Welcome to Write Through The Roof, the podcast for writers who want to improve their craft.

Episode 01 with Scott McAteer; comedian, improv performer and playwright.

“The fear of monsters is a very particular fear, a safe and curious fear.”

Episode 01 – Scott McAteer – Show notes
  • Scott’s Monsterpedia
  • Similarity between horror and comedy
  • Improvisation and writing
  • In defence of Arthur Conan Doyle
  • Madeleine’s segment: #sixwordstory

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Episode 01 – Scott McAteer – Transcript

Madeleine

Hello and welcome to Write Through The Roof. Today I’m speaking with Scott McAteer. Hi Scott, how are you going?

Scott

Good, how are you?

Madeleine

Good, thanks. Scott is a playwright, dramaturg, improv performer, stilt walker, stand-up comedian. He’s been a finalist in Raw Comedy a couple of times. His plays have been performed all around the world and he’s been a finalist in the Short and Sweet Play Writing competition. Thanks for coming on the show Scott.

Scott

Sure thing. My pleasure.

Madeleine

So, what I wanted to do to start up are a few warm up questions, to get you limbered up, you know, some star jumps and get to know what kind of writer you are. Here are a few questions before we get into the deeper stuff. So, do you write every day?

Scott

No, I should but I don’t. I´ve got to be more disciplined. But I think about a story I did in concept pretty much every day.

Madeleine

Do you put them into a little book?

Scott

I keep them on Google Document files. At the moment, there´s quite, an extensive amount, probably the most interesting in terms of research, is what I called a Monsterpedia. It’s just going through, and doing research, and any little ideas that may be useful for a story or concept later on, or keep together in a different google document, and then I separate them out.

Madeleine

So, what’s your favourite writing format?

Scott

I think writing for performance is my favourite format. I used to say that it’s great for lazy people, because you don´t have to write all the details, but it’s also a way to write knowing what kind of other colours you can bring onto a story. Even if it’s something as simple as writing for voice, something that´s going to be spoken out loud, you can control the kind of pauses and anticipations that the audience will have in a story, when you´re writing it. And it’s more difficult I think to get that in a prose piece because the reader is controlling their own pace in their environment when they´re enjoying it.

Madeleine

Are you a plotter or a pantser?

Scott

I guess there’s two ways that I normally go about. For instance, I’ll give you the best example, just the other week I wrote a piece for the Stranger with my Face ten-minute, ten page challenge thing that they´ve got, which is basically a 48 hour writing challenge. You get three prompts to start you off and then you have to write a piece. The way that I went about that is, essentially, I started thinking about the characters first and how the characters would talk and just would have a little conversation about things, and then thinking about the plot. And then, once it´s sitting there in front of the keyboard, it’s just letting the characters speak and do what they want to do in order for them to get to the end point. And sometimes it’s not the end point because they decide that they don’t want to stop at that end point.

Madeleine

Absolutely. And lastly, in the short questions, what´s your writing fuel of choice?

 Scott

Coffee. It’s quite a weird thing in terms of fuel, as I’m one of those people that eats very large meals and then gets very tired, so I actually have to schedule my writing and when I’m going to eat, otherwise I’ll have to have a big snooze.

Madeleine

In between naps.

Scott

In between naps. Absolutely. Haven´t mastered the art of writing while napping yet.

Madeleine

Maybe we can help you with that. So, let´s go a little more in depth. How would you describe your writing and what themes do you generally explore?

Scott

Generally, I guess, I always thought of myself as primarily a comedy writer. But now I tend to think of it in terms of themes in that I think that there are quite a lot of things where horror and comedy are very similar and they work in terms of emotional reaction. Everything is geared towards that emotional reaction. There are other kinds of forms of writing where there is much about getting the reader or the audience to think about something.

But that´s not the kind of thing that I write, I write things that will have an emotional reaction, either a laugh or a giggle or a tingle or even a shock. So, that´s how I would classify it. If I write something which isn’t funny at all but has quite a few sort of horrors and shocks in it. I don´t think of it being a different kind of writing but using shock and horrors instead of giggles and laughs, but there will always be a few giggles and laughs.

Madeleine

So, it’s really the reaction.

Scott

Yes. It’s about getting that emotional reaction from the reader or audience.

Madeleine

So, what is the one thing that you think has been the most helpful to improve your writing?

Scott

I think, one think that’s really helpful is deadlines because I think I have to work towards them instead of putting stuff off.

But probably the most important thing is doing improvisation as a performer. In improvisation you have to, improvisers and writer will say no, no, we do completely different things but in essence, you’re doing exactly the same thing, just different speed. And something that improvisation does, I think, well, something that I do when I improvise is, I will try to figure out where characters in stories will take them and that´s something that’s very useful for writing because there are points where you get, ok, I don´t know what’s going to happen in the story. And, instead of building it in terms of a structuring like in architecture, making sure the pillars and the plot is there. You can just let the characters and the events happen, and as long as you have the characters down, the events will happen then the story will unfold.

You get to where those characters need to go because you´ve got those characters down and that´s one thing I don’t think I had before doing improvisation. I was very much, ok, I know something needs to happen here, but it was quite torturous to get that thing that happens there. It had to be worked out and then sort of written down whereas now I have more of a skill of letting it go and fill up the space with that the characters want.

Madeleine

So, I can imagine you pacing up and down in character. Are you trying anything new at the moment?

Scott

I’m working on something which is sort of an expansion of compilation of monster stories. That’s my sort of driving thing right now. Trying to figure out, and I don´t know where it’ll end up, whether it’ll end up in prose or how connected they’ll be. But just a series of different monster stories. Because they sort of almost common now and maybe even it’ll end up being in the connected stories somewhere. Just finding different ways to tell, I guess, stories of what people fear. Because the fear of monsters is a very particular kind of fear. It’s kind of a faith and curious fear, and there´s a lot of research used to base it off, which people actually believe are true. Like the Maryland goatman or 19th century vampires which were believed to be true.

Madeleine

And it´s also really fun to research as well.

Scott

Very fun. It´s quite fascinating to find out how lots of stories you would assume are not connected, you do find out that they are actually connected, they were happening. There’s a fairy tale which is set in fairy tale time which usually ends up being 300 AD and it’s about a woman who turns into a bear, and although it’s a pretty old fairy tale, it’s basically the Cinderella type of story. But at the time that it’s set, in that region there was a cult related to Diana . They’d have women who join the cult and would then dance around in bear skins and get in touch with their primal nature. So, you have to wonder if that’s connected to the story at some point.

Madeleine

So, what writers inspire you?

Scott

I like the writers that are very, very clever. I think. They’re the ones that inspire me most.

Madeleine

Like?

Scott

Like Kim Newman who seems to have read every single book and every single movie ever written. My inspiration at the moment, which I’m very adamant about that is Arthur Conan Doyle who gets a lot of flack for being terrible, almost a dopey guy who just happened to write Sherlock Holmes. He wrote other short stories which are incredibly wonderful, and he’s got all these little off hand remarks in the Sherlock Holmes stories about the other stories. And if you do a bit of poking around with little clues that he’s given, you find out that he´s clearly got an amazingly well researched story that he’s just decided not to write and left little references to.

Madeleine

Do you wonder if they’re notes for future stories for himself?

Scott

Yes. I think so…

 Madeleine

That he never got around to doing?

Scott

That’s where you go and, oh, is this story… did that start in that throw-away line? Another one but such a cliché, but is William Shakespeare. It’s that thing where you asked before about being a plotter or pantser. If I´ve got an idea in mind, with characters in mind but I can’t quite get a hold of how the plot will happen. I would have always gone back to the books of William Shakespeare and think, which of Shakespeare’s crowd he’s most like and look at the scenes in the plotting because they are perfect. If you´ve got a guy who’s a crazy murderer, Macbeth does it the best way possible, and so on. I mean, they really are, it’s one of the things that everyone takes the guy for granted, he´s a great writer. But, if he´s a great writer, he’s a great resource, in terms of this happens, then this happens, then this happens, Shakespeare´s probably wonderful for that. It’s like bang, bang, bang.

Madeleine

So, what would Shakespeare do?

Scott

What would Shakespeare do? And how can we rip it off?

Madeleine

Because everyone has for the last six hundred years. Are you trying any writing techniques at the moment?

Scott

At the moment what I’m trying, right now, is that I’m working on something a little bit different, in that I haven’t sort of plotted out a story. But I have plotted out what the main… the story isn’t going to flow chronologically, it’s going to kind of go back and forth, but it’s going to escalate chronologically. So, that’s something that’s kind of difficult to sort of plot through. It’s going to have the end happen at the beginning but the author happens at the end. But it´s going to be kind of, it’s going to escalate so that it has that climax but it’s not going to be a pure climax of action, but it´s going to be a climax, I guess, of all the threads coming together.

Madeleine

Cool, so this is the monster…

Scott

Yes, this is the monster thing.

Madeleine

Oh, I look forward to that then. Let´s wrap up, I´ll let you get on with the rest of your night. So, where could people find you if they wanted to see your work or read your work?

Scott

My place would be at the Australian Script Centre, there´re quite a few of them there. It’s not just my place there, there´s also lots of other plays there to have a look at, and also anyone looking for dramatic stuff. Probably a place to hear my work would be Grain of Truth which is a fun little improvised game show that has a very short prepared written piece by each of the performers. You can get a taste of the work that I´m working on through that.

Madeleine

And, that’s on Itunes?

Scott

I believe it’s on Itunes, yes.

Madeleine

So, if anyone wanted to connect with you on social media, how would they…?

Scott

I´m on Facebook or on Twitter @ScottMcAteer

Madeleine

@ScottMcAteer. Alright, well, thank you for talking to me today Scott. That was really great.

Scott

My pleasure.