Love U2

Ines Durand, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University

Ines Durand

Ines is a second-year Occupational Therapy student at PolyU and has lived in Hong Kong for her whole life. A French and Chinese writer of poems, she is trying to pick up reading again after putting it off for years. She likes having heart-to-heart conversations, and a careful eye may catch her being spontaneously goofy. Music and singing appeal to her, as well as asking questions on world phenomena and a more recent hobby of reading about theology.

Author’s Introduction

Coming up with the idea of this screenplay was very random. In the course ELC1C03 Creative Writing in English, we were prompted to create a main character who was obsessed with something. I thought of one who happened to be obsessed with a band, U2, whose songs I’d heard about but barely knew (except Beautiful Day, which I had to perform in our Primary 6 concert). I considered the idea, said “Why not?” and just went with it.

Originally, I had planned for it to be a comedy-drama, but actually making it funny was (and still is) a challenge. My humour is quite lame as you might attest, so deciding to spin it into a genre I’m unfamiliar with was both exciting and squirm-inducing. If you find some parts funny, that’s absolutely fantastic.

I’ve also come to realise that the first draft is always the start, not the end. Revising a piece really does improve it, even though my fear tells me it would mess things up even further. In doing so, I have tried to develop other characters much more, make the scenes more coherent, and make events more realistic. Yes, adding and dumping parts of writing is painful. Not knowing how the whole piece will look like until it unfolds feels uncomfortable. But ultimately, revising drafts is critical to improving pieces in the creative writing process.

Photo Credits

Photo by Tom Barrett on Unsplash