A Writer’s Journal #01
A New Writing Challenge
Subscribers of ‘The Exciting Incident’ will already know that, for a writer, I do precious little writing. They’ll also know that I have a cunning plan to fix that. This November / December, I will be submitting something to BBC Writers Open Call. But with keeping up posts on this blog, maintaining ‘The Exciting Incident’, and now running a scratch night in Cardiff, my writing time has become scarce.
To fix that, I’m folding this blog into my writing. Each month, as ever, I will be setting myself a creative challenge. Unlike previous months, however, the challenges for the rest of the year will all be interconnected to achieve a single goal: A full, complete script.
Each month, I’ll focus on a different element of the creative process, charting my journey through a series of journal-style blog posts. Each month will build on the work done in previous months until, in November, I will have a full, hopefully compelling draft to submit to the open call.
This months challenge is to not do any writing or creative work at all. While it sounds counterintuitive, there’s actually a whole host of research I need to do before committing finger to keyboard. It’s a crucial element of every writing project, and often overlooked.
This post, as it’s the very start of the month, is just to lay out the absolute bare bones of the story I hope to tell, offering context to future updates and laying the foundations of what’s to come.
So, without further ado, here’s what I have so far for Factions, a limited series about politics, adventure, and a need to run away.
An Apocalypse of social Erosion
Long before a certain right wing celebrity found himself on the wrong end of the gun laws he was fighting to protect, I had an idea. What if, during a Question Time style panel show, a member of the audience got up and assassinated a right wing panelist. An act so random, so public, and so violent would ripple out, the catalyst of enormous social and political change. In this thinking, I charted not change, but collapse.
What if, after thirty years of that turmoil, war, and eventual societal collapse, a woman just wanted to find a decent pair of daps?
The Story
The world of Factions (as I’m currently calling it) is designed to be a simple quest story told in a complex post-apocalypse unlike any we’ve seen before. Unlike most apocalypses of fiction, there was no cataclysmic weather event, no nuclear fallout, and no killer virus. This is a ‘bloodless apocalypse’. People died, of course, in their millions, but there was no one event that got the world from where it is now, to where it is at the start of the protagonists journey. Family turned on family, age old institutions collapsed in on themselves. To chart Britain’s collapse in this story would require in-depth knowledge of tribunals, political freedoms, and bureaucratic conventions.
All that said, the end result is the same. Cities returned to nature, nomadic living, and a need to survive against the odds. In this world, however, lines in the sand have deep roots in the so-called “culture wars” of today. To survive, you must live among your own. The protagonist of this story, Aurora, is someone who, quite frankly, doesn’t want to get involved. She just wants a new, decent pair of daps that will survive as she travels the country trying to survive outside this new world.
That all changes, however, when her scavenging brings her to the centre of Welsh-speaking Cardiff at the exact moment the mysterious ‘redcoats’ arrive on the shore of the Bay. Unable to run from the conflict or her past, Aurora is forced on a quest guiding some well-meaning Welsh thinkers to the heart of London to discover the true intent of these potential colonisers.
It’s my intention to use this story, ironically perhaps, to celebrate what Britain is, or could be. It’s also a warning of what we could become if the ‘cold’ culture wars were to become ‘hot’.
Approaching May’s Challenge
Naturally, a story of this scope is going to require heaps of research, and that’s what I intend to spend the next month doing. At the end of the month, I’ll be back here to chart exactly what research I’ve done, explaining why, and exploring how I’ll use that research in my writing when the day does eventually come to open Final Draft.
If you fancy coming along for the ride, head over to @tongueincheekwriter on Instagram where I’ll be posting semi-regular updates as the month goes on. Or, head back here at the end of the month to see how I got on!
The Journal’s So far
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