Stromness Plays Project by Rachael McGill

Thanks to Rachael McGill for providing this blog, bringing attention to the Stromness Plays Project.

I’ve just run a couple of playwriting workshops in Stromness and Kirkwall, part of the Stromness Plays project I’m organising with the Stromness Drama Club. The idea of the project is for people to write a short play inspired by one of the themes discussed by the Stromness Debating Society, which ran from 1953 to 2012. My granddad was a founder member and my dad was one of the last secretaries. I was looking through the minutes, which Dad has now given to the Orkney Archives. They’re a funny, fascinating snapshot of Stromness people’s thoughts on issues since the 50s; everything from ‘Old Stromness is not worth preserving’ (1966), to ‘the experiment of democracy has failed’ (1995). I thought it would be fun to use these ideas as prompts for telling stories. I managed to get some funding through a Scottish Society of Playwrights (SSP) Fellowship, so the Stromness Plays project is now one of ten across Scotland that will celebrate SSP’s 50th birthday this year.

I love teaching writing workshops and these ones were great fun – plenty of ideas and talent were in evidence: mysteriously, despite never having been discussed in any of the debates, chickens featured prominently in people’s works-in-progress. We covered finding inspiration, creating characters, structuring plot to keep the audience engaged, subverting your ideas to make them surprising and writing dialogue. 

One of the participants commented, ‘I liked the idea of taking something ordinary and flipping it to make it much more interesting.’ Another added, ‘I’ve learned to cut the fluff out, as I like to explain far more than I need to.’ 

Explaining more than you need to is one of the most common playwriting mistakes. I gave some tips on how to avoid it, as well as some other classics: talking about the past instead of showing things happening in the present, having characters whose voices all sound the same, telling your audience what to think instead of letting them make their own meaning...there are easy ways to avoid doing these things as soon as you know how to spot them.

The big challenge for a lot of people is all the editing you have to do. Almost everyone makes all of those mistakes and more when they first get things down on paper. That’s normal. You have to ignore the silly little voice that tells you it’s rubbish and there’s no point carrying on and go back and whittle away at what you’ve done. You keep on going back, again and again and again, until it’s clear and fresh and surprising.

People have a couple of months now to write their plays, as the deadline’s May 31st. For anyone who missed the workshops, I’ll also offer them again online for whoever gets in touch. I think it’s really worthwhile entering – plays don’t have to be perfect, as I’ll also work on them with winning participants after they’re submitted. We’ll have up to three prizes of £300, and these winners and other selected writers will have their play performed by Stromness Drama Club in a staged reading in Stromness Town Hall on 1 November. There’ll be space for lots of mini-plays to be seen, and of course there’ll be opportunities for anyone interested in acting or directing too.

The identity of the judges is being kept secret until after the closing date as that makes it easier for judging to be fully anonymous. But I can say that one of them is me, and I’m really looking forward to reading what comes in.

Stromness Plays | Rachael McGill