The Word Cloud

First up a big 'Hello' to people on The Word Cloud who can now read this as well as my 2oth Century Cinema blog. You've missed about a year so try to keep up.

As of four o'clock this afternoon The Infernal Comedy is out of my hands and into those of an agent (via the Royal Mail anyway). I spent time choosing the right agent to approach and then more time researching them so I could spend a day writing the best covering letter I could. I spent another two days writing the perfect synopsis.

I hate writing synopses and I've always assumed that it's because of the difficulty of cutting a big story down to a page and half. But I reckon i could do it with ease to someone else's story so that's not it. I now think it's that, however much we want others to read our work, we really write to please ourselves. But the synposis is just a tool, designed to appeal to someone else. To us it is just a watered down version of something that has already achieved perfection.

Anyhoo, It's done, it's gone, I refuse to worry about it.  Yeah, right.

The best way to not worry about soemthing you can't change anyway is to work on something else. I have two other big projects in the pipeline. The first is a sitcom which reached the semi finals of the sitcom trials last year and which was read through at LCW earlier this year. That version was only ten minutes long but it seemed to go down well and I like the charcaters so I'm expanding it and seeing how it goes. It's one which i genuinely enjoyed writing so I'm looking forward to getting back to it.

A more difficult but arguably more interesting prospect is the musical which, as regular readers will know, has been in various degrees of gestation since last November. The story is now locked and the title is Learning to Fly. Everything else is up in the air. It's a while since I worked with a partner and for this it's a necessity because I can't write music. It should be good for me but in some areas we have very different ideas.  I also hadn't really thought about how much I give away; in a musical the major moments, the dramatic beats, are underlined in song, if they weren't it wouldn't be a musical, so i am having to come to terms with the idea of taking the moments over which i would usually expend the most time and sweat and giving them to someone else to write. It's weird. There are going to be problems, there are going to be fights, but it is a great story and one which I really feel will work best as a musical. At this point however I have too much material (the story is historical and largely true), I have to find a spare few hours and pare down the material to a clear and concise story. Which can be agonising but it's also one of my favourite parts of the process, the longer I do this more I prefer storylining and structuring to dialogue.

The name 90 pages for this blog has ceased to be really appropriate, since a sitcom is 25 pages and the musical I have no earthly idea, but I'll keep the title, I like it. And I'll keep you up to date with developments on The Infernal Comedy, don't hold your breath, I sure won't.