Methods Of Work Avoidance # 2365

In between writing re-drafts (no, really), I have also found the time to create a avatar of myself via the website BitStrips.I'm fully aware I may have created  a generously attractive   version of myself, but screw it, it's my cartoon,and so I'll do what the hell I like.  

Thursday 29th August 2013

At ‘that’ stage with a good few short stories. I’ve been a bit like a magpie with them over the last few months (and by ‘few’, I’ve just realised I mean ‘twelve’), in that as soon as one idea gets a bit too tough to carry on writing, then I’ve flitted to another work in progress, and tinkered with that one. As soon as the tinkering gets a bit too much like hard work, then I’ve gone back to the first WIP (or a completely different one), so that my attention  span doesn’t get too hammered over the head, and I give up on the writing altogether.

Now, depending on who you listen to, this is either a perfectly fine and noble way to stop ideas (stories) getting too saggy and baggy and boring, or it’s the worst idea ever, because you have to stay committed to your ideas, and see them through to the very end, otherwise you’re never actually going to finish the bloody things at all. And, of course, in some cases, both those statements have been made by the same person at different times. Like all pieces of advice, they can be embraced or ignored as you see fit (and as you see that the advice itself fits you).

Right now, however, I feel that I need to go the hard-work route, and commit to the stories, and finish them off. One by one. This will be somewhat tough, because, at the moment, a lot of them are crap. Don’t get me wrong; this isn’t self-loathing, deprecating analysis. Even at their current stage (and I think a good few of them are about three drafts away from the final version), some of them read better than a few of the short stories I’ve bought on the kindle. There’s a reasonable amount of short stories self-published by unknown authors, some of them good, some of them awful (not nearly as many as you might think, however), and the majority of them – uh, average. Now, I’m sticking my neck out here slightly, because of course, I intend to publish my own collection at some point (reasonably) soon. So it’s a bit of a risky job – if not actually arrogant – to compare my unfinished works to those that have actually been uploaded onto a website and people are paying for. But, what the hell. I will claim that in at least a couple of cases, the stories that I’ve got, in their second or third draft, are better than the stories that somebody has deemed fit for public domain, publication, and consumption. And, yes, I am talking about the drafts of my stories that are currently in the ‘crap’ stage.

It’s not as if the stories that I’m talking about are bad, not at all. And I’m aware that I’m certainly setting myself up for a fall when I do publish my own (hey, here’s an idea, maybe I don’t publish them, that’ll keep me safe from public criticism – even better, hell, I won’t actually finish any of the stories ..). The ideas behind the stories (the ones that people have published, not mine) are actually pretty good. But quite often, the story is told in such a brief, perfunctory fashion – in the matter of about three kindle pages – that I wonder, what’s the point? It feels less like a story well told, and more like the synopsis on the back of the DVD cover : ‘Once there was this guy who said that it would be cool if we were all nice to each other but he got nailed to a tree but it was OK because he came back to life the end’ … Now, come on. I’m sure you could’ve stretched that out a bit.

It’s occurred to me recently that short stories don’t always have to be short, and they don’t have to be stories, not in the normal sense of the word. Quite often, I see short stories (very short, around 1,000 words) struggle to keep to the format of a beginning, a middle and an end. I understand the desire to keep things coherent and within a recognisable framework, but I’m not sure it’s always vitally necessary. Some of the best short stories deal with a passing thought or emotion, a reaction to something else (I’ll be honest – some of the very worst short stories do that, too, because the writer is shrinking away from committing to an idea – but that’s a blog for another time).

Anyway, I managed a few thousand words each on two stories this morning. They’re both currently at the stage of ‘terrible’, but they still feel good to write, and I still (just about) remember what I liked about the ideas in the first place, which isn’t always the case. Plus, it’s helped that in the café where I’m writing at the moment, there’s a couple of other people, both working on Important Stuff. There is a distraction here, and it’s name is Free WiFi, but there seems to be a atmosphere in these kind of places; if you’re vaguely aware that the other people are actually furiously working, rather than piddling about on facebook, or tweeting the hilarious ‘other’ dream that Martin Luther King was going to talk about, it ‘shames’ you into doing some work yourself.

Or, as writing avoidances go, writing a blog isn’t exactly the most terrible .. 

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 .. 

I Think They Call It Grazing

A reasonable amount of writing today, although if I had an editor, they probably wouldn't be able to tell the difference. My attention span seems to be slim for a writer. I've got about ten short stories on the go at the moment - which is great, it can be tough enough to come up with just one idea - but since one of my biggest problems (or do we still call it challenge these days?) as a writer is to actually finish the darn things, this can be something of a worry.

What I do then, is either a delaying tatic, or the best way forward, depending on what your view is. I spend a couple of hours on one story, and as I feel my interest begin to wane, or if there's a currently unsolvable problem that's about to demolish me, I jump ship to another story. I can't shake the feeling that this feels distinctly amatuerish, except for the fact that it seems to work. I certainly get more writing actualy done this way, rather than attempting the almost-always-failing method of re-working one page in an effort to get it exactly 'perfect' - whatever perfect means. I seem to work in this way even when I'm working on a single project - for instance, when I was writing 'Four Play', I intially wrote various keys scenes or jokes, then began to fill in gaps between them, before finally shifting them around, deleting them, re-writing, ignoring massive plot holes, writing the two scenes to bridge the plot holes, which would normally suggest only one logical thing between the two , write that .. and then, finally, have something approximating a coherent script. It probably isn't the most time-effective way to write, but it seems to have worked so far for me.

I'm a little concerned about work taking hours and mental agilty from me when I return next week, although it's true that for the first time in a year, I won't be working seven days a week. What is nice, however, is the messages of encouragement friends send regarding my writing, asking to see works in progress/finished stories. It's remarkably energising, and it's at least partially why I've been making an attempt to keep up this blog: while I'm painfully aware that there are few things more dull than a writer talking about writing (there's a fair chance that if they're talking to you about the novel that they're working on, that novel will never be completed), I use this blog to speak loudly and clearly to the three or four people who are actually reading it as a way of painting myself into a corner: if I have enough people asking me how the play/story/whatever is going on, there may be enough personal embarassment actor at stake to goad me into actually finishing the damn thing.

For the record, there are two projects (as a writer) that I'm working on at the moment: a re-write of 'Four Play', that I expect to take until at least the end of the year (which probably means that any new production won't be until at least well into the latter part of 2013), and a collection of short stories. As for the latter, I have no idea if short stories are fashionable at the moment or not - whatever I read on the subject seems to have conflicting views. But in any case, short stories seem to have a disipline all of their own - and the possibilty that they're about 150,000 words more likely to be finished.

In At The Deep End

Finally managed to go for a swim yesterday for the first time this year, which considering there's two swimming pools in easy distance, and I've got the English Channel at the bottom of my road, is pretty much unforgivable. I managed to do it in the end simply because I'm very aware that I'm in my last couple of days off from work right now, but also because of the damage I did to my shoulder earlier in the week. I thought, in some vague way, that swimming would do my shoulder some good.

So far, that seems to be the case, as my shoulder hurts significantly less this morning that it has all week. It wasn't always thus, though: while swimming, I was very weak on my right side, and wincing manfully (or something) as it was too painful to do a full stroke on the right hand side. I've never been a strong swimmer in any case, having never really learned to swim properly: as a kid, I just got into the water and largely suceeded at not drowning. Water seemed to be the great leveller, as I seem to remember the tough kids being surprisingly inept in the pool. But, as I say, I never had 'proper' swimming lessons, meaning that even when I have full use of all my limbs, I always end up being convinced that the onlooking lifeguards aren't there to potentially save my life; but more to sneer at my pathetic attempts to look like I can swim. But hopefully, I'll be able to take the start suggested by yesterday, and begin to swim more regularly.

However, next week is where things start really to kick in. On Monday is the first acting class of the new season at the New Venture Theatre, led by myself (I'll chat more about the details of that in the next blog), and for three nights of the next six weeks, I'll be working on a one-woman show, Three Kinds Of Me, which will be produced in early October. Right now, that seems like a reasonably long time away. I'm sure my opinion on how much time I have will drastically alter very soon. I'm still working on a couple of short stories, and expect to have a significant demand on my time in all of November, which I'll tell you about closer to the time.

And tonight, I have an extra Ghostwalk, this one being at the same time as Brighton Pride. I have no idea how that's going to go yet - the streets are likely to be somewhat busy because of everyone being, well, proud, but I'm not convinced that a lot of them will actualy make it out to the Walk. And, anyway, a lot of our core audience - kids - won't be dragged away from the living room tonight. For tonight, Doctor Who starts its 50th anniversary season. I'm very glad I live in the era of the iplayer ..

Good Ghostwalk last night. You can never really tell how it's going to go down from night to night, but last night's crowd were a fun bunch, full of banter and making all the right noises. Last week, I went to see one of my colleagues (Julian) do the Walk, and was somewhat put out to see that he had about forty or fifty with him that night. The most I've had so far this year is about thirty. I mean, I know (at least I think I do) that the general public don't spend time poring over the Internet to check which particular Ghost Walker they're gonna get, but it's still somewhat disquieting, and indeed, far too easy too take it all far too personally. I was also (as was the purpose of the visit) comparing and contrasting Julian's delivery of the stories to my own, and was pleased to see that our styles were sufficiently unlike each other so as to make such comparisons pointless. I did, however, find myself thinking 'he's a bit too good' somewhat too often. I always flattered myself that I don't do jealousy. Maybe I'm getting old. Perhaps I should kill him, that'll solve it.

Anyway, tonight, I'm stopping off at the NVT for their night of Short Fiction. I shouldn't be there at all, because I have a dinner engagement in Hove to get to (get me, being all sociable. I'm sure it's not the sort of dinner party on Hove you might be expecting. There probably won't be any hummus, and we'll probably only discuss Caroline Lucas once). But I will make a brief stop at the New Venture Theatre, and it's entirely egotistical.

You see, I'm having a short story of mine being read at the theatre tonight. As impressive as that might be (and I am impressed) it pales in light of the fact that I've actually finished a short story. This is pretty much unheard of. Like many people who laughably call themselves writers, I have far more ideas than I actually finish, and there are rather a lot of ideas that are still sitting around there in the upper attics of my mind, waiting for a final resolution.

I seem to be in the early stages of a bit of a creative kick at the moment, which is truly lovely and exhilarating, and I suspect it has a great deal to do with the fact that I don't really have enough time for it. I've always assumed I could get a lot more writing done if I just had a lot more time to myself (in fact I still do, of course I do, just chuck me twenty grand for the next year or so and well see, shall we?), but it also seems true that I've been knocking out more writing in the past month than I have done for a while, and I've only really had sections of fifteen minutes at a time with which to do it. As you might imagine, I find deadlines concentrate the mind wonderfully. Although I'm still not convinced that I've managed to give my story a suitable ending. You can judge for yourself tonight and tomorrow at the NVT, and tickets can be booked here: www.ticketsource.co.uk/newventuretheatre
There's plenty of other excellent stories from local writers, so there's stories for every taste, and the curator of the evening, Sarah Charsley, is an exceptionally lovely host, so it promises to be a lovely evening.

In the spirit of me seemingly only finding time to write when I don't really have time to write, I will be writing (and directing, I guess) a ten minute piece for the Brighton And Hove Arts Council to commentate the passing of the Olympic Torch through Brighton. More news on that once I've actually gotten around to writing it.

Which I haven't yet.

But, as I've mentioned, deadlines can really focus you.