"Stories are great. They can inspire lives. We want to use ours to save them."

The 3hundredand65 project is an inspiring writing project challenging 365 writers to crowdauthor a graphic novel in the 366 of 2012. Set up by artist David Kirkwood the story will be told day by day via twitter and accompanied by a daily illustration by David. The story and illustrations will be collated into a book at the end of the project, which will be auctioned off for Teenage Cancer Trust. You can also donate to the trust throughout the year – with the aim of raising £36,000.

I will be contributing to the story on 7th April 2012. If you’re inspired by the project you can contribute as well.

Visit the 3hundredand65 website to find out more about the project, see who else is contributing and select a date. Visit the fundraising page if you’d like to donate and follow the project on twitter or #3hand65 to keep in the loop.

Now generally my glass is always half full and I tend to shy away from it being half empty. I recently saw the Derren Brown experiment, Derren Brown: The Secret of Luck and agreed with his conclusion that you make your own luck and if you open yourself up to opportunities then ‘luck’ will come your way. But can the same principle apply creatively? If I only see good plays and avoid all the bad ones will it make me a better writer if I only allow myself to be influenced by quality?

Thinking back over my creative history, of all the plays I’ve seen or read, I thought of the ones that stuck in my mind the most:

The Pillowman – Martin McDonagh [good]

Other Hands – Laura Wade [good]

For Coloured Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When The Rainbow Is Enuf – Ntozuke Shange [good]

All good so far… but maybe my glass half full is coming into play too much? So I thought about bad theatre I’d seen that had stuck in my mind:

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I honestly can’t think of any. I know I’ve seen loads of awful plays though – even one where I didn’t stay for the second half it was so bad – but I seem to have eradicated them from my mind.

Despite this seeming selective amnesia, I still know what I like in theatre and what I don’t, what works for me on a page and a stage and what I think is rubbish. These opinions must have been formed from the good and the bad, I’ve just blanked the specifics and made more room for the useful stuff that’s going to make me a better writer (fingers crossed).

Back to the initial question though – is it good to see bad? Well, contradictorily I do think it’s good to see bad because creativity is all subjective and whether overall bad or good, moments of brilliance can still be found even in the worst play. But the contradiction comes in that I’m not going to book a ticket for the play my friend saw. For a start I’ve thought about it far too much and it’s bound to be a disappointment now however bad. But also because with so many options of plays I could see there’s already too many for the number of nights in a week and given the option I’d rather go and see something I thought might be more on the good side than the bad. So I’ll never know quite how bad the bad play is after all, which makes me a little bit curious…

But photographs are a different thing entirely, as each photo tells a unique story and despite being placed in a moment of time when they were taken and some, more than others, being tied to a specific date, photos can be taken out of date, out of context and can stand alone as just a great image, waiting for your imagination to tell the story behind. The Guardian have collected together some great images from 2011 – take a look here – my favourite is the boy throwing his new ball in Chittagong.

This inspired me to take a look at my own photographs from this year and look at the diversity in where I’d been, what I’d done and who I’d met. They are definitely not as well composed, professional or international as those snapped by the Guardian’s journalists, but do give a snapshot of 2011 for me.

Light display exhibit at Hampton Court flower show on preview night

The Dog in the Pond, Hollyoaks. Taken on my first visit to set.

Raining on set - Hollyoaks village. This is the yard of Hollyoaks college in torrential rain.

Christmas in Sloane Square - just opposite The Royal Court Theatre.

As a BT Storyteller for London 2012, Daley Thompson sent me a Christmas card. Next year is going to be BIG.

According to Paul, “voice is the ongoing conversation writers have with themselves.” I have many ongoing conversations with myself, most of them complete rubbish and then sometimes I put some of the better ones into scripts. But rather than streams of consciousness of course he was talking about the development of your voice – recognising words on a page that no one else would have thought of, or a tone that no one else would be able to execute and understanding this is who you are/ what you do as a writer and then working on it to make it better. It’s the ‘unique’ that gives you the ‘SP’ and it’s learning how to tap in to this.

He also gave an interesting perspective on ‘great writers’ as we pulled together a huge list of fantastic writers with their own unique, recognisable voice. “Great writers don’t stop, they keep writing” and “a great play is a one off”. I guess it’s the difference between a one hit wonder and The Beatles. And between ‘Yellow Submarine’ and ‘Obla di Obla da’.

Nina Steiger was refreshingly straight-forward about voice – it’s what you write, how you write it and how you talk about your work. Amongst good exercises she also gave some good tips on how to make your voice stronger, which I found useful:

1. Write every day

2. Travel

3. Experience some cultural tourism – look around at different cultural arts and see the connections with what you’re doing.

4. Start a play that a person like you would never write.

5. Read and see a lot of theatre.

6. Identify what makes you you?

7. Be influenced by other people.

8. Look at your roots.

9. Do it your way – find something you’re passionate about and get stuck in.

10. Get a play on and get feedback.

Before being ordained seven years ago Gavin Tyte was a beatboxer and continues to use beatboxing as parts of his sermons. With this video he has won this year’s ‘The Nativity Factor’. Whether you’re a God lover or loather it’d be tough not want to buy this vicar from Uplyme Church a pint in the local – what a legend.

On the panel were Jo Bunting (Producer, HIGNFY), Claire Zolkwer (Commissioning Editor of Comedy, ITV), Tamzin Cary (Exec Producer, Big Talk) and Andrea Mann (comedy writer) and the event was chaired by comedian Susan Calman. So all women then? The discussion opened with a statement that women are funny – no question – and discussed many funny women, including Victoria Wood, Jo Brand, Sarah Silverman, Sandi Toksvig, Sarah Millican, Miranda Hart, all whom have cracked the system. So why can’t more women?

The pool of women writers/ performers available for hire was discussed at length. Apparently there’s generally more men than women writing/ performing comedy because the pool of men to draw from is bigger. Proportionally the same amount of men to women are chosen, but because more men start in the first place or less men give up, more men come through.

But why don’t women choose this career/ hang on in there? There was a mention of children as a reason, a suggestion that men might have thicker skin than women to plough on despite rejections and a discussion around whether men have more self belief. At this point, sorry to say, I started to switch off… Not because I don’t think the balance should be more or a, well, balance – but mainly because it reminded me of why I generally don’t go to any events with ‘women’ in the title…

Yes I believe men and women should be equal, yes I believe there should roughly be the same amount of men and women doing the same jobs and no I don’t believe in discrimination – man, woman, race, religion, sexuality, frog, dog etc. But it feels like we’re over the man/ woman discrimination thing now, or at least I am.

For me it boils down to who is better at the job and that person should get it, whether they happen to be a man or a woman, it doesn’t matter. For comedy, all decisions should be based on who’s funnier and when selecting a writing team ensuring different tastes are catered for within the wider team. You need someone who can write gags, someone who’s going to opt for the highest and the lowest form of a joke and you need to fill the grey areas in between. Let the funniest win.

Perhaps the event was mistitled – perhaps it should have been called ‘That’s (not) funny enough’ and should have been centered around getting as many funny people into comedy writing teams. I think we do need to give the men who apparently keep getting these jobs some stiff competition and a run for their money, but I really don’t care who that run comes from – man or woman. I do care if they’re (not) funny.

Hamlet... can you spot any mistakes?

If you’re aspiring to be a perfect writer then Shakespeare is probably one of your inspirations. I know I wouldn’t mind a career like his. Shakespeare’s 38 plays (including collaborations before you start…) have been translated into every living language, performed more often than any other work and celebrated still 400 years on. Feats unattained by any other writer in history. Pretty good really. But did everything happen in his plays for a well-planned reason? Was Shakespeare ever an imperfect writer, an abuser of coincidence, convenience or unexplained seeming mistakes?

I can think of several examples throughout his work where things don’t quite add up, but last week I went to a talk by Paul Ashton from the BBC Writersroom and he outlined a specific example in Hamlet, which made me realise that sometimes you can end up constructing story that is convenient and coincidental even if you’re Shakespeare, but you can still end up producing a brilliant script.

In Act Five, Scene 1 Hamlet arrives back (after being sent to England to be executed) to a churchyard, where on the same day Ophelia is being buried. Cue funeral procession and Hamlet finding out that the love of his life is no more. Coincidental enough already, but even more so as the reason Hamlet never made it to England is because the boat he was travelling on was ambushed by pirates and he escaped, assuming from the middle of the sea somewhere and made it back to Denmark. Plot points – terrible!

But do we forgive Shakespeare? Of course. Has it made a difference to how well received the play it? Not at all. Hamlet was one of the most popular of Shakespeare’s plays in his lifetime and continues to be one of the most frequently performed of his work. Maybe coincidental plot points aren’t so bad, after all.

I’ll be posting updates here of what training I’m doing, how training is going and the likelihood of me making it round without hitting the wall. I’m also writing for BT Storytellers London Olympics 2012 so I’ll definitely be getting in the mind-frame of team GB Marathon runners… although I can’t promise our times will be in any way similar!

I’m going to be running on behalf of and fundraising for a fantastic charity. I’m in the process of setting up my Just Giving page and as soon as I do, I’ll post a link so you can follow my fund-raising progress. My chosen charity is Kidscape, it’s a UK-based charity dedicated to the prevention of bullying and child sexual abuse, providing information, advice and resources. They do brilliant work and if I raise enough money to help at least one young person deal with these issues, then the running will be worth it.

For updates on the race, the training, the fundraising and the charity… watch this space.

UPDATE: Fundraising page now set up. Visit it here.

The app is called ZOMBIES, RUN! and is described as a “running game and audio adventure”. The basic premise is you’re running in a post zombie-apocalyptic world and as you go on your normal runs you can collect medicine, ammo, batteries and spare parts, which you use to update your ‘base’ back at home. The more you collect, the more missions you can unlock at home, so each time you run you’ll be on a new mission, hearing a new part of the story. Sounds brilliant to me.

What’s even more brilliant is the team behind ZOMBIES, RUN! started with an aim to get $12,500 worth of crowd-funding via Kickstarter to develop the app. It’s captured so many people’s imagination their running total is currently $72, 627 and counting, so hopefully the app will be even better. Here’s more about the project: