Day 6: On time and writing

What is it with time and writing?

No matter how long you think a piece of work will take, it inevitably takes longer and while this piece of work waits for you to finish, it will make snarling noises, poo on the carpet and shred your curtains. Just to see how you'll react. And it will drink lots of lukewarm coffee, ideally with chocolate and King crisps.

If you take a conservative guess and give yourself heaps of time, then nothing gets done; if you try to restrict yourself to the minimum time + coffee break you think it needs, it will run over into every other part of your life. And you will end up finishing something else instead.

Today chapters 14-19 got a going over. None of them are fully edited but they are all re-modelled so I know, at least, they work chronologically, are cut back where they ran over-long and most of the dull bits have been buried in the back garden under the weeds. All the other chapters took a gentle hammering too - I now have 25 chapters, not 23 - but it was satisfying work.

And I have found out that you don't leave line spaces between separate sections, you centre a 'hash'... This is in case the editor doesn't realise there is meant to be a line space because of the configuration of the print out.

Oh yes, it's coming together--just more slowly than I'd like!

Monkey Puzzle Tree... and a chocolate gobbling dog

I finally allowed myself to print out the script, running at 118 scenes and 87 pages. And yes, it's short which is great because I've realised the fun to be had out of re-writing comes when there is space to flesh scenes or characters out in tiny little ways as you polish. Though that only works when the script works as a whole... so I haven't started reading it yet!

Meanwhile my dog, Roxy trotted into the babysitter and my daughter with a large bar of dark chocolate - 70% proof - clamped proudly between her hairy jaws. Even when tempted away with chorizo, she managed to get the sausage and still guard the chocolate under her hot little belly but yes, it was finally rescued or she was rescued from it. Or so we thought...

Cue the back bedroom next morning. Very hungover friend called Jane. Snoring softly. Softly enough to make the blind flutter like an escaped convict.

What I hadn't known was that when we'd gone out was that Jane had left a handbag by the bed. Inside were various things of international importance... and four bars of same chocolate. Only now there was no chocolate in the bag and the floor was littered with infinitely small pieces of paper and foil. Absolutely NO trace of chocolate ever having been near either. It was as if the chocolate itself must have thought it dreamed it existed and now knew it was untrue.

Judging by the quantity of debris, my guess is that the bar Roxy brought downstairs was the fourth of these, and maybe she just got tired of binging on her own and wanted to continue her binge in company. BIG mistake. I'm sure there's a lesson for us all here... hoard your chocolate at a height? learn to enjoy your guilty pleasures away from babysitters and children?

But it's better than the time she managed to lock herself into the bathroom and ate most of the contents of the bin. And at least she doesn't eat poo like the last dog. (Yeah, it's amazing what you can become grateful for over the years!)

Why is it soooo much easier to write about a dog than to read a script or a novel you've just finished? Is it fear?

I think it's fear.

This noble profession...

For forty odd years in this noble profession
I’ve harboured a guilt and my conscience is smitten
So here is my slightly embarrassed confession –
I don’t like to write, but I love to have written...

Without doubt, this is one of my favourite bits of doggerel by a writer called Michael Kanin. Doesn't it just sum up how impossibly difficult writing occasionally is, and how frustrating.

At the moment, I seem to be bogged down by all the material I want to finish or start. There's a competition being run by Shine Pictures called The Big Idea. Look it up. (http://apply.shinegroup.tv/writingcompetition/index.apply?redirect=true)
It's a really interesting competition and you're allowed up to one entry in each genre... only the storyline has to be 700 words and for some reason this seems to have stumped me. The pieces I would love to develop have either short two page outlines or storylines that range above the 3,000 mark.

And I want it to be a really strong piece - there's no point otherwise - and yet, every time I think I have space in my head to thrash it out, 'something' happens. An enquiry arrives from the outside world looking for me to develop a proposal for a body of work, or to see if I have something to match a certain brief -- which means developing on spec, yet again, but sometimes it pays and if you're not in, I don't see how you can win.

It's a greedy business. It gobbles up time.

Then there's the script-editing work, which always seems to take far more time than I ever allow for. And I'll be teaching again from Thursday eve in Filmbase so I managed to spend hours today reorganising my handouts, my notes, choosing different clips... Which led me to realise I have to see heaps of films and fast because I want to find even better clips.

And then there's the children's book I was rewriting. (I managed to narrow the focus down to just one for rewriting). My life - which seems large and enjoyable now that the tooth/ sinus/ jaw demon has been mostly expunged - tugged me me away from it a fortnight ago, at the tail end of Chapter 7...

I've realised in the interim that there there is sooo much more I can do with it and I'm wondering why I got an idea that all the chapters should be the same length? It's so arbitrary and it really isn't necessary. I'm hungry to get back to it but I haven't had time.

Mind you, sometimes that 'something' is me, allowing distraction to lure me in just about any direction. And hell knows, there are enough genuine distractions in life without procrastination jumping in. Self discipline is something that comes like a miraculous gift and then you get tons done, amazing mountains of work sift away into manageable dunes... but then, sometimes, it vanishes again.

And this is one of the reasons I haven't been looking at Facebook or writing the blog or watching those fantastic TED lectures. I WANT to be writing. I want to create something new and original and bloody compelling... and I want to finish everything else so that it feels new and original and bloody compelling, with bells on.

So I'm considering buying a self-zapping collar. I could rig it up so that if I strayed too far from the desk, it would remind me with a gentle (?) electric zap to sit back down... Only it might kill more brain cells than I successfully murdered with wine last night and might be self-defeating.

Besides, sometimes the procrastination, the long walks and the ruminating and the picking out of odd books from a bookshelf, or even the making of a pot of coffee are all necessary to the art of creation.

I think.

40,000 Words in 15 Days...

I think it's a record... at least for me!

So far, this means I've written 80,000 words since the 6th of June, ie rough drafts of two new children's books, which are loosely based on scripts that have not been made. It's such a buzz!

Realised last night, however, that I am totally whacked so taking a break this week, if I can. But it is very comforting knowing I have that material to play with and that I will have two (hopefully polished) books to offer someone by the end of the year.

It was actually quite a relief to write books after so many years on screenplays and in development, but it has meant that everything else that wasn't necessary got sidelined. The work went with me into bed, dragged me out of bed in the middle of the night and trotted along everywhere I went. When I wasn't writing something, I felt slightly adrift. I even managed to write while my family were watching TV, which shows how much it gripped me/ took over my life!

My daughter went to camp for six glorious hours a day and I buried myself in the office, only coming up for air - reluctantly! - when my daughter needed to be collected and fed. The poor child was very understanding and quite excited but she did puzzle why I had "suddenly turned into a workaholic?"

Now she has started her own book now, about a dragon keeper. Her last one (it ran to one third of a copy book) was about the Holocaust and yes, she is only 11 but I refuse to fear or squash the competition just yet. And she knows that she will be my first reader, when I've polished them up, so it's in her interest to encourage me or, at least, put up with my absences in the evenings. (7-10 are two very productive hours, for some reason.)

I can't wait for her feedback. I'm not sure whether I should let her read them herself or to read her a chapter a night. One will test the book from a reader's perspective but the other way, I'll hear what's wrong and know what needs to be fixed. I suspect it will a bit of both.

And I can't wait for these books to be done so I can get on to the next one and the next! There are several exciting projects that might stem the flow a bit - which is why these two months are precious - but that's cool too.

Hope everyone else's work is going well too?

The new novel - a difficult and trying birth!

Since nobody ever said this, I wonder how we come by the notion that writing should get easier with practice! Maybe it's a throwback to primary school when we were actually learning to write. Or was it an idea planted by Barbara Cartland, resplendent in pink chiffon lying on her chaise longue dictating to her secretary.

I've three completed books (two fiction, one non-) - unpublished, there's the rub - and yet this new one is mewling and wriggling and kicking its little heels. I'm wondering if this is the difficulty

a) of trying to write another book when you know the others are glaring down from a top shelf; I'd only send one of them out ever again)

b) trying to write an amusing/ witty/ entertaining book or

c) because it is based on some things I cannot hide that actually happened, ie my child. (Who is masquerading a bug and curled up on the sofa writing her own novel. She's only 10; she doesn't 'get' writer's block yet.)

I'm desperately moving it further and further from any resemblance to people I knew and trying to make everything hold together far more than it did in real life. (That was messy. Fun, but messy. The book, instead is simply messy. Which means my house is now supremely tidy and well cleaned and there remain only about 12 of the hundred (very) odd cobwebs that were there before I started rewriting the first draft.)

And given the whole wood/ trees analogy (being too close to the trees, being chased by crazed woodcutters wearing the heads of wolves and playing for days with cute furry little meercats that have set up home at the base of the oldest Oak; yes, it is an unusual forest), I have to plough on to get to another draft.

This means ferreting through all the handwritten edits and scraps of plot and story and dialogue that have come since the first draft was finished and without which, I will never know if the whole thing actually works. On any level.

Next time it will be PURE fiction.

Or impure. All in all, I think that would be far more fun!