My Technicolor Dream Career of Many Day Jobs

When I mentioned, a few blogs ago, that I made my mind up to be a writer, I gave the impression that it was one definitive decision, at which point I downed tools at everything else, took up residence in front of my laptop and never looked back. In fact it was nothing of the sort.

I left drama school with vague notions of knowing I wanted to work in theatre, and most probably direct eventually. I lived up to the adage "take everything and anything you can get" and for two years I was box office assistant, stage crew, wardrobe mistress (including spectacularly stabbing Puck in a sensitive area during a backstage repair at an outdoor production of A Midsummer's Night Dream), script reader, stage manager, dramaturge (a script editor for theatre), casting assistant, literary assistant, and finally assistant director on a couple of productions before starting my own theatre company. Reading and editing other people's play scripts had whetted my appetite for writing my own, but I didn't do much about it until I realized that my brand spanking new theatre company couldn't afford the rather essential element of… scripts.

Part of the ethos I'd created for this company was to explore new and unique ways of storytelling, so I had always imagined that there would be an element of improvisation in our work. We set about devising pieces from scratch: I would come up with a concept, and character bios, and we began to improvise. If you can picture an artist's preparatory work: sketches around the subject, experimenting with perspective, angle, placing - it was a little bit like that. There was masses of trial and error, over 90% of our improvised scenes were never performed in public, and I had stunned actors storming out and threatening never to speak to me again galore. Once we (with however much of the cast was left!) started devising scenes that would form the actual play, I began to write. Initially, this consisted of literally transcribing the improvised scene, but gradually I started to re-draft, to shade and tighten, and then we would improvise some more, and finally we had a working script. I am grateful that this was my first experience of drama writing, because its having always been intrinsically wound into the actors' and director's process means that I skipped over the main beginner's weakness that I often see in scripts I read now: an… entirety that renders it flat by not taking into account the production process. Ideally, the script is the foundation for the finished project - whether it's theatre, film or television - it's the springboard from which everyone else starts their creative process.

Millions of miles from my point as usual. For the first few years after making the decision that writing was what I wanted to do - in some ways directing will always be my first love, and I hope to return to it some day, but writing is the priority for now - I would say that I dabbled in it. I thought about it, I scribbled out ideas and the odd few scenes here and there - in addition to returning to a variety of production work, and experimenting with other writing media - but with the exception of the pieces that I wrote for my course at the Vancouver Film School, I didn't properly complete a full length script for a good three years. I wrote a few (produced) shorts, did the odd bit of re-drafting, script editing, dialogue polishes here and there. All of this just about kept my head above water and let me pretend that I was an aspiring screenwriter, but, even in my own head, I never got anywhere with my own work. Then, just over a couple of years ago now, I got serious. I realized that… I hate the expression "shit or get off the pot" but it's applicable. Finally, that decision was properly made: the commitment to writing in every spare hour rather than going out or vegging in front of the tv, the promise to myself to block distracting thoughts of maybe going back to directing, or casting, or PR… I was, finally, a writer.

Except that unfortunately no one knew that yet but me.

So I devised a plan. I knew that it would take me 3-5 years to have enough projects of professional quality to actually start making a full time living at it. So writing time was my main priority, but I also needed to keep my bank manager from turning a funny colour without distracting myself too much. I decided that I would divide my time between sitting in my pyjamas wailing at a blank computer screen, and a succession of day jobs which would a) keep me just afloat enough to avoid lying awake worrying about bills, b) have enough variety to stop my brain from going on holiday and not telling me, and c) not be so consuming that they turned into careers in themselves or left me too exhausted to be creative in my spare time.

In the last two years I have been a club promoter, a fashion PR assistant, a bartender, an HR administrator, a studio assistant (for radio drama and music), a door picker (the bitch who decides who looks cool enough to get in to clubs), an events manager, a web copy writer, a celebrity babysitter (more or less ;) ), a marketing project manager, a legal PA. I've been a PA and had a PA; I've worked in hospitality, insurance, administrated for the British Columbia Liquor Board, dressed windows at Gap, stuffed more envelopes than I care to remember. I worked for the Refugee Commission in south London, taught drama to troubled kids, and worked in an oil refinery in Ohio complete with fire resistant overalls, safety goggles and steel toed boots. I've answered phones for television companies, insurance firms, investment banks, charities and music moguls (at one I was told off by Simon Cowell for being unable to reach the person he wanted to speak to, over heard a Scottish accent in reception, looked up and said "oh, whereabouts are you from?" before noticing it was Annie Lennox).

And that is how, last week, I agreed to go to Munich for 10 days to photocopy…