Her book Inconceivable: Heartbreak, Bad Dates and Finding Solo Motherhood won a lot of attention but that wasn’t how her career began.
Alexandra had been a playwright in New York for 10 years, before that where her plays were produced Off-Broadway. She is now working as a screenwriter on ABC’s Return to Paradise whilst developing her own TV series. She’s also a Writers Victoria mentor!
Writers Victoria Digital Resident, Emma Andrews, spoke with Alexandra about her career and what’s next.
I’m fascinated by the collective nature of your work from playwright, to memoirist, to ghostwriter and now screenwriter. Before I make my own assumptions based on headlines, how would you describe your career?
It’s definitely a patchwork of things.
I started out in theatre acting, but I didn’t find the roles interesting. So, I decided to write my own plays, and moved to New York as it’s the centre of the theatre universe. I was quite monofocused. Eventually I was worn down by my own ambition. Writing ended up being an act of work rather than an act of love.
That’s when I moved back to Melbourne and decided to use donor sperm to become a parent. I noticed people were really interested in the story of what I was doing. It was really salacious and titillating to people that someone would use donor sperm to have a baby.
Everyone would lean forwards when I mentioned what I was doing. I got a lot of questions. People would be agog. And I thought: this is a story. This is something that people are curious about. This is something that people are ignorant about.
These stories hadn’t necessarily been told, or if they had been, they were not nuanced. I discovered a whole community of people doing this. And there had been things written about this, but those versions did not contain any nuance or greyness, conflict, or a sense of what you might grieve and leave behind in this process. I wanted to write a story that encapsulated all of that. That was the book I had to write. I had a deep compulsion to tell the story.
This is where my career started to dovetail with my personal life.
I pitched an article – a long-form feature piece – to Good Weekend and once that story was in print, publishers started to reach out.
‘We loved your article. Could it be a book?’
They were interested in me writing a memoir. I immediately thought yes, as there was so much more I wanted to explore than what was in the article.
This is an unconventional route, by the way … pitching it out before it’s written and it being picked up.
Helen Garner talks about this and says ‘you get one for free’. That book was my one for free. It just came out.
We wanted to launch the book to coincide with Mother’s Day so that meant the book had to be ready pretty quickly – in around 18 months. The deadline was a gift. It provided the pressure to push me forward. The benefit of limited time is that you don’t have the luxury of procrastination. I wrote in any small moment I could whilst being a new single parent.
And so, my career had officially swung away from playwriting.
Everyone would lean forward when I mentioned what I was doing. I got a lot of questions. People would be agog. – Alexandra Collier
And then what came next, after the memoir?
I started pursuing screenwriting. I was writing my own original plot on spec to try and get into it. This kind of thing might not get produced or pay you, but the next job it gets you will. It got me a job as a screenwriter on Return to Paradise.
So, in parallel two things were unfolding — my memoir and a detective TV series. It was both luck and design. I followed the trail of my interests.
What is the experience of being a screenwriter like?
We brainstorm each episode in the writers’ room across five days. We discuss the plot, mechanics, characters and the big turns of the episodes and then we’re sent away to work on one episode on our own. We go away with a pretty clear outline and then have quite a bit of freedom within each scene. The writing part is still a solo endeavour.
In the writers’ room we’re constantly talking, pitching, listening, telling stories and anecdotes. It’s a very vulnerable place. You have to pitch all these ideas, all the time. Often, they’re getting shot down. Sometimes it’s a ‘yes and’ which develops into something. Other times, it’s a no and you have to move on to the next. You have to learn not to take it personally.
You get good at not getting attached and weather lots and lots of notes on your drafts. You don’t have a lot of control over the final product in TV. But it’s amazing to see the things you come up with become a reality and get filmed.
In screenwriting, the voice belongs to the characters in the fictional worlds that you create. The skill is to shape-shift into other people’s voices for this work. In your own writing, in my memoir, I had control over the story and the voice.
It’s a very particular skill set and you have to hone it over time. It’s such a specific craft in its precision, brevity, action and visual dictates as well as how you have to work with other people.
The benefit of limited time is that you don’t have the luxury of procrastination. – Alexandra Collier
Do you have an idea of what’s next for you?
I’m working for free when I’m not working. By that I mean I’m always working on my own stuff. At the moment it’s the screenplay about a solo mum who is a homicide detective. It’s about the struggle between ambition and motherhood – my twin obsessions.
I’m writing it because it’s compelling and interesting. The worst case is that it ends up being a sample that gets me more work. The best case is that it gets optioned, developed and turned into a show. It’s a long game.
Got a story to tell but don’t know where to start? Our mentors are experienced authors, like Alexandra, and they can help you take your career to the next level. Find out more about our mentors and assessors.