Bonnie
For my final project in my undergraduate degree, I wrote my first ‘full length’ script. Full length is obviously a relative term, so the faculty wangled it to mean ‘full length’ depending on the medium. A poem is not the same length as a feature film. I, however, wrote neither.
My final project was a pilot episode of a murder mystery. This was in 2013 to 2014, so Broadchurch fever had taken hold of the TV landscape, and the drug ‘spice’ had made its way onto the streets of Cardiff. This percolated in my mind for all of ten minutes before I came up with a brilliant idea: What if the creator of spice owned a café and was murdered?
The resulting project was, by BBC Writersroom Open Call standards, pretty damn good. I got to the top 13% of entries with a second draft entry. To my own standards eight years after the fact… not so much. The dual stories of the jaded detective trying to identify and prosecute the creator of this new ‘legal high’ running alongside the story of Cass as she tries to find her sisters murderer work relatively well. After all, who would expect the manager of a failing café to be the country’s most up-and-coming drug lord?
Again, I seem to be so obsessed with working in a core ‘queer’ angle, the piece loses a lot of focus very quickly. But it’s not a bad piece of writing, all told. Cass is underwritten but ultimately a protagonist with a lot of potential, and the narrative structure is pretty sound.
This project holds a special place in my heart for a few reasons. Chief among them, of course, is that it’s the piece that rounded out my undergraduate degree, a time in my life I still consider to be the most fulfilling. It’s also the first full-length project I ever wrote, with a view to write more. It was a humbling experience using part of this script to be performed as part of my final major project. The script was also a massive ego boost, having expected nothing back when submitting to the BBC’s Open Call, only to be told my writing was considered among the top fifth of all entries.
After finishing my undergraduate, while thanking my lecturers, they asked what our plans were for the future. Some were off to take a year abroad, others returning home to see what life brought for them. But, when I said it was my aim to carry on working on my projects, I received some of the best advice anyone has ever given me:
Don’t.
Go and live. Get a shit job, have some shit relationships. Go and live. The writing will still be here.
So, I did.
CAM
Living, it turns out, sucks.
After getting a job in THAT pub chain, and having a whirlwind summer of working, drinking, and working while hungover, I almost forgot about writing. Even if I’d remembered, I wouldn’t have had the time. It’s funny how a 16-hour-a-week work contract can look more like 40+ hours in practice while management constantly try to ‘save hours’.
Eventually, thankfully, I remembered that I had in fact got a degree, and I should maybe try and do something with it. The three previous projects showcased have all been tonally and thematically varied, so I decided to mix things up this time. After writing a murder mystery series with a queer angle, I decided to stretch my wings and write a murder mystery series with a queer angle.
This time, the victim was a gay sex worker. The detective was new to the job, and gay himself. The police force was stuck in its homophobic ways. The outgoing detective, just about to retire, was the first female detective on the force.
Cam, as it became known, was my first foray into a slightly sluttier tone to my writing, probably reflecting my lifestyle when not working. I worked in hospitality, being slutty is a survival technique.
I never quite got my head around this script. Again, there’s nothing wrong with the story itself, but as I tried desperately to make the damn thing work, I realised two things: I haven’t done enough living to provide the right texture to this story, and I’ve got nobody to help me work it out.
The pub where I worked had become my entire life. Pursuing a promotion that I was never going to get had become my sole goal. The people I worked with were also the only people I knew.
Then, just as I got a new job that would provide me the stability and opportunity to put myself out there professionally, the pandemic hit. As the pounds piled on thanks to a Tesco Express around the corner from my house, and the depression I’d been ignoring suddenly reappeared in an ugly way, Cam and the prospect of writing anything fell out of my to-do list. Like many people, the pandemic was one of the single darkest points of my life. But, not to lose hope completely, I enrolled in a course that would change my life forever.
Until then, here’s an extract from my first slutty script, Cam.
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