![]() ![]() ![]() I’ve found that this engagement will often translate into the quality of the work, providing the writer with their particular viewpoint, whilst sustaining them through the long and often arduous process of rewriting. When developing new writers, I encourage them to work from their passion/s, to identify and locate what engages or fascinates them. Too often emerging writers second-guess what directors or publishers want, or copy trends rather than setting them, or enter into a strange ventriloquism using a borrowed voice, not their own. ![]() It is the only way to stop getting ‘lost’ or losing time in dead-end pursuits. The only conclusion I can draw is the importance of being guided through the labyrinth by individual curiosity and passions. Yet when I look back over my own career, there is a logical pattern, an apparently designed trajectory, although my progress felt haphazard and peripatetic at the time. This is a territory that can’t be definitively mapped. I spent years expecting everything to suddenly become clear once I had gained enough experience, but now I don’t believe there is one route, method or direction. I know writers who have limited their careers and creativity by believing it’s inappropriate to try something new, or that there are set patterns and processes to adhere to (if only they could decipher them), rather than inventing new ones.īut it’s difficult and daunting to initiate projects and career paths, especially when writers are often solitary figures in an industry that seems to work in mysterious ways. Phrases like ‘Jack of all trades, master of none’ damn the Renaissance wo/man. I’ve often found in the UK that diversity is seen as an anomaly, a vulgar excess to be treated with suspicion. I try to keep experimenting, taking on new challenges and developing my skills. Although often seen as perverse, I pride myself on not being easy to define. This business will often try to label us, slap a convenient sticker on our forehead and file us away under a limiting, narrow definition. I think one of the most important lessons I have learnt is never to perceive myself as one thing. I have written libretti, radio drama, short film, prose sold shoes, meat and copy directed film and dance theatre been a writer in residence and Creative Fellow and supervised postgraduate degrees in writing for performance whilst participating in Deaf arts, disability culture and the so-called mainstream. I have been a physical theatre performer, a chambermaid, a live art practitioner and a volunteer relief aid worker in war zones. Maybe it’s my greed for experience, but I have always wanted to lead several lives, a desire made manifest through my choice of projects and parallel careers. ![]()
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