Drafting

It strange after such an active and social research and development process to have found myself alone, locked in my room for four weeks trying to pin down the final script. Perhaps unsurprisingly then, this part of the process has been the most self searching and revealing in terms of my own artistic concerns.

I'm fairly new to script writing. I've put together scripts before for small projects as a student, but never with so much material or responsibility to tell the stories I had been provided with. In addition the process of draft- feedback- reflection- re-draft was one that I had to discover. I'm a little embarrassed by how defensive I got about my first draft, without realising that it would take a couple of weeks for me to really consider the feedback I was given so I could re-approach the script more objectively.

But perhaps the biggest discovery was the elucidation of the real reason behind my desire to do the project. This was a particularly powerful revelation, as it allowed me to see the reasoning behind all my concepts and ideas for future projects and indeed past pieces of writing. I realised that these are not things that are separate from me, but that they all grow from a deeply routed subjective stand point. In Hearts Unspoken, and in everything else I "create", I am in fact exploring some part of myself. As far as Hearts Unspoken is concerned that means the outsider status that being gay in a heterosexual world places upon me. This understanding is exciting, as a clarifies for me what parts of myself I am mining when developing a project, but it also allowed me to be more objective. In re-drafting I could make see than in a couple of cases I wasn't telling the interviewees story, or was missing a major part of it, as I highlighted only the parts that reflected or mirrored my own feelings and experiences, albeit in a far more extreme fashion.

However now it is pretty much done. There are still tweaks to be made and many unanswered questions around staging, but it is important to leave those open as we enter rehearsal. It's quite amazing when I look back to April and I had no idea who I was going to meet, or what the stories would be, or how they would fit together. Now I have a script I feel proud of and excited by and I leave behind a research process that has been one of the most inspiring and fascinating periods of my life so far.