Not Making a Crisis Out of a Drama: Why I No Longer Call Myself a Playwright.

Quartz with Liam Brennan

I used to be a playwright.

Over the past decade or so, however, I've slowly but surely moved from writing plays to writing fiction, mostly historical fiction, with the odd feature article or contribution to an online magazine such as the Scottish Review. 

Now, if asked, I think I would call myself a novelist.

This wasn't so much a conscious decision, or not at first, anyway, although latterly, circumstances and inclination did force me to make some hard choices. I'm still occasionally asked to speak about drama to writing groups. I always enjoy the variety of people and their interesting questions. But recently, I've realised that I shouldn't be speaking about drama at all and have taken a conscious decision to stop doing it. (Although I'm delighted to speak about fiction instead!) Why? Well, you need a certain enthusiasm for your topic, coupled with a certain amount of up-to-date knowledge about the practicalities.

I can do this with fiction. I'm happily published by an excellent small independent publisher, Saraband but I know about self publishing too. I know about learning the craft, and what the current market is like, the difficulties, the potential avenues. I know what might sell and what might not, about whether or not you need an agent, about supportive professional organisations. I know all about research and writing historical fiction in particular.

But I don't think I can do this kind of thing any more with drama. And what's worse, I don't think any advice I might have to offer to people just starting out will do them very much good at all.

Let's face it, drama writing was always a hard row to hoe. But back when I started out, a certain amount of enthusiasm and application might get you some way along the road to success. Now, I just don't know what to tell people any more. Years ago, if you wanted (as I did, then) to work in radio drama, you could listen to a lot of radio, find a producer whose work you liked, submit a piece of work to them, and receive encouragement. Moreover, if a producer was willing to work with you, and you were willing to put in the hard graft, you were pretty much guaranteed a production at the end of the process. My first couple of short half hour radio plays were produced here in Scotland. I cut my teeth on those before moving onto anything more ambitious, and the late Gordon Emslie taught me so much about writing for radio.

Anne Marie Timoney and Liam Brennan in Wormwood 

With theatre, I again submitted work - an early draft of a stage play about Chernobyl, called Wormwood - to the excellent Ella Wildridge who was then Literary Manager at Edinburgh's Traverse Theatre. That play went through a long development process, including workshopping with professional actors before eventually being given a full professional production to glowing reviews. None of this was easy and the money was woeful, but it was hugely rewarding in so many other ways. Wormwood was followed by Quartz, and then later on, I had three shorter plays produced at Glasgow's Oran Mor. I did some television and a lot more radio.

And then, it all dried up.

Partly, this was my own fault. Sometimes you just grind to a halt with a particular medium. But I had ideas. I was proposing them - often I was even writing them - and nothing happened. After a while, it struck me that I couldn't in all conscience advise people to send work here, there and everywhere, knowing that I myself, with a decent track record and contacts in the business, could send work out to be met with complete silence, without even the courtesy of a rejection half the time.

In many ways this was something of a blessing. I started again and this time I concentrated on fiction, with all the knowledge of dialogue and structure that I had learned by writing plays. Nothing is ever really lost where writing is concerned. And some years later, fiction has been good to me. I love what I do and so far, fingers crossed and touch wood and all that, I've had a certain amount of success.

I would never say never with plays and in fact there are possible plans afoot for a new production of one of my Oran Mor plays next year. And I'd be absolutely delighted if one of my historical novels was made into a film or television production. (Rights are available!) We'll see. But I don't much want to teach people about plays any more.

If somebody asks me what I do, I tell them I'm a novelist. And extremely happy with that title.

R.I.P. Ray Bradbury.

Some years ago, while I was still writing radio drama, and having already worked on a serial based on a little known Sci Fi novel by Zenna Henderson, called Pilgrimage, I was asked to dramatise some of Ray Bradbury's short stories for a radio series called Tales of the Bizarre. My fellow playwright was Brian Sibley, a fine writer and a friend of Bradbury's who has written his own tribute to the great man here. The series was produced by award winning producer/director Hamish Wilson, with whom I was doing a fair amount of radio work at the time.

There was no prescription about the work. I was simply handed a huge volume of Bradbury's collected stories and asked to pick the ones I liked best. The only difficulty was in choosing, because there were so many wonderful stories - and not all of them 'science fiction'. Some of them could more accurately be classed as 'horror'; some of them were simply bizarre.  But all of them were beautifully written and often poetic. I loved them. And fortunately, Brian and I chose different stories, so there was no haggling!

There were two series and my choice included I Sing The Body Electric, Skeleton, The Man Upstairs, The Day It Rained Forever, Have I Got a Chocolate Bar for You and And So Died Riabouchinska. All of them were quite different, but all were a pleasure to dramatise.

I've written plenty of original drama, but when I was working in radio, I was sometimes asked to dramatise classics and contemporary fiction. I've also found myself turning my own radio plays and series into novels and stories, reversing the process. My novel The Curiosity Cabinet began life as a trilogy of radio plays, also directed by Hamish Wilson. The act of dramatising a work of fiction, of finding the drama while staying true to the original, is a peculiar and quite difficult skill, not to be undertaken lightly. It can be especially challenging when the work of fiction is well loved. And - unexpectedly - the dramatist can find a piece of work dissolving in the transformation. It has happened to me on one occasion and it can be disturbing to realise that a widely acclaimed novel seems to be all style and no substance.

This, however, never happened with Bradbury. These stories were all brilliant combinations of style and substance.

Although I enjoyed the whole process, there were two stories which stand out in my memory, perhaps because both of them were uniquely suitable for radio. One was Skeleton, a truly horrific tale of a 'bone specialist' who turns out to be a little more sinister than a simple osteopath. Think vampires, but fixated on something quite different from blood, and you get the drift. It was fun to do from start to finish, including our bone specialist, played by Liam Brennan, crunching on breadstick, to get the sound effects just right. Oh, and there was a bowl of jelly somewhere in the studio. The result was both revolting and riveting.

The other story which worked very well as radio drama was The Day It Rained Forever. This is a magical story about so many things that you can't pin it down. It's about drought and rain, about sterility and fertility, about death and life, about age and youth, about poetry and rejuvenation. I still think about it sometimes, with that little kick of pleasure that a great story gives you, even in retrospect. Oh, and it involves a woman who plays the rain on her harp: a delicate and beautiful tale, quite the opposite of Skeleton. And therein, I think, lies the genius of this writer.

Bradbury introduced each episode of Tales of the Bizarre in his own inimitable and generous way. I remember being very happy that he approved of my dramatisations, and also being touched by the fact that - unusually - he always pronounced my surname accurately, without having to ask! Somehow, that little courtesy seemed to encapsulate the man I knew only from his stories.