The importance of bad writing

A Full-length play

In 2012, my now-wife and I were engaged and looking for work. We’d both had some success in our respective careers, but we had the energy to do more. We felt creatively aligned with a good friend and creative genius, Kate Murphy.

It’s a tale as old as time: a bunch of theatre nerds come together and, with red-cheeked naivety, decide to put on a show. Well, gee, we can use the barn for a stage! That’ll be swell!

We were about five or so years outside of uni. Graduation was a memory. We knew enough that this was what we wanted to do with our lives. But we didn’t know enough that we were getting gainfully employed. So we decided to produce a new work independently.

With little mentorship, we began to craft a new work. I had the faintest traces of a new idea but trusted that we’d be able to flesh it out into something exciting.

The project, Life etc., was staged in Toowoomba as part of the Empire Theatre’s ‘Homegrown’ season of independent and emerging works. I haven’t spoken to Kate or Emily before writing this, but I hope they won’t mind me saying it was quite bad.

It had nothing to do with their performances. It had much to do with my inexperience as a director and my script, which was only ever formed around a bunch of half ideas. Out of everything I wrote, Life Etc. honed my instinct for when an idea is ready to be birthed, and when it’s just a passing brain fart.

The show had a bunch of good ideas and some good images. Nevertheless, if your only interaction with us was one weird night in Toowoomba when you saw this bizarre show, you would’ve left very confused and probably a little dissatisfied.

But for us, the show was crucial. We acquired a whole lot of implicit skills we wouldn’t have otherwise learned. And in the following years, we all became regularly employed. A year later, I worked with the Queensland Music Festival, Emily worked with Queensland Theatre, and Kate began international voice-over work. I don’t believe you get established careers without a few duds. The duds have to happen.

Thank God for programs like Empire Theatre HomeGrown - they still have the good fortune to exist. The other programs that proved important hallmarks of my emerging career have now gone. La Boite Indie vanished almost a decade ago. Metro Arts, where I started, moved into more experimental work and lost its operational federal funding last year. Playlab has picked up as much of the slack as it can manage for Brisbane and emerging playwrights. However, there remains achingly little supply for overwhelming demand. For the dozens of graduates that appear every year, there is drought of working opportunities that allow them to grow. Brisbane has only grown in cultural importance, but there is less to help develop our artists then there was fifteen years ago.

Anyway, I include the full script of Life Etc here for paid subscribers (who get access to a full script once every few months). I do so with trepidation - it’s not great. Nevertheless, it’s as much as part of my career as anything else. It’s part of the advice I always give young writers: just shut up and write. Keep making things and figuring out what works and what doesn’t. That’s the only way to learn.