Sunday 1 June 2014

Had a haircut and shaved the beard off in the last couple of days, and it feels like I've lost something roughly the weight of my own head. When the beard first started growing, back in January, it was mainly down to laziness, but then I got a part in a play in which the beard seemed to quite suit, so I kept it for that. And while enough people seemed to like it, there came a time that I was pretty keen to be rid of it, particularly as I was beginning to look like Serpico by way of Jesus (the Robert Powell version, obviously, not one that actually existed). 

And now it's gone, and I look concenviably younger. Only by about three months, but hell, I'll take what I can get. It's a good enough novelty while it lasts. The thing is, I'm not usually one of these people who gets their hair cut on even a semi-regular basis. (and yes, I realise while typing that last sentence that I could simply have replaced the phrase 'one of those people' with the shorter, and more accurate, 'people'. I'm pretty sure that there have been years when I've only had to cut it once. Not such a big deal when you're bass guitar in that band in your local pub that's definitely gonna make it any day now. Really, I've never really cared about what hairstyle I'm styling. People who have known me a while will be able to readily vouch for this. Cut, grow shoulder length, cut, repeat. 

But this time, it - along with the beard - had got so long - not really all that long, in the world of long beards (can you imagine such a world?), but long enough that any hairdresser wouldn't neccessarily know what it was that I wanted, particularly as my conversational skills with hairdressers tend to not get any more detailed than 'Just a bit of a cut'. This is an opening line that's served me well since about the age of eight, although addmitedly not one that you want to be misheard if you're in Croydon and the other person has easy access to a razor.  

Because that wouldn't be quite enough this time around, I did something that I've never done before, which was to bring along a photograph of the sort of style I thought I wanted. Of course, it wasn't a photograph at all, but an image on my mobile phone. This didn't stop me feeling slightly foolish as I showed it to the hairdresser. I wanted to be very clear that I wasn't expecting or even hoping to look like the guy in the picture, who was all pretty-boy-pouty-lips and airbrushed cheekbones. I think most hairdressers know this already, but mild paranoia had set in: I half expected him to do a double take between me and my proffered mobile, and fight hard to contain his hysteria. That, and beckon a couple of his work colleagues over so that they could join in their derision. None of that happened, of course.  He just nodded, looked entirely unimpressed, and got to work. Six months of hair were clipped into a reasonably innoffensive (and a helluva lot lighter) style in under twenty minutes. OK, so I had previously been waiting there for about half a hour, but that's hardly the point. 

Maybe it's just the change in hair, the change in weather and the change in month (hello, summer), but I'm currently feeling infused (and enthused, I guess) with all manner of upcoming projects. There's a couple of performances coming up next month, plus a full length script to get done in roughly the same time. Plus, I worked out this week that some of the writing projects I've got going on will take me - and this is if I'm working non-stop, along with everything else I've got going on - til at least 2020. That's two leap years away. On the bright side, I will have probably had a haircut again by then. 

Thursday 22nd August 2013

As a writer, you’re not really meant to go on too much about whatever it is that you’re working on at the moment. There are many reasons for this, the most compelling being that if you’re talking about the writing, then you’re not getting on with the actual business of doing the writing. It’s a form of procrastination: if you can talk about how fantastic the finished product is going to be, it (deceptively) lets you off the hook of actually putting in the work of putting one word after the other on a page. What you talk about will always be better than the dull, flabby story that you finally produce. There’s also the fact that you’re likely to dilute the story. Speak it out loud enough times – and all stories, at their source, come from the oral tradition (oh, stop sniggering at the back) – and the written version becomes a pale tracing.

There is, of course, yet another reason to shut up about your writing, and it’s probably the most simple. Unless you’re already published, unless people are prepared to fork out twenty quid at a book festival and ask some variation of ‘where do you get your ideas’, then, frankly, nobody gives a damn about that thing you’re probably never going to finish. Oh, sure, some of your loved ones will, and the couple of people who earnestly believe that you actually do have some talent – but even those people would rather you shut the hell up, and get on with the writing.

Back when I lived in Croydon, I remember attending a house party, although I don’t clearly remember anyone there, suggesting that the party was of a friend-of-a-friend. Therefore, I found myself wandering aimlessly through the various rooms. I do have one very clear memory of the party, however, and it’s of a writer talking – rather tediously – about this book he was working on. I remember thinking, even then, that this book would never be finished. The woman he was talking to also seemed to have reached this conclusion. He was speaking about how he got his ideas, making him reasonably unique in all of authors in that he actually had an answer to this question, even though it was likely that nobody had asked him it.

He’d written some kind of sci-fi book, which to my eavesdropping ears sounded somewhat like a EE Doc Smith kind of book. He was speaking about how he’d come up with the name for his hero. ‘You know the housing estate by the ABC cinema?’, he asked. It’s genuinely likely that you – yes, you, the one that’s reading this blog – do in fact know what housing estate he was talking about, since it’s the one that Jeremy and Mark live in, in the series Peep Show, and appears in some form in almost every episode. The name of the housing estate was (and may well still be) Zodiac Court. For as long as anyone could remember, however, the ‘O’ in court was missing. And therefore, our writer friend declared in revelatory tones that one normally reserves for penicillin being discovered growing on your lab table, wouldn't it be a great thing if those two words were reversed, and - ? Well, the rest is history. Uh, literally history, it seems, as a perfunctory Google search suggests that that character has not yet reached any kind of saturation point.

As I’ve indicated, though, I felt even then (and I wasn’t particularly doing any regular writing at that point) that his talking about his ideas in such a way seemed to pretty much guarantee  that he’d never finish the book. I’m not a big fan of Family Guy, but I’m fond of the repeated gag where the would-be intellectual Brian is constantly mocked: ‘you’ve been talking about that novel for three years now. How’s that going, anyway?’ Most of us probably know of a writer (read: not actually a writer) like this. I’m very aware of that trap.

However, that hasn't stopped me banging on about my writing on various networking sites. I know it can be tedious and boring to read/hear, and that it can be an excuse – as I’ve mentioned earlier – to not actually put the spadework in. I do it, however, for the same reason, I suspect, most writers do: partially for the affirmation, to get friends and other writers to show interest and support – to cheer me over the finish line – and also (the theory goes), if the declarations of a story are in such a public forum, then the idea is that I’ll be too embarrassed to do anything else but actually finish. However, I’m acutely aware that many other writers do this, and never finish (or even start) the stories that they’re wittering on about.  After all, writers have no excuse not to write, no matter how tired and emotionally drained at the end of a work day they are (which is normally, literally my excuse). The only thing to do is to sit down and write.

I feel a little more relaxed about banging on about what I’m writing (or so I tell myself) because the bulk of what I’m talking about is, for the most part, actually finished, done, completed. In the case of one play, it’s already had a full cast production. What I’m going on about now is the re-writes, the final draft. A few more of those well-wishers are now more vocal about wanting to actually read something I’ve written at some point. And, at some point, I’m going to have to take a deep breath, and let that happen. After all, why the hell else does anyone write?