A Hired Gun and A Fist Half-Full of Dollars: Freelance Writing in Australia ~ Guest Post by Dave Halliday [06.12.2009]

Starting out as a freelance writer in Australia is like learning to surf. You get a few good waves, but mostly you just get dumped a lot.

Having been freelancing for a number of years, I have taken part in a plethora of random projects. I have written feature articles for various magazines, and had short fiction and poetry published by others. I have worked as a screenwriter for Universal music videos and I have written for documentaries and advertising campaigns. Last year I also had a non-fiction book commissioned by Australian Scholarly Publishing, due for release in 2010, and more recently I worked with Jason Alexander and Fran Drescher making a film for Geoff Edelsten’s wedding extravaganza. Of the projects I’ve taken part in, this was one of the more interesting ones.

Edelsten’s wedding video was a short film sent to guests in lieu of an invitation. I was asked to write it as a romantic comedy, and initially the good doctor Edelsten wanted a re-hashed version of Pretty Woman. I was editing the third script draft until someone, somewhere pointed out to the couple that Pretty Woman is about a prostitute, and hence not wedding film material unless the bride doesn’t mind people thinking she’s a hooker. Pretty Woman references were then abandoned.

Jason Alexander was signed early and I was pressing to have Jerry Seinfeld too, and set the action in a diner a’la Seinfeld; when a production has a carte blanche, you need to see how far you can push these things. But in the end, neither actor was keen to revisit former roles, especially as a vanity project for a doctor in Melbourne.

The script quickly became a finely orchestrated frenzy of to-ing and fro-ing; drafts were sent from myself to the director, the director to the producer, the producer to Edelsten, and then back down the chain again. I met regularly with the director, and he’d give me Edelsten’s most recent ideas. From my original script, the producer made adjustments, and then told me to undo most of those changes when they realised you can’t tamper too much with a story arc and expect people to stay interested.

Ultimately, seeing George Costanza speak my words down the barrel of a camera was comforting; an assurance that perhaps what I was doing was Right. It was a good brief, but of all my freelance projects, writing music videos has proved to be the most fun.

Music videos are becoming cheaper to make, but the record companies’ expectations on small studios have become increasingly unrealistic. In one brief Liquid Creations studio in Fitzroy had to go from no concept or script, to having a final clip to be screened on Rage, Channel V and Video Hits all within the space of two weeks.

For the Universal single Skylight by rapper Phrase and Kram from Spiderbait, I wrote a concept based on classic 70’s television show Monkey). I had to write a treatment, complete a script and also source kung fu specialists to train hip hop artists to execute a semi-believable fight scenes all within the space of several days.

I also foolishly wrote a pig into the script.

On the shoot date, after days of searching, we finally found a brown piglet. He became the unofficial mascot of the film and spent most of his time shivering under blankets and towels in his dressing room. The cast and crew became very fond of him and it was distressing to learn that we had in fact borrowed the piglet from a spit roast company and after his time in the spotlight, he would return to his former vocation, none the wiser.

Needless to say, the frantic creative energy on set produced a weird kind of mayhem that the mind feeds on like a herd of possessed swine. It was a surreal feeling to arrive at the studio at the crack of dawn to find award-winning kung fu masters and breakdancers crossing blades with DJs, musicians, hip-hop artists and a crowd of armed Chinese extras, with Jade McRae dressed as Buddha and Kram dressed as an evil wizard lurking in the background, watching as make-up artists blow-dried a shivering piglet wrapped in blankets.

For this clip, the writing went completely hand-in-hand with production. During the shoot, I would write and re-write the script on the set as producers and directors constantly changed their ideas. Music-video writing requires the writer to be able to come up with interesting and original ideas and write them into the script quickly, and then be willing to abandon your favourite scenes to the editing room floor without putting up a fuss. More importantly, each project demands its own style or “voice” (although I tire of writers and writing teachers in particular, crapping on about “voice” like it is something that could be learned.)

At the beginning of freelancing, each piece of published work is like collecting scalps to hang from your belt. The most important thing I’ve learned is to be willing to write expertly on subjects on which you have very little previous interest. Because when the work dries up, you take on briefs of an absurd nature just to make ends meet. You’ll be ghost-writing blogs for entrepreneur playboys, writing how-to manuals for building tree houses and screenplays for step-by-step guides to welding sheet-metal. Newspaper and magazine work is good when you can get it, but the day to day reality of freelancing is often much more random.

The life of a freelancer is distressingly similar to those poor souls who stand sentinel-like on Tyler Durden’s porch in Palahniuk’s Fight Club. If you can stand still for three days and nights with no encouragement, then you may be admitted into Project Mayhem. If you are a writer, the task is similar, only more arduous. My advice for any aspiring freelancer would be to endure. Paid work is not easy to find, but if you can devote a solid ten years to your craft with only marginal shreds of encouragement at best, then welcome to the club.

Dave Halliday is an ideas man and an overall good guy. His ideas have been translated into music videos, fiction and non-fiction, articles and books. He has just completed a Masters in Editing and Publishing and has worked as a screenwriter for Universal Music. Before working as a hired gun, he was a secondary school English and History teacher. He can be reached for scriptwriting, scriptsaving and other freelance writing assignments at davidphalliday@gmail.com .

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