Well, we are only a few weeks away from the publication of Great Sexpectations, the third novel in the Laura the Explorer series. How relieved I am to have finally reached this point! It’s no secret that this novel took me WAY longer to write than I ever thought it would, and there are a few reasons for that. Some are personal, which I won’t go into, but in terms of the book itself there were some huge plot challenges that I faced when trying to wrangle this book together. I always end up with a lot of deleted scenes and deleted storylines from the final version of the book, but this was the first time that I think I’ve deleted a HUGE number of characters as well as some fairly hefty plotlines. So today, I’m going to deep-dive into one of the big challenges I faced when trying to write this book and how I came about solving my problems to finally get the book working!
Setting a novel on a film set when I’ve never worked on one.
So! Here was the first big challenge. In Laura the Explorer, at the end of the novel, Laura leaves her job at Tiger Finance and is offered a job as an assistant location manager on a film set. And then in Eat Pray Shag, we know that Laura is only weeks away from starting her new job, and the book ends with her new career imminently commencing.
So, I had the framework for Great Sexpectations set up before I wrote a single word; Laura was going to go to work on a film set. I chose this job for her way back when I was writing Laura the Explorer, because it’s one of those careers I’ve always secretly coveted, and thought it would be really cool to do myself. So writing a character who gets to work on a film set seemed like a great idea!
Only problem though … I’ve never worked on a film set. And as much as watching tv shows like Unreal or movies like Bowfinger were a great starting point, when I tried to write about Laura going to work on a film set I kept hitting brick walls. How could I write about something I really had no idea about?
The solution seemed obvious. I’d just have to get myself a job on a film set and get some first-hand behind-the-scenes experience. And what better way to do that than by …
Becoming an Extra on a TV Show
Extras work! What a perfect way to be a fly-on-the-wall for a few days and watch the crew in action! It seemed like the perfect solution, and luckily, since I live in Sydney, there are extras agencies and films and TV shows constantly being shot in Sydney. So I signed up at an extras agency, got my professional headshots done, and then proceeded to wait for a call …
Except then we had the COVID lockdowns, and it seemed that no matter how many jobs I flagged I was available for, I just wasn’t getting picked as having the right ‘look’ that the various jobs wanted. It took almost a year of waiting before, finally, I got the call that I’d been picked for a role.
Finally getting a job as an Extra
I got the part as the Court Recorder on season one of the Australian version of The Twelve!! Okay, so technically I was the backup Court Recorder, which meant I had to wait for a day when the primary extra couldn’t come in, but that day did happen and I finally got called in! It turned out that TV shows are filmed in ‘blocks’ which means they get all the same extras in for a number of days while they are shooting scenes that are meant to be happening in one day in the show (in TV and movie land, it can take weeks to film something that is meant to happen in one day), so I ended up getting to go onto the TV set on five different days. It was such a fun experience, and also really surreal. The Court Recorder role is basically the courtroom typist or the stenographer (although alas, there was no stenographic machine, just a laptop) who sits in the courtroom during trials and records everything that is said. And the courtroom was an entire set in a studio, complete with moving walls and smoke machine.
I can still vividly remember the first time I was called in from the extras holding area to go on set, and how I was just sat down up on the podium area below the actor playing the Judge, and directly in front of me playing one of the lawyers was Sam Neill. Nobody explained anything to me at all in regards to what I was meant to be doing, and before I knew it they’d shouted ‘Action!’ Panicking, because I had no idea where the camera even was and if I was currently in the shot, I simply put my hands on the laptop in front of me and started to pretend type as the actors started saying their lines. I was too terrified to even look up from the laptop in case I found myself looking straight down a camera lens and ruining whatever shot they were doing.
But after they cut each shot and did retakes, I started to get more of a handle for what was happening, working out where the camera was each time and whether or not I was ‘in shot’ and needed to pretend to type or if I wasn’t in shot and could just sit back and watch the action. Ironically, the one close up of me that made it into the show I’m pretty sure was this very first take I was in, when my ‘pretend typing’ was the most fake!
Fun things I learned on set
1. Call times are EARLY. To say I was shocked was an understatement when my day 2 call time email came in and I saw I was required on set at 5.45am.
2. Extras are super fun people. When we weren’t required on set, the extras got to hang out in a kind of holding area that had big tables and chairs for us to sit at. A lot of the seasoned extras brought decks of cards and other games to play while they waited, and I spent the time chatting with other extras about other jobs they had done. I also learned from the extras that food was always provided and was free, and that yes we could go and take advantage of the free coffee carts they had on site! Winning!
3. There is a LOT of crew involved. Being a fairly big production, there were a lot of people on set at all times. I was amazed at just how many camera/sound/boom/lighting operators and assistants were always present, and that’s not to even mention the director, 2nd Assistant director and 3rd assistant director … there was probably a 4th assistant director as well! The crew were the ones I was the most interested to watch, since Laura is meant to be part of the crew, and so whenever I was on set I had my eyes firmly tracking all the different things the crew members were doing.
4. People in the film industry are LOVELY. Everyone was so nice to work with. I know this is a bit of an overstatement, and I’m sure not everyone is nice, but in general it was a lovely place to work. One of the assistant directors was even happy to have a quick chat with me between takes and let me grill her on all she knew about location managing, which I was very grateful for!
How working on a TV set both helped and hindered my writing
While working on The Twelve gave me some great behind-the-scenes insights into how a TV show is made, it also kind of helped to overwhelm me and my ideas for the book. Deep diving into different careers and settings is a great way for a writer to make their work more authentic, but it can also become a burden because suddenly there’s so much detail you want to include – detail which actually has nothing at all to do with the story of your book. Unfortunately one thing I did do when I was trying to write Great Sexpectations last year was to overcomplicate the plotlines. I had SO many crew members as characters. In fact, I had huge character matrixes and about thirty different named characters with their respective crew roles just for the film set scenes in the book. Combine that with the other plotlines and characters I wanted to focus on – namely Kalina, Ben, Lucas and Holly (Lucas’s girlfriend) and there was suddenly a LOT going on. Too much going on, in fact. And one of the hardest things was trying to connect Laura’s two worlds together (her film set career vs her out-of-work life) so that I could end up with one story in a book, rather than two competing stories squished into one book.
I tried writing the book in different directions about three or four times before giving up on each draft in frustration. And funnily enough, the solution came from Linden (my husband) on one of our long drives to Mudgee when I finally just tried talking out the plotlines with him and why I didn’t think they were working.
Advice for writers: Talk it out with a friend
For someone who doesn’t read fiction, Linden is surprisingly good at throwing out plot suggestions that result in my “Aha!” moments. As it happened, we were just driving into Mudgee and I was telling him how I was struggling to connect the plotlines in my book with so many competing characters when he suddenly said, “Why does she have to be working on such a big film production? Maybe it’s actually some shoddy, low-budget real tiny film.”
My first reaction was, “Well that can’t work, because she’s the assistant location manager, so there needs to be at least one other location manager and you wouldn’t have more than one location manager on a small film.” (By the way, I am very logically minded, so this kind of reasoning is like a brick wall for me). But then Linden said “How about she gets made into the only location manager, and the whole thing is a big clusterfuck?”
Okay, so then my brain finally decided to work. Almost instantly I could see my cast of characters shrinking down. All those funny but unnecessary little plotlines just disappearing. Laura’s boss, the original location manager, disappearing. The crew being honed down into just the characters who were essential to the core plotlines – and dumping all the others.
It really was the “Aha!” moment I’d needed. And even though it would mean going right back to the start and rewriting the whole book once again, I could suddenly see it working.
And that was that! I started writing the whole book again, salvaging scenes that just needed a bit of tweaking for the new storyline and deleting a whole lot that no longer worked. I plotted out the book once again and this time I could actually see that it would come together effectively. And though I haven’t given away any spoilers for Great Sexpectations, you’ll now know that Laura does indeed go and work on a film set, however it is rather smaller, lower-budget, and slightly shoddier than she had anticipated. But that just means there’s extra fun for Laura to deal with!
Oh, and in case you wanted to catch my cameo on The Twelve, I’m in Season One, Episode Five, about six minutes in :)