Saturday, September 4

An end and two beginnings

Taking a break from the International football (only the England match to go) to come on here and scribble some more..
Somebody reminded me that I'd not put my End of Story entry up on the t'internet like I'd promised to on my old blog. For those who don't know "End of Story" was a competition run by the BBC that had eight professional authors begin short stories, and then asked you to provide an ending in under 1200 words (at least I think it was 1200, forgive me if I'm wrong, the actual figure escapes me).
Now as anyone who knows me will tell you, I'd always fancied writing something (and to be fair, still do) and have had many a stab at writing.. The results of this was that I had many beginnings.. some of which ran to a few chapter's worth in the end. But I eventually lost interest, or (most commonly) decided they were shit and binned them (and in a lot of cases they were literally binned), I no longer have them in any form whatsoever.
The only two remaining pieces of writing I have left are a couple of scripts that I started (with the advent of digital video camera, and more than a little inspired by Kevin Smith's debut "Clerks" I fancied writing and filming something - how up my own arse was I?). The first of these scripts, Paid Breaks, was actually an idea I came up with in 1999 (and is based on what we used to call our cigarette breaks where I used to work in London, mainly to piss the non-smokers off! Don't worry, though, they'll have the last laugh when we all die horribly of lung cancer (or poverty brought on by the criminal prices of fags)) and took me until early 2001 to write a single line.. The last edit on this document was sometime in 2002 so it was the first time I'd seen it in a while today when I thought about it. Anyway.. it could never be finished or filmed now as the idea has been brilliantly ripped off by BBC3's comedy "The Smoking Room" so thought I'd share.
The second piece of remaining evidence of my failed attempts to be a writer began life as something for a scriptwriting course I attended a few years ago (which was quite a good course actually until I eventually lost interest - sheesh, is that a common theme or what?). Anyway U.S. Convicts was my response to the Big Brother/Reality TV fascination that seemed to be sweeping the nation at the time, and I just got to thinking how far would they take the format? I was shortly told (funnily enough around the time I did the last edit on this document) that at the time EVERYONE was doing reality t.v. show themed scripts (I think one famously made it into a movie too, "Series 7: The Contenders") so this got binned fairly quickly afterwards..
So I have no problems sticking them up here on the 'net as the ideas are no longer original and the writing's probably pants too!
Anyway, how did I get on to this?
Oh yeah the "End of Story" competition.. well here for curiosity value if nothing else.. here is my non-competition-winning entry..
To put it in context you'll need to download Shaun Hutson's beginning from here and then you can read my stab at an ending here.
Catch you later, you crazy kids..

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]

<< Home