Learning to write

Well obviously the best way to learn is to write a lot - but I have also had the benefit of various wiser writers than me along the way. I attended...

• Bill Manhire's Writing course at Vic as an upstart 18 year old.
• Drama and Playwriting at Otago with Lisa Warrington and Roger Hall respectively.
• Graduated NZ Drama School as an actor.
• Completed Grad Dip in Writing from Swinburne University - won PostGrad coursework Prize for hyperfiction piece 'The Casino Project'.

Beginnings

For me it was all about Silvios Bookshop on Cuba St where for a buck you could pick up a tatty Penguin Modern Classic. Eventually I had a store of a couple of hundred of these, since given back to charity. The amazement of discovering the modern Europeans was staggering: Camus, Mann, Grass, Huxley, Beckett, Hesse, Sartre... all wonderful stuff and a great escape from the banality of suburban life in Miramar.

About this time I also started reading eastern mystical texts, influenced mainly be Hesse I suppose - an interest I still hold.

To my credit I also had the decency to discover NZ poetry at a young age and read my way through the poetry section of the Wellington Public Library NZ Room. It was some years later that I realised the librarian was Jackie Baxter. Jerusalem sonnets in its own way was as important as The Outsider to me. I also got right into the fresh Auckland scene where journals like AND were the (welcome) antithesis to Wellington's parochial scene. My first 'serious' writing was poetry, a great form to love language in. I spent a year writing a poem about water ' w.ae.t.r ' on big sheets of paper that I later lost. Obviously this was the best work I ever did :-)

Then as I discovered theatre I consumed all the modern classics, and ran deeply into that corner of the NZ theatre owned and created by Bruce Mason - particularly his later less, errr, sentimental solo work. Of the authors I discovered at that time the enduring favourite is probably Caryl Churchill. I completely hold with Churchill that form is as much to be used as content in the creation of theatre. I also got into people like Peter Handke and Peter Barnes - the conceptual and the theatrical.

From stage to page

I became really fascinated with the Theatre machine - the way the technology, language and bodies all kinda collided in this crazy project called theatre. Despite being an actor for a good few years I found the study of writers and plays more interesting than performing per se an fairly quickly I started writing plays alongside acting, starting with 'The Vampyre Dances' in 1994.

In 1995 I left NZ for Australia and stopped acting all together. I went back to study all forms of writing and discovered 'web writing' or whatever you would like to call it. I turned this into my main money-making career and make my day money as a web designer and manager.

From stage to screen

A chance comment about the ambitious spatio-temporal scope of one of my plays started me thinking about writing for the screen. I essentially gave up writing plays for five years to write screenplays.

And back to prose again...

Writing screenplays let me realise I could actually write description, something playwrights just don;t need to do much of. For the last couple of years I have been writing fiction, mostly seeing how I get on with a few simple ideas. Nothing to look at yet. Soon.

What is it about writing?

Writing is one of the few things that I find deeply satisfying - a place where you can employ emotion, intellect, imagination and craft all at once, all without using anything more than a humble laptop.