The Price of Giving Ourselves
Story by Red Holden Photography Supplied
“The ways that I had been bruised, I pressed harder into, and made use of their blue purple hue. I didn’t stop writing. I couldn’t.”
In classic Hollywood cliche, Red was working in a coffee shop when she landed her first job as an Assistant Director on a film. After working for three years in this role in the industry, she has now established herself as an emerging screenwriter. A constant stream of different avenues for her writing; a feature film, a short film, a play, a novel, and dribs and drabs of poetry. Her writing offers close studies on relationships— whether platonic or romantic—which are highly organic and deeply relatable. Recently relocated to Tasmania, she is camping all over the state while working on her next project.
In my room back home there is a bookshelf overflowing with the words of great poets and humble lesser known writers and playwrights; Walt Whitman, and Mary Oliver, and Andrew Bovell, David Sedaris, Joan Didion, Claire Keegan, Georgia Blaine, and Roddy Doyle. I have marinated in their imagery and dialogue. The words of Charles Bukowski have saved and swallowed me. Andre Aciman has taught me to use every word possible without saying “love”, and how to carry the heaviness of heartbreak in its’ absence. But because I’m currently camping around Tasmania, there is a bookshelf, which a friend taught me how to build, displayed with a select few of my favourites, and room for new ones, in the cab of my ute.
I booked my ticket not entirely on a whim; I’d always wanted to end up in Tassie at some point, and had projected perhaps in three years I would make the move once I’d established a career as a writer. I was working on a tv series in Brisbane, feeling miserable and being bullied by my frazzled superior, and decided to text my friends to see what date they’d booked the boat for their next lap around Australia — I had a ticket for November confirmed between takes. On reflection of that moment, I’m grateful that I wasn’t involved with anyone romantically—having been told by someone about a month prior that spending time with me he’d viewed as a waste. His words got me thinking about my own time and how I should, and want to be, spending it.
Admittedly, I romanticise a lot of my day-to-day and I look at moments as scenes or chapters in a novel. In a way, it also helps me process information. I enjoy speaking more thoughtfully and eloquently, and taking time in my responses, rather than rushing to have my turn to speak and not properly listening.
I’d always wanted to write and tell stories whether they were films, or plays, or novels. Whenever we had friends over as kids, I was making up plays for us to perform, or dance routines, and directing everyone on their movements. At first I thought that this passion meant that I wanted to be an actress, but during my time at an acting university I found that the breaking down of scripts and understanding the motives between subtext—often pencilling in lines I would have written in place of the ones on the page—was what I paid attention to the most.
After I completed the acting course, I enrolled in a writing degree, but decided to drop out while in my third year of studying when I was offered a position to work as an Assistant Director for the film, 6 Festivals, by the same company who’d allowed me to learn from them while working at the coffee shop. I said yes before I even knew what the requirements of the role were. I laugh about it now thinking of how green I was, saying yes to whatever any of the crew asked me, and quickly turning around to google what it meant. I would stay up later than anyone else, studying the schedule and call sheet, trying to get a better understanding of how a film progresses from script to screen. I had no idea what I was doing, and if I was doing any of it correctly, but if it hadn’t been for the graciousness of the first Assistant Director taking me under his wing and training me, I think I would have been swallowed whole and spat back out by the industry.
What I quickly came to learn is that the film industry is nowhere near as glamorous as what people may think, and the rumours and allegations about sexual harassment and abuse on set are undoubtedly true. Married men almost thirty years my senior were commenting on my legs on days I wore shorts instead of jeans, and slurring in my face with bourbon breath about how they would absolutely spend a night with me if they weren’t married—as if I never had a say in the matter. These moments undoubtedly had a hand in my sabbatical from crewing, and questioned why I wanted to be working in an industry angled towards such oppressive behaviour. Not to mention the exhaustion from being overworked and underpaid left little room for my own creativity, deprived of any chance to work on my own scripts–my eyes were bloodshot and screaming at me to sleep.
I’d lost a grip on the ordinary little moments that made me enjoy writing, sitting in a coffee shop before anyone else has woken up, wiping crusty leftovers of sleep from my eyes and trying to form the first threads of a thought. Last year, I went into a bear-like hibernation, ignoring my phone and cancelling plans so that I could focus on writing. The ways that I had been bruised, I pressed harder into, and made use of their blue purple hue. I didn’t stop writing. I couldn’t. I was sending scripts and pitch decks to producers and people I’d come to know from my time working on set, who I also believed in and valued their feedback. I was starving for it.
But what also came out of this period was an intense amount of what I’ve named the Crying Cowboys — a series of charcoal drawings based on the script I was working on. The series stemmed from the script idea of two cattle farming brothers; one scene in particular that I was going back and forth with writing because the grief of it was a lot to bear the weight of. Sometimes I would act out the scene and put myself in the character’s position to then find the words they wanted to say, but in this case, drawing was what helped me dive deeper into their world. The drawings have now become a kind of art therapy for me when I’m feeling unsteady, the nausea and anger of an episode rising up like sticky bile, and I step into my studio — “studio” now on the road being wherever I can set up my table — into their world, and draw.
The things that I write about are all lived experiences — not necessarily the plot, although all of my characters so far bar one are autobiographical, but the meaning of it. It’s important for me to draw from what I’ve lived through because it’s a way of getting it out of my body and making something reflective out of a traumatic, or heartbreaking situation.
I am a nuisance at a dinner party, scribbling down lines of conversation on napkins or receipts with lipstick; anything close enough to a journal and pen. Perhaps I’m never entirely present in any situation because I’m always editing a script in my head, or turning an argument into a short story. I’m never quite a part of anything, but more of an onlooker, watching a party through a window from across the street, knowing that it wouldn’t really make a difference if I entered or not. Sometimes it’s loneliness in a crowded room. Connection without intimacy —an intimate separation. And time. Time is at the forefront of my thinking when establishing my initial notes of a script. Time, not in the same way that Christopher Nolan explores lineage, but in who we choose to give ours to.
It’s a conversation overheard in bars and cafes, whether we have plenty of time, or not enough, and if it’s being wasted—just as I’d decided that my time would be best spent booking a ticket to Tasmania and applying for funding here. There is a strange societal unease around milestone years; a list of outdated accomplishments that accumulate to “success” in life. Moving interstate to further my career, and camping without a plan was never part of my personal looming milestone success checklist.
By twenty-eight, in all honesty, I didn’t think I would still be here. Can one be a hopeful pessimist with a deadline for happiness tattooed on their fingers? And yet, I shower to wash off each day, I brush my teeth, and lie down to close my eyes, and hear my heart still beating. And I hear my dad’s voice, stay safe, stay alive.
I can remember the first moment that I felt like a writer. It was a short story I wrote called Sugar, Baby. The story is a creative non-fiction piece about seeing the guy who raped and ruined me for the first time since it happened. I hadn’t told anyone, and the secrecy of it held an uncomfortable amount of power over me. At the time of writing it, I’d been struggling to find my particular style, and where I sat amongst the ranks of literature. I was yet to be diagnosed with Dissociative Identity Disorder—because of what happened, the behaviour stemmed from PTSD—and I was going through a particularly bad episode, feeling an immediate, and absolute, severance from my body, and into someone I couldn’t recognise.
Writing his name into the story was never going to happen—I still struggle saying it, or being around people with that name—so in the story I called him the Candy Man. By changing his name, I could write about it and remove the sticky tar that had kept my mouth closed for so long. Essentially, since that moment, I’d been waiting. Waiting for it to stop being painful to think about. Waiting to become something, anything else. I’m more aware of how I speak about it now to myself and to others—without any shame or embarrassment, or fear of him overhearing or appearing; a small kindness to myself that no police officer ever gave me. There’s a patch of hair which he ripped out which grew back with a blonder tinge to it, but because my hair is so thick and vibrant, no one notices it. Sometimes I think that’s why it is.
After I’d finished writing it, my hands were shaking and I felt like I wanted to throw up, but there was something else, and I thought, is this what relief feels like? That is what writing is for me, it’s taking what I cannot speak aloud about, and allowing me to speak about it.
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