On Writing a Play
I’ve been writing poetry for about twenty years now, and I mostly write narrative poems. So, when I started going up to the Edinburgh Fringe in the late 2010s, I got really into the idea of producing long-form live literature shows. The first show I wrote was called Skip, Skip, Skip , and it was an autobiographical, one-hour piece that I performed at the 2019 Edinburgh Fringe. It was a nostalgic and heartfelt show about music, friendships, and accidentally becoming a teenage goth in rural Norfolk in 2002. I really loved the process of writing the show. I liked telling a cohesive story in a long-form, theatrical context – something I’d never done before – and I loved making something that really seemed to resonate with people. But I found the performance side of the process really challenging, especially having to learn an hour’s worth of words. My brain just doesn’t work like that, and the nerves really got to me. Next time I write something like that, I thought to mys...