Duck Life

After the oppressive summer heat comes the cooling summer rains, and Bristol recaptures its fresh and pleasant vibe.  The muddy waters in ponds and rivers rise once more to habitable levels and happy ducks splash about and quack their approval. As I crossed Totterdown Bridge over the River Avon I swear I saw a paddling of ducks (correct collective noun, look it up) form a happy face emoji just for me.  But that might just be my medication.  The other day I thought the Asda delivery man was Elvis. And yes I might have been a bit too insistent (asking to see his birth certificate was a Donald Trump-sized mistake, I now admit), but he really did look a lot like an elderly King of Rock and Roll, albeit with a rasping cough, a Bristolian accent and severe shrinkage.

They use subliminal imagery and a series of quacks to control your mind.

 

At every meeting, we do a show and tell of the work we’ve done at home (we assign ourselves little bits to do), and I am always amazed and delighted at the sheer number of pages Naomi manages to write (and she leads a much busier, and certainly much madder, life than me).  And it’s always great stuff, too.  I sit in the pub reading it on my laptop (she invariably emails it to me an hour before we meet), laughing out loud.  It’s a joy.  I always feel a nervousness as she reads through my stuff, and I find that helpful as a motivator to write the best, funniest stuff I can.  There’s a natural and healthy element of competitiveness, I think, in collaboration, which is why I always bring a weapon with me. 

After we’ve read through our homework contributions, we write new material together line by line, and we aim for around five pages in a two-hour session.  But last time we had no need to write new things (bar bits of connective tissue) because –  drumroll, please, Maestro… ta da! – we are done!  It is done.  This thing is down, as they say in the Grime music culture. Possibly.  Yes, we have completed a second draft of the play.  Go us!  A gentle rain falls, a cool breeze drifts in, and rainbows arch the horizons.  The universe is on our side. Those ducks? Definitely forming a smiley.

The first draft was written August-January.  After the readthrough in January, we started tinkering with the full re-write in February.  We have had 27 writing sessions, over which we’ve consumed 64 pots of tea, 89 glasses of orange and lemonade, 13 glasses of Prosecco, 11 pints of beer, and 300 industrial grade psychotropic hallucinogens. Though that was just that one time, when the ducks told me to.  The new draft is 145 pages, just under 30,000 words.  There are 11 characters, 4 locations, 3 stories (4 if you count the bit I can’t tell you about) and a duck.  

The next stage begins tonight as we cut and tweak.  A full two-act play should come in at around 100-120 pages, which will translate, roughly, to two hours of stage theatre. Imagine a production of Hamlet where the mopey Dane gets off his arse and actually does things, and you’re out the door two hours later. That’s what we’re aiming for, only with a duck.