Gymnasts get the twisties. Golfers get the yips. Can writers get the typies? In 2021, gymnast Simone Biles pulled out of the Tokyo Olympics saying that she was “having a little bit of the twisties”. Last week, she was back| Chocolate and Vodka
It might be a messy, complicated thing with a variety of causes and potential solutions, but it absolutely does exist. It’s been a busy couple of weeks since my last newsletter. I finished the first draft of Fieldwork, my half-hour sitcom pilot script, and wrote about how much prep went into it, compared to the 8 hours and […]| Chocolate and Vodka
How Shaun of the Dead, Ted Lasso and Cabin Pressure use callbacks and repetition to create gags, move the plot forward and develop characters. It’s been a couple of months since I’ve written about the insights I’ve gleaned from Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre by Keith Johnstone, so this week I’m taking on his rather rambling chapter […]| Chocolate and Vodka
What does science have to tell us about writer’s block? A couple of years ago, Sarah J Ahmed and C Dominik Güss from the University of North Florida published a paper, An Analysis of Writer’s Block: Causes and Solutions, in the Creativity| Chocolate and Vodka
This week’s newsletter brought to you by the letter S, for stubbornness. Sometimes, I find that my head is just… empty. I need to write something, but there’s not a single idea to be had. Not a light on in the house. I could skip a week, I suppose. People do. But if I skip […]| Chocolate and Vodka
You should probably say it to yourself more often. Some friends and I have an entire Slack channel devoted to celebrating the times we say ‘No’. We’ve made ourselves little loyalty cards and if we tick all 10 boxes then we get to buy ourselves an ice-cream. I’m currently stuck on nine, because these days […]| Chocolate and Vodka
How do we find a window to climb through? I spent Saturday at the Big Comedy Conference, finding out about the parlous state of TV comedy and rethinking my Fieldwork short film/sitcom project in the process. What was clear from the folks on stage is that budgets are shrinking and fashions are changing which means […]| Chocolate and Vodka