Monday 29th April 2013

When do you throw in the towel, and realise that the story you're working on isn't actually any good? I'm in the middle of a couple of tweaks on a short story that's due a deadline to tomorrow. Any tweaking is purely cosmetic now, just a tightening up here and there. At this stage, I don't want to do too much of a rewrite, because the story itself is pretty much written. Completed. Finished. As well it should be. I've sent it off to two other competitions already.

Basically, the not so hidden punchline to that paragraph is that, not only have I posted the story to two previous competitions, I've also had it rejected twice, too. It hasn't even made the long list. I just got the last rejection a couple of days ago, meaning that it's perfect timing to release it from statis and get it out there one more time. Now, I'm a reasonably paranoid and self deprecating kind of chap. Hell, I'm also a unreasonably paranoid and self deprecating kind of chap. Any lack of praise for my work will cause me to tense up, convinced that whatever it is that I'm working on isn't worth any kind of comment whatsoever, and people are all too willing to change the subject before being forced into a situation where they have to concede that whatever thing it is that's under discussion is just disappointing, whether it be a short story, a play, or maybe even sexual congress. Maybe that that middle one. Whatever. Obviously, being like many other creative types, these paranoid feelings remain in check even when people say flattering things. Maybe they even get heightened, because we're hard wired, most of us, not to really take on compliments, not without a great deal of effort and self coaching. Many famous actors refer wryly to the recurring dream that one day they're going to get 'found out' as someone with no talent. Why should it be any different for a creative type who hasn't even had a career yet?

Look, I know how a lot of short story competitions work. I've heard the horror stories about, uh, the stories. The unpalatable truth is that the people judging these things have to wade through a remarkable amount of dreck, of stuff that is at best unoriginal, and at worst, seemingly unfinished. And a lot of the time, judges are forced to wonder to themselves 'does this writer know? Do they actually think they're good?' Presumably they do. Here's the thing: I actually like this twice rejected story. It's not any great and powerful change of events, but it is a sweet moment. A passing kiss, if you like. So I have no problem with sending it off one more time. To see what happens. I keep in my mind all those popular tales of the authors who had their most famous story rejected thirty or forty times before finally getting accepted. Sometimes, it really is just a numbers game.

(while writing this blog, I came across a flyer for the very short story competition I'm about to enter. I've decided to take this as a good omen. On the other hand, while writing the last paragraph, I spotted someone pushing a ten foot wicker man down a Brighton high street. I'm being serious. I haven't yet decided what sort of omen that is. Probably best not to think about it too much)

Saturday 6th April 2013

I'm probably two, maybe three drafts away from the final draft of a story I'm working on called 'Broom Handle'. If I'm lucky, it's only one draft. When I had the idea for the story, it seemed really simple. And, actually, it is: the idea itself is quite a basic one, and shouldn't require too much in the way of complicated add-ons. But because the concepts aren't that simple for the characters themselves, I need to be a bit clever about how I'm telling the story, a cleverness that's currently hiding from me. Over the last few drafts, I've begun to hate this story. Not actively, not with real passion, not even so much that I consider the writing (and re-writing) of it to be a genuine chore .. but certainly enough for me to question if the story is actually good enough. And, by extension, if I'm good enough as a writer. 

Again, this is why it's useful to have deadlines. If I'd been writing this story a year or so ago, pretty much at any point in my history, there's a damn good chance that I'd have given up on it by now. After all: what's the point? Who's actually waiting for this story? No-one. (actually, that's a bit of a lie: two friends have asked to read it when it's finished, because they quite liked the sound of the idea behind it). It's so easy to let a pretty good idea wither and die even before it's finished. That's any idea: whether it be for a short story, a film - or even a little blog like this: if you don't get the damn thing down as quickly as possible, even if it's not particularly good, then there's a very good chance that nothing will get written at all. Of course, that's a major factor in itself: so many things don't get written because they are not perfect in their first incarnation. Then the inner critic gets disheartened, dials back, and thinks that they'll do better if the first running jump is much better. What happens, of course, is that there are lots of running jumps, quite a few bad stumbles, and then: nothing. Nothing actually gets finished. Writing (as well as anything I do, like acting, directing, improvising, whatever) seems to be a journey of constantly re-learning the same things, over and over. You can have twenty years in the same discipline, and still, in that twentieth year, re-realise with evangelical fervour the thing that you learnt in the first day. For me, in this past year, it's been this: it really is irrelevant if I write every single day. Even if I'm producing, say three thousand words every single day: that doesn't matter. Sure, it's relevant, but those three thousand words a day don't really add to the pile if you don't do one simple thing: ACTUALLY FINISH. 

I think it was doing Nanowrimo last year that really cemented that ethos for me. Now, I haven't yet looked back at the novel that I finished in November (with about thirty minutes to spare), and I'm reasonably confident that it's a pretty shoddy bit of story telling. But I know that it's a pretty shoddy bit of storytelling  and that in itself has been a instructive experience. Just the pressure of finding narrative closure (or a deliberate lack of closure) for my characters demanded of me a certain amount of discipline  that I hadn't always really buckled down to before, mainly because of that old idea that nobody's actually waiting for the story, so it didn't matter - not really - if I didn't actually buckle down and finish the damn thing. 

This year, I seem to have got a lot better at actually finishing stories. Some of them, I even think are reasonably good. So far, fate doesn't quite agree - none of them have been shortlisted for any short story competitions that I've sent them off for. On occasion, I suspect that the story wasn't quite right - either for whatever comp I was sending them off for, or maybe even that the story itself wasn't perfect. I haven't sent off a story that I didn't think was as good as it could be, however. 

So, these deadlines are a real life line. As I've indicated, there's a reasonable chance that if I didn't have a deadline for this story (April 15th), I might have bailed on it quite some time ago, as just so much damn hard work. It's easy to forget, however, that writing - good writing - is supposed to be damn hard work: it's not as if you can just throw one word onto the page after the other without so much as a re-write or checking over to see if it makes any sense whatsoever (like this blog, for instance). It really is - without getting pretentious about it all - an actual craft, and that demands a certain amount of respect and hard work. It can take a very long time to understand exactly what that means. I suspect I'm not even close to truly appreciating what I'm taking on. 

Lots of rehearsal this week for both the Brighton Fringe shows. With Three Kinds Of Me, we're having to do a fair bit of re-write in order to get the balance of the show right for the new space (and the new running time). We always knew that, just because of these seemingly innocuous and irrelevant details, that the show would be very different, that, indeed, it would be about something different, but it's still a helluva challenge to rip up what you've already achieved, and, for all practical intents and purposes, begin again. Well, I say we: all of the work is being done by writer/performer Sarah Charsley, who is doing extraordinarily well. I can imagine how challenging it is to totally re-do something that you are creatively so close to. 

As  well as 3KoM, we've got A Beginning, A Muddle, And An End, the totally improvised show. I'm still debating with format, etc - I don't want it to be too much of a ringleader/circus type improv show, where the 'director' directly addresses the audience and asks them to call out suggestions, because I feel (this week, anyway) that this is not quite in the neighbourhood of what I want the finished product to be. This isn't a judgement call on one kind of improvisation as opposed to another, but I certainly want the audience(s) to have the very real experience of a play - rather than an extended sketch - being formed before their very eyes. This week, we were rehearsing in the DukeBox Theatre, which gave the cast a good chance to experience how it will feel to perform on an actual stage, with light and music / sound. Things are beginning to fall into place ..