The Thing is...

The thing is I've decided to try and think about the problems I've got before I start work. The youth piece. I don't know exact cast numbers - between 20 and 30 - or the number of boys to girls, I know there will be more girls than boys because there always are, but not how many more. I can't have a couple of protagonists who run all the way through the play because they won't be able to make every rehearsal as they'll have extra science or a job at Morrison's. I can't have more than a handful of named characters because I don't know about the cast, so it has to be possible for the dialogue to be distributed easily, but I can indicate where a precise number of characters are talking to each other and that is useful. And I've made the decision that the story is going to be told by the group. I've got three characters that we see at the start and who crop up throughout and that helps hold it together and give the audience a way in from the beginning to the end. Always nice to see a friendly face. I've got an opening and a big finish. It's the bits in the middle I've got to sort out.
The first draft has given me the structure and a lot of the incidents. Some of them just need tightening. Others need chucking out because they don't earn their place, they don't move the action on, or they don't tel us anything we don't already know about the characters, or because they are pretty boring. That's okay. Sometimes the first time round you think to yourself, I know more or less what should go here but it's not quite there, and so you write anything knowing that it will be changed. There are moments when it is enough just to cover the blank paper with words. You can always rewrite rubbish, can't do much with a blank sheet.
So, the next step is to rewrite what I've done so far, this will involve cutting the naff bits and leaving holes in the text, that will be followed by rethinking the whole piece, and starting again. Deadline the end of August.
In fact the rewrite is the best part, and I am looking forward to getting to grips with it. No, really. But I did bump into a mate last night outside the Broadway - we went to see Harry Potter which is very long - and when I told him that I was allergic to Facebook as I don't need any more displacement activities, he reminded me of a night at the Nottingham Writers' Studio when five of us stood round comparing the different things we do to avoid writing. This blog is not one of them - it is an important part of my creative process and as soon as I've finished it, had breakfast, read the paper, and done my turn clearing up the house for the friends who are coming to stay, I shall start work.