Authors Electric

Apart from scribbling stories and stuff as a kid (to which I probably subjected my poor siblings), and then doing essays at school and university, writing wasn't ever really part of my grand scheme of who I intended to be or how I'd spend my time. (To tell the truth, I had no scheme.) I graduated, got a job, started a family and was already in my thirties before I started 'writing' and, even then, there was no burning ambition or seeming purpose about it. It certainly didn't earn me a living. I suppose most of it I did just for myself, to try to understand things. Putting stuff into words, filling foolscap pages with spidery ink marks made stuff manageable, creating characters made them accessible, understandable, perhaps helped me to understand why 'real' people said and did the things they did. I’m not certain about that; it's just speculation. In retrospect, though, that's what happened. (Not that I pretend to 'understand' people now, ...

So what’s new in the writing world? For me anyway … After circumstances forced me to resign last year from the script-writing, technical and admin teams of the community radio-play project  Littlewich Ways , those of us who left decided we had to continue to put our creativity to work (the weekly pub meetings  may  also have influenced that decision), so we spent a couple of months bouncing around some new ideas and came up with something the same, but different. Rather than an ongoing soap, we are aiming for a series of one-off radio plays of about 15-20 minutes duration – these may or may not feature the same characters and can be listened to in any order.  Hopefully, the independence of the individual pieces should make casting easier and reduce the need for having to jump through hoops to get dozens of people together at the same time. We’ve all learned so much over the past few years that we can put to good use – include better directions, name-tag chara...

I've blogged a couple of times about Littlewich Ways - our village community radio play project. Littlewich is a small fictional village set in Cheshire; the wich refers to the salt industry around which much of mid-Cheshire's industry has grown over the years. My own house was built in the mid 19th century for the manager of the local salt-mine, and the Winsford mine (a mile or two away across the valley) is Britain's oldest mine. So our little script-writing team - there are four of us at present - meets up every week and we storyboard future scenes and read-through stuff we've written for group feedback. We get strange looks in the pub occasionally (but they're used to us by now) and we even recruited our latest writer when I apologised for disturbing her quiet drink with her partner ... But nothing was actually getting recorded. Nearly 40 episodes in and we still only had two up on YouTube . The problem is trying to get groups of volunteers in the same p...

Just over a year ago, I was invited to attend a meeting of our local village drama group. Well - a spin-off meeting anyway, of people who might be interested in branching out into other forms of acting as well as/instead of the plays put on a few times a year by the group. I'm not an actor. I had vague dreams as a child - as one does - of being on television, on the stage or in Hollywood. They probably came after my dreams of being a dancer on Top of the Pops (yes, I am that old) and before my dreams of being an astronaut or a show-jumper. Or a famous writer? At least I'm working towards that one... I did make a training video at work many years ago - over two days in a deserted college with a real professional BBC actor who probably thought he'd be working with other real professional BBC actors, but instead got me and my colleague who made it up as we went along! But this meeting in the village was about setting up a group to write, act, record and produce a serie...