Check out the Gallery & Media sections of Born For This and Listen to Grace where you will find photos of my latest two productions.  Thank you to James Carter for taking these pictures and also snapping some behind the scene shots. 

I will begin another production for Christmas in the next month.  Once casting is complete, parts will be written for those in the play.  Normally you write the play then cast.  But when it comes to a community effort, I like to take advantage of actors’ personalities and explore that more creatively in the writing process.  Several of the actors I have worked with regarding these seasonal productions, have experience and therefore I am able to push the boundaries as to what they can achieve on the stage. 

I look forward to beginning this project in the months to come.  Ideas are percolating, but nothing solid.  In the meantime, I’ve been re-writing my screenplay Twig.  This is the story of a hoarder named Eugene Twig and his peculiar family.  I kept the basic structure of the story, but gutted and re-wrote scenes that just weren’t clicking.  Many scenes in the previous draft were not advancing plot, character or adding to the overall theme.  Scenes in a script should be cut if they don’t do one of these three things.

Writing, and re-writing particularly, is hard work.  But if you stick with it, you are rewarded with surprises.  A character or plot takes you down a road that you did not plan and that’s the great joy of writing.   

 I found a wonderful quote by Charlotte Bronte, writer of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, which best sums up what I am talking about: 

 “The writer who possesses the creative gift owns something of which he is not always master – something that at times strangely wills and works for itself.”
– Charlotte Bronte