IDEAS
I have been so looking forward to the workshops from professional playwrights over the course of this programme, and our first workshop (in my opinion!) couldn’t have kicked things off in a better way.
Our first workshop with the playwright and author Barney Norris focused on ideas. How to establish them, how to develop them, and how to find them in the first place. I think the very idea of coming up with ideas can feel like a bit of a mystery. It definitely has to me and I remember often wondering where writers get their ideas from and more importantly how do they know they’re going to work. This is the part I’ve often struggled with, alongside forming an idea that feels complete. I frequently get ideas for characters and moments and dialogue and settings, but then rarely end up being able to tie these elements together with some kind of plot to form one complete idea. What I’m learning, though, is that ideas never (or rarely) come to us as ‘complete’, and this is something that the workshop touched on.
Barney Norris – by Jay Brooks
We did several exercises, all with an emphasis on generating stories that we could turn into ideas for plays. The first exercise revolved around describing the world we see when we close our eyes – our ‘psychic geography’. We tried to picture and articulate the things that make up our world when we close our eyes and examine what is there and what these things mean. Lots of the things that you think about when you close your eyes might be surprising - a place from a vague memory, the face of a person you went to school with, the lyrics of a song you loved a few years ago, a corridor from a building you only visited once. I found myself writings things like clouds and fishing boats and strangers and the sea and Glasgow. We talked about how ideas can come from the unexpectedness of these memories.
Throughout the workshop, Barney said several things that really resonated with me about why we write plays. For him, this is because it’s a chance for anyone to be placed at the centre of a world and a story, and the lens of a play can point at absolutely anyone. This struck a chord with me because this is also exactly why I love to write. What motivates and moves me is the way you can control whose story you’re telling. I like to write about women and about places and communities that often aren’t in the spotlight or at the centre of stories.
A final thought that really stuck with me throughout the workshop was that you shouldn’t dwell too much on what you think you should be writing about: about issues or topics that you feel are important and are supposed to be written about. Instead, you should write about something that you actually have something to say about, and this may well be a big important issue, or it might be something else. I often worry that what I want to write about isn’t ‘big’ or ‘important’ enough, and I love learning that actually that’s OK and that the smaller, less obviously significant parts of life are stage-worthy too.
Eilidh Nurse
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