Writing The First 7500 Days Of My Life
What was your inspiration for this script? What compelled you to write it?
This is the only thing I've ever written where I can actually pin point the exact moment of inspiration. About two years ago, 2 or 3am, lying in bed next to a woman who I was becoming increasingly sure I no longer loved, and all I could think about was how out of control my life was. How I didn't know anything. How I don't know how to live.
So, for some reason, I became obsessed with the idea of calculating precisely how many days old I was. I worked it out in my head. It took a while. 9505 days. So my solution in that moment was to spent that night infesting my brain with plans of what I needed to get done by the 10000th day of my life. When I woke up I couldn't remember any of the plans but I could remember that feeling, that mania, that profound need for control, and that very quickly turned into the character of Max.
This is the only thing I've ever written where I can actually pin point the exact moment of inspiration. About two years ago, 2 or 3am, lying in bed next to a woman who I was becoming increasingly sure I no longer loved, and all I could think about was how out of control my life was. How I didn't know anything. How I don't know how to live.
So, for some reason, I became obsessed with the idea of calculating precisely how many days old I was. I worked it out in my head. It took a while. 9505 days. So my solution in that moment was to spent that night infesting my brain with plans of what I needed to get done by the 10000th day of my life. When I woke up I couldn't remember any of the plans but I could remember that feeling, that mania, that profound need for control, and that very quickly turned into the character of Max.
Max grew and grew in my mind, stealing bits of my personality (that really is my favourite joke, I really do love Doctor Who, I do wish I was a robot) but certainly becoming a seperate person from me, a universe and world expanding around them (Max's friends and family are nothing like mine, I'm not nearly as organised as Max is and so on).
This bizarre, angry, arrogant person started to live in my head and I wanted to hate them but I only ever ended up pitying them or at the very least understanding them. Admittedly that was helped by Max being very much a little bit of me. I felt very quickly that this character and that journey, from hating them to feeling for them, had the legs to be a play. It was something I didn't think I'd seen before and it was saying something that both meant a lot to me and I think people would relate to or at least engage with.
That is what inspired me in the first place.
What compelled me to write it (other than the fact that Young and Hungry were paying me to) was that as the process started and continued I went through what is now, with retrospect, a massive depressive low. The line between being a good person who sometimes does bad things and a straight bad person began to blur for me. I treated people terribly. I thought having my heart broken (the woman in bed next to me when I had the idea soon after to replace herself one day with a letter saying goodbye) gave me licence to break other people's hearts. My life fell apart and writing 7500 Days became more about making sense of my life and feelings. It became an exorcism of the bad parts of myself and a promise to my future self to regain perspective.
Which I think I have. Hopefully. Seeing it on stage is still really weird for me. More like a panic attack than a piece of theatre.
What are the key themes or messages of the play, and how are the characters used to convey these themes?
For me, at least, (knowing that everything any audience member takes from a play no matter whether intended by the makers or not is valid) the thematic crux of the play is learning to deal with the mess and conflict of life and other people in healthy ways. It's about how so many people's defence mechanisms against the wholeness of reality do not make things better, just keep them further away.
It's about how trying not to hurt people can be the most harmful thing to do. It's about how blind we can all be to the inner lives of all of those around us.
I don't really think that I've used characters to convey these themes (though I'm happy to admit that I'm blind to a lot of things about the script so that's not to say that I haven't or didn't). I worked more to have the characters experience and travel through these themes rather than being straight up conveyers of them.
That said each of the helpers is there to underline or bring out a different part of Max. They're all foils for different parts of Max's personality and how their supposed scientific approach to life affects those around them.
What is the central conflict of the play?
I don't know but yesterday in my journal I wrote "How do we live in a world full of so much sickness" so let's go with that?
I also thought a lot about Groundhog Day while writing the play. Which I know is not a sentence you were expecting to read in this Q&A. But anyway, Groundhog Day doesn't have an antagonist. Well it does but he's also the protagonist. The conflict is within the person and that was something I was interested in as a model for 7500 Days so the conflict is kinda Max vs Max. Max (as the presentation) vs Max (the person underneath the presentation).
Tell me more about the play/presentation within a play concept.
The metaphor of the show (that it's a real time presentation set in the present moment that gets more and more out of control) emerged very early in my thinking about the show. If Max is a character who has to be in control, obviously they have to lose control. What was the best way of showing that rather than just telling it? What was a set-up that could embody that idea rather than just acting as an area for characters to talk about that idea? Max didn't just have to lose control, they had to fail and in what other set-up would that failure be any more tangible?
When I had that idea was when, also, I knew it had to be a play too. I think that it's very important that the media through which a story is told (novel, play, film, etc) is adding something to the expression of that idea. I want my plays to have to be plays. Someone, after the Wellington seasons, told me that 7500 Days would be impossible to make into a film. That's the greatest compliment I've ever received.
When a piece of live theatre goes wrong in front of you there is a special awkward tension that you couldn't get anywhere else (maybe live TV or radio?). The sense of being on a high wire that runs through all performance becomes all the tenser when it's real people right in front of you. That had to be the energy of the show, it had to not only be the fuel that drove the plot but a whole other character in the room. Just like the audience becomes one too.
So, in short, the presentation idea came out of a need to get the worst out of Max in the most interesting, tangible way.
What is your writing process? Where do you get ideas, and how do you go about putting them on paper to complete the script!?
There's a lot of panic, fear and YouTube in my writing process. While my work does totally obsess me, it often plagues basically my every thought, that doesn't mean I'm always particularly great at actually doing it. A lot of it is thinking. Like, just noodling the thing around in my head and letting it grow on its own.
Then a deadline will come (and, often, pass) and then the process becomes cartons of cigarettes, Red Bull, and crying at 3am just desperately trying to scrape the mould that has formed around the idea out of my head and into Final Draft.
Every script I promise myself it will be different this time. It never is.
But that's just me and everyone's process is different. You do you.
The most important thing to know as a writer isn't process or formatting. It's structure. Even plotless or abstract works need to understand their own build and release of tension and expectation. The thing that marks newcomer scripts out from the rest more than anything isn't nothing happening or the wrong things happen, it's that things just happen with no rhythm, rhyme or structure.
Screw process, love structure (and not just the three act or hero's journey, all structures, then find the right structure for your story).
Any advice for aspiring theatre practitioners or writers?
Beyond the obvious "get out there and make stuff" things?
You need to understand that you will never like what you make. Not one hundred percent. There might be bits that you like but never all of it. Your taste will always outstrip your ability. That will never change. It will never look like it looked in your head, but the audience can't see what's in your head, only what you made. So trust the thing not the idea of the thing.
Train yourself to measure your success internally ('this play will be a success if I learn how to do better character work') not externally ('this play will be a success if we get good reviews and do 80% houses). External validation is never enough and its absence always hurts. Remember: bad reviews hurt and the good ones don't help.
Do not judge the stories you want to tell. Every story is worth telling. The only question is how.
Also, don't be a dick. This industry is tiny. Everyone will know.
This bizarre, angry, arrogant person started to live in my head and I wanted to hate them but I only ever ended up pitying them or at the very least understanding them. Admittedly that was helped by Max being very much a little bit of me. I felt very quickly that this character and that journey, from hating them to feeling for them, had the legs to be a play. It was something I didn't think I'd seen before and it was saying something that both meant a lot to me and I think people would relate to or at least engage with.
That is what inspired me in the first place.
What compelled me to write it (other than the fact that Young and Hungry were paying me to) was that as the process started and continued I went through what is now, with retrospect, a massive depressive low. The line between being a good person who sometimes does bad things and a straight bad person began to blur for me. I treated people terribly. I thought having my heart broken (the woman in bed next to me when I had the idea soon after to replace herself one day with a letter saying goodbye) gave me licence to break other people's hearts. My life fell apart and writing 7500 Days became more about making sense of my life and feelings. It became an exorcism of the bad parts of myself and a promise to my future self to regain perspective.
Which I think I have. Hopefully. Seeing it on stage is still really weird for me. More like a panic attack than a piece of theatre.
What are the key themes or messages of the play, and how are the characters used to convey these themes?
For me, at least, (knowing that everything any audience member takes from a play no matter whether intended by the makers or not is valid) the thematic crux of the play is learning to deal with the mess and conflict of life and other people in healthy ways. It's about how so many people's defence mechanisms against the wholeness of reality do not make things better, just keep them further away.
It's about how trying not to hurt people can be the most harmful thing to do. It's about how blind we can all be to the inner lives of all of those around us.
I don't really think that I've used characters to convey these themes (though I'm happy to admit that I'm blind to a lot of things about the script so that's not to say that I haven't or didn't). I worked more to have the characters experience and travel through these themes rather than being straight up conveyers of them.
That said each of the helpers is there to underline or bring out a different part of Max. They're all foils for different parts of Max's personality and how their supposed scientific approach to life affects those around them.
What is the central conflict of the play?
I don't know but yesterday in my journal I wrote "How do we live in a world full of so much sickness" so let's go with that?
I also thought a lot about Groundhog Day while writing the play. Which I know is not a sentence you were expecting to read in this Q&A. But anyway, Groundhog Day doesn't have an antagonist. Well it does but he's also the protagonist. The conflict is within the person and that was something I was interested in as a model for 7500 Days so the conflict is kinda Max vs Max. Max (as the presentation) vs Max (the person underneath the presentation).
Tell me more about the play/presentation within a play concept.
The metaphor of the show (that it's a real time presentation set in the present moment that gets more and more out of control) emerged very early in my thinking about the show. If Max is a character who has to be in control, obviously they have to lose control. What was the best way of showing that rather than just telling it? What was a set-up that could embody that idea rather than just acting as an area for characters to talk about that idea? Max didn't just have to lose control, they had to fail and in what other set-up would that failure be any more tangible?
When I had that idea was when, also, I knew it had to be a play too. I think that it's very important that the media through which a story is told (novel, play, film, etc) is adding something to the expression of that idea. I want my plays to have to be plays. Someone, after the Wellington seasons, told me that 7500 Days would be impossible to make into a film. That's the greatest compliment I've ever received.
When a piece of live theatre goes wrong in front of you there is a special awkward tension that you couldn't get anywhere else (maybe live TV or radio?). The sense of being on a high wire that runs through all performance becomes all the tenser when it's real people right in front of you. That had to be the energy of the show, it had to not only be the fuel that drove the plot but a whole other character in the room. Just like the audience becomes one too.
So, in short, the presentation idea came out of a need to get the worst out of Max in the most interesting, tangible way.
What is your writing process? Where do you get ideas, and how do you go about putting them on paper to complete the script!?
There's a lot of panic, fear and YouTube in my writing process. While my work does totally obsess me, it often plagues basically my every thought, that doesn't mean I'm always particularly great at actually doing it. A lot of it is thinking. Like, just noodling the thing around in my head and letting it grow on its own.
Then a deadline will come (and, often, pass) and then the process becomes cartons of cigarettes, Red Bull, and crying at 3am just desperately trying to scrape the mould that has formed around the idea out of my head and into Final Draft.
Every script I promise myself it will be different this time. It never is.
But that's just me and everyone's process is different. You do you.
The most important thing to know as a writer isn't process or formatting. It's structure. Even plotless or abstract works need to understand their own build and release of tension and expectation. The thing that marks newcomer scripts out from the rest more than anything isn't nothing happening or the wrong things happen, it's that things just happen with no rhythm, rhyme or structure.
Screw process, love structure (and not just the three act or hero's journey, all structures, then find the right structure for your story).
Any advice for aspiring theatre practitioners or writers?
Beyond the obvious "get out there and make stuff" things?
You need to understand that you will never like what you make. Not one hundred percent. There might be bits that you like but never all of it. Your taste will always outstrip your ability. That will never change. It will never look like it looked in your head, but the audience can't see what's in your head, only what you made. So trust the thing not the idea of the thing.
Train yourself to measure your success internally ('this play will be a success if I learn how to do better character work') not externally ('this play will be a success if we get good reviews and do 80% houses). External validation is never enough and its absence always hurts. Remember: bad reviews hurt and the good ones don't help.
Do not judge the stories you want to tell. Every story is worth telling. The only question is how.
Also, don't be a dick. This industry is tiny. Everyone will know.