Critique and self-doubt.

"All feedback gratefully received." That's what I always say. Of course, what I actually mean is "please love me, and don't criticise, or I'll cry".

I say all this because SWMBO gave me feedback on my second script. She gave me a lot of constructive advice on how to make it better, but I wanted it to be good enough already!

I know, unrealistic expectations of self have always been a problem; it is, after all, only my second script, and so I have things to learn. But it still hurt.

I hope that I was positive and polite when I spoke to her (even if she HATED my choice of poem for the committal), and I could see that all of her suggestions were right, but I felt a bit flat afterwards.

I've swapped scripts with other members of the group, or rather, I embraced the idea, sent my work out to 5 people, and only one has replied and I spent ages frightened to read her work, in case it was brilliant. It is very good, but not to the point where I'm intimidated.

In the final part of training, a group of us work together on a script, and I'm already convinced that none of my contributions will be used, as everyone else will be better than me.

But I have a lifelong habit of worrying about things that haven't happened yet, so perhaps I should just take a breath, calm down and do my homework!

More feedback, and another funeral

Another week, another cremation.

I got feedback from NG (my trainer) on my first script. He made several useful comments, and some that I found entertaining. This was because he had criticised one or two things which were straight lifts from my mentor's scripts.

NG is a bit of an evangelical humanist, whereas I think I'm more liberal, so there are bound to be differences, but he summed it up as "not a bad stab at it", which I took to be a complement.

There was also the problem of the family for this particular script. I'm surprised that they could even agree that the bloke had died, because they couldn't agree on anything else! Still, NG's not to know that, so he made comments about "should have got more here" (none of the music had been decided when I sent the script to him, but one piece was changed on the day of the ceremony). Therefore, he doesn't know if I didn't have everything because it wasn't given, or because I'm not good at listening, getting info etc.

Generally, the feedback was useful, however, and I don't want to seem as though I'm making excuses.

So then we came to the funeral yesterday of the elderly lady. The family are lovely, and when the deceased's daughter said hello to me when they arrived, I said what I always say: "All right?"

No, she probably wasn't, as she had just arrived for the funeral of her mother.

I must teach myself simply to say "hello". It's kinda established in the language, it really shouldn't be too much of a shock.

I met one of the funeral directors yesterday, and when he shook my hand he leaned forward and said, very quietly, "welcome to the show". To me that summed it up beautifully. A good funeral is dignified and respectful theatre.

Bring on the next performance.

Poetry and feedback.

I feel that it's about time I got organised (famous last words), and so I've printed off all of the funeral poems I've collated so far, and put them into a folder, with an index of first lines.

I was quite impressed with what I'd collected but, major note to self - think before you print!

I thought 5 copies of each would be about right (to hand out as needed). That is fine, but when you've got nearly 50 of the buggers, and they are to go into plastic punched pockets (oh my, I do love my stationery!) they struggle to fit into the ring binder set aside for this purpose (a purple holographic one).

Plus, some of them are beautiful, but a bit on the religious side, so are inappropriate for a non-religious ceremony. Many are complete sentimental rubbish - but that doesn't mean that the good folks won't love 'em. I daresay I'll have to listen to a lot of Boyzone and Celine Dion as I make my way through this career too!

However, I can always do a bit of judicious filtering, and leave the god-squad ones in a less shiny binder at home.

On a more positive note, I got some very good feedback from SWMBO from my first script. She gave some very practical tips (number pages, put a deep margin at the bottom so that you don't end up talking to your feet -that kind of thing), as well as suggesting some changes, but her general comment was that although it could be improved, she didn't feel that a family would be unhappy with that ceremony, as written.

I'm a happy bunny!