A jubilant forward roll

Dear Mum,

My first draft is complete! Woop Woop!

The ending scene was my nemesis. I sat in front of my laptop for several hours, desperately wracking my brains for an ending, any ending, to materialise as a light bulb suspended above my (thumping) head (ache).

The BBC Writer’s Room website offers tips on solving writer’s block from literary professionals. The main lesson learnt was that, a bit like heat rash, there is no single technique that will solve this mental ailment.

Bugger. I was hoping for a groundbreaking solution.

Delving in a Freudian manner (“Oh joy,” I hear you say) my writer’s block really was, in fact, me simply not being 100% sure of my premise or my plot. When jumping on the Writer’s Room wagon and journeying merrily through my writing venture, I continuously put off thinking of a conclusion.

This was because I was not 100% sure how I wanted it to end, and my lack of any ideas meant establishing a single conclusion and sticking to it was very daunting.

And then, as I scowled at the screen, loathing my script and this entire mini-project, it came to me.

It is not a dramatically profound ending, nor a hilarious final scene. Au contraire. We’re a long way from the bodies in the pond of ‘Keeping Mum’ and the heart-warming students’ salute of ‘Dead Poets Society.’

But it is a complete script of my original work all the same – with a beginning, middle and, at last, an end.

I’ve still got a pretty long way to go. I need to edit it, work on more arresting dialogue in places, tighten up the technical cues etc.  

So you can be expecting a few more steps before I made the bold leap into posting the script.  But, rest assured (as I’m sure you’re all lying awake worrying about it), I’ve a little over thirty pages of script.

I’ve got exactly three weeks before the deadline. I need to get my skates on...