Options.

I'm in the process of preparing My Name is Stephen Luckwell for options, the final stage in the lengthy and mysterious process by which plays are produced on Radio 4.  The idea has made it's way through several stages, the last one being pre-options and now this week it will go into the final stage and the decision to produce or not will be handed down sometime in July.  My producer will write up the idea and submit it along with the other ideas from other writers she hopes will be taken up, and I will submit sample scenes.  This is the tricky bit.
I get an idea for a play, and an image of how it starts, how it ends, and a feel for where it's likely to go and the first thing I have to do is write a draft to finds out what happens. As S Luckwell is an adaptation from an existing play I thought it would be quite easy to write a couple of sample scenes. Not so.  As soon as I started thinking about it, and I've already written some pages for a previous stage in the process to see how it might work on radio, I found that it had become a new story.  It now has three characters and moves in and out of the events of one day in a way it couldn't on the stage. And I need to write it to find out not what happens, but how it happens. So I've elected to have my sample pages be the start of the play. 
Then it starts to get interesting.  How much information can I give the listener, how much should I give?  What can I sow in the first few pages to use in the later stages?  At what point do I launch into the story?  How can we use sound to help convey an impression of Stephen's autism.  All of which makes me want to write it even more. I was supposed to send my ideas in today and so I worked on it over the weekend and sent it in yesterday before I tweaked it out of existence.  Fingers crossed.