afternoon pill?”  She asked.  “Its a glass of milk and a biscuit.  Its blue.”

“No thank you” said Jimmy.  He was keen to get back to his experiment.  And a glass of milk and a biscuit never seemed very attractive when it was in pill form.

It was a full fifteen minutes later that the boy appeared again.  Half way across the lawn, Jimmy stopped dead.  The boy stopped dead beside him.

“I know where you are.”  Said Jimmy firmly.  As if it was some sort of binding spell.

“Eh?”  said the boy.

“I’m in my garden.  So you must be,too.”

The boy was looking puzzled.

“You’re an entanglement.”  Said Jimmy by way of explanation.

“What?” said the boy.

“You’re my entangled pair.”

“You’re nuts, you are.” Said the boy.  “I ain’t a tangly nuffing.” And then after a pause he went on: “My name’s Bobby.”

“So what are you doing here, then?” said Jimmy.  He was feeling very proud that he knew what was going on.

“I was running up and down.  Minding my own business when, whoosh, here I am.  Wherever this is.  You’ve kidnapped me, ain’t yer?”

“No, no.  Not at all.  You see, some bad people have entangled us at the quantum level and we’re the same.  We do the same things at the same time.”   Then Jimmy ran out of explanation because he didn’t really understand any more than that himself.

“Rubbish.” Said the boy.  “You’ve kidnapped me and I’ll have the law on you.”

Jimmy felt his bottom lip trembling again.  This wasn’t the way it was meant to come out.

“Well, maybe not the law.  We don’t exactly go in for that sort of thing.  But my Dad’s a big bloke.  He’s a bruiser.  He’d sort you out.”

Jimmy had no wish to be sorted out.  He wished he hadn’t embarked on this experiment now.  Science was about hover cars and rocket ships, not about fierce boys with bruisers for dads.

“It’s all right.” The boy said.  “Don’t fret.  I don’t need my dad to fight my battles.  My name’s Bobby.”

“I’m Jimmy.”  Said Jimmy.

There was something not quite right about the boy.  Jimmy suddenly realised his hair was not smoothed down and neatly parted the way most boys were but stood up on end in a sort of tangle like a gooseberry bush, his face and hands clearly hadn’t seen an auto-scrub for some time and what’s more, he wasn’t wearing a silver suit.  Jimmy began to think that the entanglement theory may not be right.  Unless, of course that was how Jimmy looked himself.  “I think you may be an entanglement.” Said Jimmy. 

Not me, mate” said the boy “I’m just Unhappy” said the boy grinning broadly and showing his stained, uneven teeth.

“You don’t look unhappy.” Said Jimmy puzzled.

“No not unhappy,” replied Bobby grinning even more broadly.  “But Unhappy.  You know the name the governments cooked up for the like of us.”

“You?  You’re a...”

“’Sright.  I’m a dissident.”

“You mean a terrorist?”

“Right again, me old cock.  I am a terrorist.    Bobby the Terrorist.”

“Crumbs.” Said Jimmy in awe. “I’ve never met a terrorist before.”  And then he couldn’t think of anything else to say.

“Well, I’ll be on my way then.  Cheers, mate.” Said Bobby.

“Er, wait a minute” called Jimmy as Bobby turned to go.

“ ’Urry up.   Me tea’s on the table.   We got pizza and chips tonight and I ain’t gonna let it get cold.”

“Umm.  What do terrorists do?”  asked Jimmy.

“You know. We sort of... terrorise people.  Ain’t you ’eard?”

“How do you do that?”

Bobby came up very close to Jimmy so that he could smell his bad breath and put his face next to his.   “Boo” he said.  Jimmy jumped. 

“Boo?” Said Jimmy.

“Yep. Boo.” Replied Bobby.

“Right, I see.”

“OK, then toodle oo, old chap.”

“It’s not very terrorising.”

“Boo.  Boo hoo.  Boo hoo.  That’s why they say we’re unhappy.”

“Toodle oo.”  Said Jimmy after a moment’s thought.  But Bobby was already gone.

(Note from author:  There may have to be a third part to see what happens to Jimmy and Bobby later.  Please tell me if you're enjoying this series.)

Bones of the Land

We live among the bones of the land

Between the place where the sea has slashed

Sabre sharp through the turf

Revealing the soft chalky white flesh beneath

And where the surf has scratched and scoured at the soil

To show the naked bones of the very under-rock

And we cower among the ribs

Huddling for warmth against the scalpel wind

Among the Liver and the lights

Just as a hunter on the frozen tundra

Will slaughter her horse and, slashing its stomach,

Force her blooddrenched soul into its guts

Into the warmth for succour.

And yet, when the year and the wind turns

The skeleton dries in the sun and wind

And we can make such pretty things

Carving pieces of bone for trinkets.

The Mary Anning Play - another chapter

After the first go at the 25 minute monologue we've also decided that we should aim a version for 9 to 12 year olds in school.  This is fine by me because I have written a lot for this age group in the past and I find it very enjoyable. At this age most kids are very receptive of ideas and like to be spoken to as adults so its important not to dilute or speak down too much.  I find the trick is to shorten sections so that the audience can concentrate hard until you give them a bit of breathing space to catch up.   I expect that we will be working  mostly in schools or educational areas and, frankly, these are not ideal theatre spaces.  Kids will be sat on the floor in a lot of places so its important to keep things moving forward briskly with  some sort of wriggle opportunities.

But, all in all, the piece requires exactly the same attention to character and situation that I would give to the full length play or the monologue aimed at adults.

Since the last time I posted we have visited Mary's stamping ground in Lyme Regis and followed her footsteps along the clayey, clingy beach and under the dark forbidding cliffs.  So I have a much richer sense of place and the character.

Last time I told you about "Chasing" where I'm chasing out details to enrich the piece.  Well, now I'm going through a process I call "combing" where I kep returning to the script from the beginning and combing out some of the tangles and finding hidden pieces of character that I have buried in either intentionally or unconsciously.  That leads me on to another process of reinforcing and amplifying character traits within the dialogue (or monologue as in this case).  I call this "grooming" and its where the character begins to gain real solidity and depth.

Rewriting the monologue for children has enabled me to develop all three of these processes so much that I can actually hear Mary's voice each time I read through.  Oh yes,  its a play.  Its meant to be performed so each time I go through I read it out loud.  The voice has to be right when spoken so I'm spending most of my time chattering way to myself.  Goodness only knows what the neighbours think.

Doollee Database of Plays

I have just finished uploading the detailsof most of my plays onto the Doollee database. This heroic undertaking aims to be "the free online guide to modern playwrights and theatre plays which have been written, adapted or translated, into English since the production of Look Back in Anger in 1956. doollee.com contains information on 38,219 Playwrights and 127,610 of their Plays"

Jobbing playwrights like me tend to be a bit careless with the records of their work so its been a good exercise  scrabbling though my shelves and cardboard boxes looking for copies that might otherwise have gone out with the recycling. So far I've got details of about twenty plays of all types that have been commissioned and performed since I started writing but, alas, not all of them are complete and, while I may have production details, very little of the actual script remains. 
This year I'm going to make an effort to reconstruct some of these scripts because, who knows, somebody may want them in the future. Apparently, the database is a worldwide resource and is consulted by companies and academics across the globe. So if you've got an old box of your scripts that have been performed in England in the last fifty years its a good idea to get them on the Doollee database to complete the picture if nothing else.

Click on the title at the top for the link to Doollee

Where does Language come from

I'm always interested in ideas about language, where it comes from and how  it operates.  Click on the link at the top of this post to see some interesting new ideas.

Just a Minute

I have always been fascinated by the way people talk to each other.  In playwriting we call it dialogue, in everyday parlance it is conversation. It is the broken, halted and halting, lame, repetitive jumble of words that tries to convey some meaning between individuals.  As a playwright it is my stock in trade and, despite many hours sitting on buses and in cafes trying to capture its essence, I have never come near to being able to reproducing dialogue in its true sense.  What is wonderful is that most dialogue exchanges make no sense at all when recorded.  Sense and syntax become so jumbled, vocabulary so wretched and torn that trying to find a way of describing it for others to follow is a nonsense.  From these entirely non-scientific observations I have distilled my laws of dialogue: 1) Nobody says what they mean.   Dialoguers circumlocute, they prevaricate, they even lie.  In fact they lie most of the time “How are you feeling today?”  “Not so bad” is a lie we have heard every day.  It means “I’d really love to tell you how bad I feel and how i would like your sympathy but I don’t know whee to start and anyway you are not really interested I can tell.”  2) Dialoguers seldom listen to each other.  Each exchange is a series of statements about oneself.  “Yes I know.  I had the same thing myself.  Well worse, actually”.  3)Nobody talks in straight lines.  The idea of a reasoned argument is laughable.  In a dialogue one makes a series of statements about oneself (See 2) which come under the general heading of the topic being discussed.  This inevitably leads on to 4) Dialoguers can change points of view in a single sentence so that they appear to be holding two utterly contradictory points of view at the same time.   In rhetoric we could say they are advancing a “On the one hand.... on the other hand....”  sort of argument.  But that is not true.  They are just saying and believing completely different and random things. 5) Most dialogue is filled up with nonsense words, phrases and sounds.  I believe linguists call these “phatic exchanges” in which it is the exchange not the meaning which is important. “How’s it going?” is phatic.  But then we get into Malinowski and Sociolinguistics so we’ll step away from that pretty smartly.6) Repetition is mandatory.  Mostly because dialoguers have forgotten what they were saying 2 minutes ago and this is the real idea that is playing in their head cinema, not that stuff you are waffling on about.

In fact, think about the rules of “Just a Minute” in which the contestants have to speak for 60 seconds on a topic without deviation, hesitation or repetition and you have the reverse of the exact rules for actual dialogue.

In March of 1944, Nicholas Alkemade was the tail gunner in a British Lancaster bomber on a night mission to Berlin when his plane was attacked by German fighters. When the captain ordered the crew to bail out, Alkemade looked back into the plane and discovered that his parachute was in flames. He chose to jump without a parachute rather than to stay in the burning plane. He fell 18,000 feet, landing in trees, underbrush, and drifted snow. He twisted his knee and had some cuts, but was otherwise all right.



Suddenly all is quiet

All the noise has stopped and I am falling

Falling

And now I know the time of my death.

I have 100 seconds left

And I will be smashed into the soft black Dutch earth.

At 18,000 feet

That’s three and half miles to you

It will take me a full minute and a half

Falling falling.

The air rushing by my leather flying cap

Whistles and roars

But now I am at peace

In a world at war

Knowing that I am falling

Falling towards the earth.

I have chosen this course

I have chosen to die by jumping

My parachute a mass of flames

So I launched myself

Past the jagged metal

Fighting hard against

The groaning spars.

The trail of fuel flame

Lighting the night sky in a streamer of glory descending

How many times over the past months

Have I done the calculation

As have all the beery boys in the mess

In that time when we are walking back

In grim fraternity when the alcohol leaves only a bitter taste.

And now I am alone

With only the stars for company

As in some Suffolk lane trailing the others home

Turning and rolling I spread my arms

Like an angel

Like an eagle

Like the son of man upon the coss.

How long have I been falling

Falling

How long

In No more than thirty seconds

The ground wil rise to meet me

Like a soft dark lover coming out of the darkness

Of a hidden doorway to embrace me with

I have lived with death all around me

But never thought I’d experience

The time of dying so clearly,

So brightly,

Falling through the winter night sky.

For a moment I am buoyed by the air

But I know that I am accelerating

Second by second until I reach terminal velocity

Of around 125 miles an hour

And the ground embraces me.

In the mess we always said it would be better to jump

Than to go down in a burning coffin

The flames scorching and scouring with pain

Here there is no pain

Just apprehension at approaching oblivion

I am the only man

Apart from the one facing the firing squad

Or with a noose around his neck

Who knows the exact moment

When he will reach the great darkness and whatever lies beyond.

And lying in the snow, in the now

Wrenched with exquisite pain

But, by some miracle, living,

Still

Alive

To face the sort of death

That other men look forward to

And never know the time of its coming.

Oxfordshire Theatre Company and Forest Forge cuts

I was devastated to hear about 100% cuts in funding to Oxfordshire Theatre Company and Forest Forge. These two companies represent a vital part of cultural life in the South.  The cuts seem to be wretched and arbitrary and will leave a big gap that will not be filled by any other means.  We all lose. Oxfordshire Theatre Company I have a particular regard for as I was fortunate enough to be the first Artistic Director of Oxfordshire Touring Theatre Company as it was then known throughout the 1980s.  Both of these companies have maintained and developed theire artistic standards whilst doing the vital job of bringing theatre to people and communities who would otherwise have no access to live performance.  They must not disappear.  All of those who have had associations with these companies should contact them now and see if there is any support that can be giving to keep the wheels rolling past 2012.
Meanwhile, our best regards to all those who are currently part of these companies and good luck for the future, whatever it may hold.

Hyperbolics

As I writer with a penchant for a sort of sub sci-fi genre that uses snippets of information from real science as a jumping off point for a world just like our own but not quite, I love reading New Scientist.  It contains as much weird stuff as you could hope for.  Today an artist who tries to explore the idea of Hyperbolic shapes.  An April Fool?  I sincerely hope not.