Christopher Thompson

"Can you write something about writing?"

That’s what Troy asked me to do. Nothing too onerous, just a page or two about the way I work, perhaps with a focus on how I went about writing The Bridge. Sounds easy enough…until you try and sit down and capture on paper how you capture things on paper. It’s a little bit like when you try and think about how you breathe…suddenly your breathing becomes completely erratic and forced, and, as you lapse into hyperventilation, you wind up convincing yourself that you’ll probably never breathe properly again.

I’m not sure that I know exactly how I go about writing…and I’m even less sure about whether I want to know. When I was studying filmmaking at College, the first thing my lecturer said was, "…don’t worry too much about what’s going on inside the camera…it’s what’s going on outside that you should worry about…as far as you’re concerned, there’s tiny little gremlins in there that make everything work…just worry about what you’re giving them to work with…" I kind of liked that…the idea that you don’t need to understand everything about a process for the process to work, that intuition plays a part, that there’s a little bit of mystery involved.

What I do know is that I go about writing different projects in different ways, and that being a writer for performance (theatre, film or television) isn’t as solitary an occupation as the clichés would have it. I didn’t always know that. I used to think that the ideas, the characters and the stories were all totally mine, regardless of how they came to me. Now I know that that is only sometimes true. A few weeks ago, I was asked to write a paragraph about what I thought a writer was. This is what I wrote:

Sometimes a writer is a straight-out storyteller, digging into the imagination to make up characters and events to tell a tale that is just for fun and entertainment. Other times, a writer is a mirror, creating a story that is a reflection of who we are and what we feel or hope for. On occasions, a writer is a filing cabinet, storing away stories in dusty corners that can be brought out later and told again, or even passed on to others. A writer can be a translator or interpreter, taking one or more set of complex events and turning them into a story that is easier to understand or deal with than the raw truth; a writer can be a hired gun, using the skills of language and imagination to bring another person’s idea to life; and a writer can even be a hunter-gather, sniffing out the juicy roots of a story through the anecdotes and memories and ponderings of others.

Another thing I know, is that you don’t always work in a consecutive way, which is to say that you don’t always have an idea and write it, then have another idea and write that and so on. At least that doesn’t seem to be the way I work. For me, particularly in the past four or five years, writing has been a bit like that spinning plates routine you see at the circus. You get one plate spinning nicely, and then another and another…then one starts to wobble or spin oddly and you go back and give that some attention…and one slows down, so you work with that for a while…or, on a bad day, one spins right off and crashes to the ground and you have to find a new plate…but eventually, with a bit of skill, some luck, some ‘showmanship’ and a good diary, you get all those plates up and spinning nicely…and everyone applauds. At least you hope that’s how it works out.

#G1#So, back to what Troy asked me for…how did I go about writing The Bridge. In fact the period during which The Bridge was conceived, developed, written, re-written and re-written again probably provides an interesting snapshot of what being a writer can involve.

The idea for The Bridge first came up in 1996. I don’t know why, it just did. It wasn’t even The Bridge then, it was just an idea about writing a play that touched on the subject of youth suicide. Coincidentally, 1996 was also the beginning of HotHouse Theatre. At our first Artistic Directorate meeting, each of us offered up a project that we might like to create for our new theatre company. My offering went up onto the whiteboard with the less than subtle title of ‘The Suicide Project’. The idea didn’t move very far from the whiteboard for the next couple of years. Then, in September 1998, we started to get serious and began applying for funding. This, of course, required some additional thought on my part…what sort of play would this be? What would it be about? And what would it be called? (certainly not Suicide Project!) So, the first actual writing was a sketchy outline for a play that was then going to be called Esteem. (still not a great title, but better than Suicide Project) At that time, the idea for this play was all structure and no story. It was going to be performed in schools as a three-stage piece presented as an incomplete story that then invited the audience to offer ways of completing it, and then used the actors’ improvisational skills, to perform those ideas as a number of possible resolutions. In effect, I was going to write about three-quarters of the play, and then the audience and actors would finish it off. Already, this was no longer a singular effort.

Esteem hung around as an idea for more than a year until, in early 2000, I heard a talk-back radio discussion about how to stop people jumping off the Westgate Bridge in Melbourne. Although the idea had been slowly coming into focus in my head for four years, it wasn’t until then that I actually wrote anything down. It was five pages under the heading of ‘The Bridge’, and included six short character descriptions and a handful of events that occur in a regional town called Hopetoun, including the all-important death of the character of Donny (although whether Donny would be seen as a character, and how or why he died wasn’t yet certain). Three months later, to the creative team took those five pages into the rehearsal room for a week of exploration and development. For a writer, this is a rare luxury. Usually, you need to produce a first draft of a script before you get to ‘play’ with it. It also increases the number of ideas, points of view and inputs that will influence the writing process. The writing process in this project is definitely not an isolated one.

#G3#Around this time, The Bridge plate is starting to spin nicely, but other plates have started to spin as well. To my great surprise I find out that an application I sent to the Australia Council has been successful and I have received a grant to write a children’s show for actors and an orchestra. To my even greater surprise, a television project I have been involved with has been given the go-ahead, and over the next seven months I will write or co-write thirteen half-hour episodes of a new Cable-TV series called ShockJock. Now the plates are really spinning…it never rains but it pours.

So, back to The Bridge. With an enormous number of possibilities scrawled in my notebook, swirling in my head and plastered over half a dozen lengths of butchers paper, I leave the luxury of the creative development week and head off to an even greater luxury…a month in a house by the sea on The Great Ocean Road. Here, I set up a little office (with an ocean view, if you don’t mind) where I spend the days tapping away at my laptop turning all that wonderful stuff from the creative development week into the first draft of the play.

For me, writing is as much about what happens away from the desk as it is about what happens when me and my pen (or me and my keyboard) are facing the blank page (or screen). The writers retreat by the sea is such a romantic fantasy, but it is also a very good environment within which to let ideas stew and tumble and roll around in your imagination before committing them to words. This process happens for different writers in different ways. For me, there are two places where inspiration visits me more often than anywhere else. One is in the shower…and the other is while walking. The shower part can happen anywhere, but walking by the sea or in the bush is infinitely more productive than walking along High Street in Northcote. Many of the knottiest problems in the writing of The Bridge got untangled in the Angahook National Park, or walking along the beach at Fairhaven. I don’t know why showering or walking is where I’m most likely to solve my writing problems…perhaps I slip into neutral and let my mind wander so that instead of staring a problem straight in the eye, I glance sideways at it and catch it off guard. Who knows? Like my film lecturer said, "…don’t worry too much about what’s going on inside…"

So, it turns out that a month is not as long as it might be. Before I know it, I’m back in Melbourne with the creative team and we’re reading the first draft. I’m also starting to gather research for the play I got the grant for, and I also have my first meeting with the writing team that will contribute to the scripts for Shock Jock. The beach seems a long way away and the plates are all spinning and wobbling, but nothing broken as yet.

By February of 2001, I have completed a second draft of The Bridge and in the same period of time I’ve written those thirteen episodes of Shock Jock. It strikes me as strange that as we start to develop the third draft of The Bridge, all thirteen episodes of ShockJock have been written, re-written, finalised, shot and are going to air. Writing for theatre and writing for television, I have discovered, are two entirely different things. And that other play has been completely shelved for the time being.

And just when the plates look like they might be spinning well, it all changes again. The latest draft of The Bridge has another reading in The Butter Factory and we decide that the structure of letting the audience and actors complete the story doesn’t really work, so it’s back to the drawing board (and butchers paper) to write a new draft, this time for a more complete play that will work in the HotHouse subscription season rather that as a performance in schools.

#G2#To cut a long story short, the remainder of 2001 and the beginning of 2002 were pretty much focussed on getting The Bridge completed and ready for rehearsal. In that time, there was also a second series of Shock Jock to write and, of course, that play I got the grant for. These three projects, in their own ways, represent three entirely different writing processes. With The Bridge, it began as my idea but slowly took on more and more points of view. The trick this presents for the writer is to know when to listen to others, when to make changes and when to dig your heels in on something you strongly believe in. That’s the nature of writing in collaboration. With Shock Jock, the idea didn’t come from me…it came from Tim Ferguson. Slowly I got drawn into the world he wanted to create so that what I eventually wrote satisfied me as a writer and served his vision for the project. On top of that, we had a writing team of four other writers who would give feedback on the scripts and offer their own ideas, lines, jokes and so forth. Quite a different process from The Bridge. And then, of course, there’s that other play. In that case, I was writing something that relied solely on my ideas and my imagination. No creative development. No pressing deadline for the start of rehearsals. Just the writer and his idea. Perhaps that’s why it took me so long to get around to it. But I did eventually write it. As The Bridge was going into production at HotHouse, the second series of Shock Jock was going to air and I was finishing its first draft. The plates were finally all spinning nicely.

And so, here I am sitting in a little cottage in North Adelaide, where I’m spending a few weeks while my wife is performing in a play here. And what am I doing? Well, I’ve got all those plates spinning again…and a couple of new ones as well. I’ve been making a final draft of The Bridge, one that includes all those little bits and pieces that become clear to you when you finally see the play on stage. And I’m thinking about writing a third draft of that other play, which is going to have a reading later this year. And I’m working on some characters and storylines that might become a new television series sometime in the future. And I’m completing a script that will be used by young people in next year’s Biting Dog Theatre Festival. Oh, yes…and finally writing that thing about writing for Troy.

Did I mention that one of the writer’s skill is dealing with deadlines? Maybe that’s another story…