(Photo by Alex Gruber on Unsplash)

This week's update picks up where I left off last week and, unusually for me, I did do pretty much exactly what I said I was going to. Huzzah!

My first draft was very messy and involved a lot of over-explanation. It can be very tricky to write for one person alone in a room (except for the cats) because they are the only person who can convey key information. However, I decided this was a problem for later.

The first thing I did was watch "Nothing Like A Dame," a documentary from 2018 featuring Maggie Smith, Judi Dench, Eileen Atkins and Joan Plowright. If you haven't watched it, I would highly recommend as it is both insightful and charming. I was watching it because these women are all of a similar age to the character in my libretto, and so I used their speech patterns to shape the delivery in my piece. It was enormously helpful and is definitely a technique I will use in the future.

Once I had a "messy" version in the "dame" voice, I went through and stripped back the text. In many ways, this felt like being back at uni, and cutting down an essay to fit the word count. I pushed myself to say each idea as succinctly as possible. I was surprised by how much I managed to lose, including lots of over-explaining.

Then I went back through the stripped back version with the "dame" voice again, to ensure that the distinctive quality hadn't been cut along with the fluff. This got me to the present moment where I have a working draft that I'm happy with. I will hand it over to the composer to work her magic. I'm sure there will be some tweaks along the way to get the words to sit nicely with the music, but that's part of the process and I'm excited to learn.