How Things Change

A month ago, I was preparing for exams and university interviews whilst juggling a job, homework, and many other things. How things change, my last year of school was cut short and my last day was spent doing prelims, printing assignments, and trying to collect as much evidence as possible to help with the grading situation.

We tried to make the best of our last day even with tests and prelims being dropped on to us and during break we were blasting music in the common room, heard one of our teachers had brought doughnuts in to cheer us up and as a goodbye for lunch time which we were quite excited about. I liked the structure of school life and looked forward to certain classes of the day and would always use one of my frees with friends to go for food, once we even got into my car and went for ice blasts in Thornhill and our drama teacher was not entirely impressed that we went that far for a slush. I bet she found it funny even if she could not condone it because we were supposed to be studying… but sometimes you need study breaks!

Having been in lockdown for a little over a month now I am genuinely missing school and I did not think I would be one of the ones who would. I have spent so much time there and have made so many memories and to think that I am officially a leaver is scary to think about. I have gone from spending most of my time working towards deadline after deadline but now there is just playwrights programme deadlines which is a strange feeling. I have not done much with this first month off, I have bought some books to keep me entertained, I have binged everything on Netflix and spent far too long on Facetime.

One of the few productive things I have done is take part in weekly zoom meetings with the Bunbanter Playwrights group and in preparation for our Morna Young workshop we had to write a monologue. My first monologue is for a character based on a sixteen-year-old coming to terms with his addiction to social media, gaming and his internal struggles with his anger. I found this task difficult because I did not have a story for this character, so I used some character development techniques from our previous workshop with Nicola McCartney – angels, demons, myths and rituals. This got me started and I had a first draft which I was not too confident about and did not know if it was good enough for the workshop.

In our Morna workshop we discussed the different words that people in Dumfries and Galloway use are different and how depending on where we live one word can have different variations and spellings. I enjoyed this as we managed to come up with a long list but the word ‘offa’ had its challenges because it had three variations and we got mixed up and struggled with each other’s. We also took a few lines of our original monologues and discussed what kind of voice we would give them and if we could change our monologues that were written in standard English to the way we would speak to see and hear if it would suit our character, it was useful to see the spelling used and to hear the differences in our first drafts. Morna was extremely helpful and explained that she uses the sound of someone’s voice to create a story and character monologues and I found it really interesting. Personally, I am a visual person so asked if she could recommend another way of creating character monologues and she introduced me to the idea of using Pinterest to gather images to use as a stimulus which I hadn’t thought of and is something I think I will help when it comes to writing my play.  

Rachel Anderson

Rachel is part of the Bunbury Banter Young Playwrights Programme 2019-2020