bad days

Small moves, Ellie.

Posted by

0

You already know that making too big a statement at the start of the year ain't going to work. I will go to the moon, salvage all the junk that's up there, bring it back and sell it. Or even just I'm going to lose three stone in weight by Tuesday. But there are also apparently small resolutions that you give up on because they are out of your control: I will get an agent this month, that kind of thing. There is a huge amount you can do toward getting an agent if that's what you need and you can do a gigantic amount of it right now, but the final step requires them saying yes and offering you a deal you want. You can't control their schedule, therefore you can't control yours. Not in this one case.

But if you pick smaller goals and ones that are within your control, you aren't just making life easier for yourself, you're helping to convince yourself that resolutions are achievable. If we never did the bigger ones we'd never do anything, but having small, concrete, possible resolutions that we then actually do and actually stick to, it helps a mile.

So says an article in Pick the Brain anyway.

Hat tip, as so often, to Lifehacker for spotting this.

How to get rejected

Posted by

0

I offer that the best thing any writer can do is get someone else to do the writing. You’re thinking they might do my blogs shorter and let you get a word in. You’re thinking Dan Brown could retain his apparently gripping stories but that you and I might be able to read beyond chapter one. (Didn’t you say you’d managed more than me?)

But I mean it and I wish it were something you could very readily do. Commission other writers and it will change the way you write. It will change how you see the whole process. And it will mean fully half the rejections you get won’t trouble you.

Best of all, you’ll no longer take it personally when an editor phones you up, skips all the polite stuff about how great your typing is and just comes straight in laughing about the very worst bit of your script. It’s happened to me and I admit I wish I hadn’t written that scene, whichever it was, but I laughed along with that editor because he was funny, he was right, it was a dreadful scene – and because I knew we’d fix it. I can’t remember the scene and I’m struggling to remember which script it was but I can tell you the editor: Alan Barnes at Doctor Who.

You want to write the best drama you can and that’s what he and all the Big Finish people want too. It’s not what every editor, producer or director I’ve worked for wants but usually it is. (I once had a director whose chief dramatic aim, I am certain, was to make sure he could catch his last bus home after the play. I never knew a human being could make me as angry but now, when I can instantly recall the bile but cannot draw his name to mind, I’m glad it happened. Because I wonder if I’d appreciate the directors I’ve worked with since. Ken Bentley, Nick Briggs and Barnaby Edwards at Big Finish; Polly Tisdall, Tessa Walker and Tom Saunders at the Birmingham Rep. I imagine I would, I imagine I must, but I really do because of this fella.)

This is going to sound all idealistic and happy-clappy but everyone wants the best show they can make. I found plenty of jaded people in journalism, maybe I’ve just been lucky in drama so far. But if the ideal is that this is what we want, the harsh practicality is that there is never any time to piddle about.

And this is one reason for rejections. Nobody wants to reject anyone, everyone wants the material to be great, everyone needs the material to be great right now or sooner, please. If your piece isn’t what that person or people need at this moment, they’re off looking for the one that is and you’re rejected.

I feel I’m telling you something you think is obvious and yet it keeps coming up. Rejection isn’t personal, it just feels as I it is because we’re writers and we are required to dig very deep and scrape very personally to make drama. Even though you know, intellectually, that it isn’t personal, it feels it. When it’s your innards on the page, it’s hard not to take a rejection as being a rejection of you.

So commission someone else and see what it’s like. I’m not sure how you can do that very easily, I’m afraid. But I’ve done it on magazines and quickly got to the stage where I had no ruth at all. You need this or that piece and you need it by a certain date: you don’t care who writes it, you just have these pages to fill and fill well.

It kills me to say this, as a writer, but we’re not the most reliable people. After my first month on a magazine, every deadline I ever gave anyone was a lie. It had to be. I had to have time for them to be late, I had to have time for me to cope if they failed to deliver at all and I had to have time to handle it if their writing wasn’t good enough.

You can of course argue that it was only my opinion whether their writing was good enough or not, but that was my job. And if I didn’t do it or I wasn’t good enough at it, I’d be rejected and replaced.

I found that there were a few writers who I could really rely on. I’d know they’d write well and I’d know they would deliver on time. I used them over and over again – and so would you. From the outside, it looked like I’d got myself a stable of writers and that it was a pretty closed bunch. On the inside, it was that I was trying to get a stable of writers and unfortunately it was a pretty closed group because I couldn’t find many more to add to it.

Getting into my stable was hard. I don’t say this to make out that anyone would want to, that it was in someway a special set, but genuinely, really, practically: it was hard to get in. I had this many pages to fill with this many articles and I had this long in which to do it. It was easier to hand over a feature to one of these writers I knew would do it. I could hand that off and forget about it for a few weeks. As those weeks ticked by, it became less that it was easy to hand it over to them, more that it was essential.

Taking on someone new is a risk and a risk that takes a lot of time. And this was just on a magazine: drama is so much bigger, so much more complex and so much more pressured. So taking on someone new is so much more of a risk and takes so much more time – that you don’t have.

I’ve never commissioned drama. I’m new to writing it. But because I have commissioned writers, I believe I get it. People can tell you rejection isn’t personal but I think you really only get it when you’ve been even briefly on the other side.

It doesn’t absolve you from trying to write better but it does stop you wanting to give up.

Even when a guy phones you and laughs down the line.

The night before the morning after

Posted by

0

Today is the 176th day I’ve got up to write at 5am. I can tell you that it was easier than the 175th because I’ve been awake since 4am trying to work out what to do. And the thing I’ve learnt is that more important than making yourself get up is having something to do the moment you have.

Er. Apart from the bathroom, the fastest shower in history and the mandatory giant mug of tea. I can get to my keyboard by around 5:15am at a push, and I do push, but it has happened that once I’ve got there, I’ve gone um.

Only a few times. But enough to give me the willies. I’ve had days where I’ve done some emails at that time, I’ve even had one day when I watched some TV that I could call research but, come on.

It is hard to get up this early and it is very easy to waste the time when you do. I wrote about this 5am start in my book, The Blank Screen, and it was meant to be an example of how you should search for the extra moments that you are able to write. How you need to find your schedule. I happen to write best this early in the morning, even though that goes against every late-night-jazz bone in my head. So I don’t like getting up, I really don’t like going to bed, and I’m not very keen on how tired I get by the end of the day, but the work I do is better. And, face it, it’s also more. I do more work and it is better. What’s not to love?

Everything.

But that’s about all the book said. I do talk in it about my particularly brutal way of making myself get up but that was as much about habit-forming and self-immolation as it was anything else.

And what I have really learnt since finishing the book is this business that you have to have something to do. Get up at 5am or whenever you like, but do not spend any time at all then planning what to do. Go to the keys and be writing immediately or you won’t do any writing.

It just occurs to me that this is a lot like people who lay out their clothes the night before. I have not once done that. Suddenly I see why they do it. I vow to you that I’m going to do that too, except I know I’m lying and, hey, I do enough with the making myself get up this early, enough already.

Maybe a better example is the type of novelist who ends the day by writing the first line of the next chapter. So in the morning, there’s line 1 already done. I can vividly understand that now.

It’s almost never that I’m lacking for a job to do. There was one time, back around the 150th day, that I’d finished a huge project and genuinely wasn’t sure what to get to next, genuinely wasn’t sure whether I shouldn’t instead breathe out for a bit. But usually there are plates spinning aplenty and it does take some figuring out to decide which is the most urgent or which is the most important. Fine. Just don’t do it at 5am.

Or 4am. I found 4am worse today. The fact that it was 4am was pretty bad all by itself but then I had the sense of pressure that I’d only got an hour before I had to be up and writing… something.

I’ve got meetings and travel I have to do today that are affecting the shape of my day and I have one urgent deadline that you’d think I should be doing right now but it’s a radio review and that means I listen to a play. I’m planning to do that while driving and travelling to these meetings. 

I’ve got a lot of chores to do – literal chores around the house but who’s going to do any of those this early? – and I’ve always got lots of financial stuff to avoid.

But then there is the one big editing job that I need to get away today and there is the more creative one that I long to start.

I will get that editing done. I will do that review. I will start that creative project. I know I will because I have the time and I have that time because I made it by getting up at 5am.

But I also have you to talk to and that’s what I knew I’d do. Around 4:15am, I realised that I could do this, that I now had this to tell you about planning ahead, I knew I wanted to talk to you. In all the rush to be productive and edit this, write that, plan the other, we can forget the wanting and it’s important.

So hello. Nice to see you. If it’s 5am where you are, I feel your pain.

And I can help your pain just as much as I can help my own: tonight when I go to bed, I’m going to spend a few moments figuring out the shape of tomorrow. So that I can go straight to the keys at 5am on day 177 and begin writing.

Write this down, it helps

Posted by

0

Tomorrow is the first of December and at some point during the day, I will email a report of all I've done throughout November. Nobody has asked me to do this, nobody is waiting for it, nobody will do anything with the report. But it helps me enormously to write it down and to have someone to send it to.

Earlier this year I earned a place on Room 204, a programme run by Writing West Midlands for up to 15 writers who are of a certain standard, who are based in the area, and who need something for their careers. It's a very deliberately formless kind of year that you get with this scheme: it's not like there are lessons or there are, I don't know, tests. Instead, you get a year connected to this group and can make of it what you need.

I've made a lot of it. It's done a huge amount for me, it's given me a new career in presenting and two of my books this year came out of chats I had with them.

But this isn't about me, it's about you. And I want you to have the thing that I got from Room 204 which particularly helped me, which I think may particularly help you.

It's this. Right at the end of my first meeting with the Room 204 folk, we talked about the rest of the year and it was mentioned that if a month goes by without us happening to work on something together, I should just keep them up to date with what I've been doing.

That's quite clear, quite easy, and I deliberately took it the wrong way. There hasn't been a month, I don't think there's been a week, that I haven't been doing something with Room 204, for them, or ignited by their work, but still at the end of every month, I tell them what I've been doing.

I also tell them now that there's no need for them to read the emails. I'm sending it to you, I say, but I'm writing it for me.

Because simply writing down in a clear, coherent and sometimes very long email what I've done in the month makes me realise what I've done in the month. Written these articles, been published here, pitched that, got filmed for this, sometimes it's a giant list of things. There's no question but that it reads like I'm boasting.

But that's fantastic. What have I got to boast about? Apparently, monthly, quite a bit. It's nice to safely boast to good people because it's great and unusual and wild to realise that you have something you could boast about.

Only, if I have – so far – sent each of those monthly report emails off with a certain satisfaction – that is only one of the three huge, huge benefits to me of doing them.

The second is that I look at the email as I'm compiling it and I remember what I've done. You do this, I know you do: you finish something and you're off away on to the next. We don't look back much, do we? Being a productive kind of person means always rushing on to the next thing, getting stuff done and out, getting on with what we so long to get on with.

Stopping to look back across the last month is a waste of time but it is an extremely useful waste of time. I'll start to write to Room 204 that it wasn't a good month because my mind will be on the failures, the rejections, the various and many problems that come up. But then I'll write something like “Made chair of the West Midlands Screenwriters' Forum” and think, okay, that wasn't bad. Unexpected. And I thnk it'll be a lot of work, but it wasn't bad. And then I'll remember that a pitch worked out. I'll remember that this is the month I finally got paid for that thing I did.

By the end of the email, I've changed my mind about the month. I'm feeling vastly better. So far, anyway. Some months are better than others but I've still yet to have a really bad one. I'll let you know how that goes.

So there's the little bit of boasting, just enough to feel a teeny bit good, and then there's the other psychological thing of changing my mind about how it had been a bad month.

The third thing is that I can't do this monthly email in one go: I forget too much, far too much, of what I've been doing. So as I do things, I add a swift line to an OmniFocus To Do task. Just jot down two words, enough to remind me, anything.

And that always prompts me to find something else to add to the list. All the way through the month, this drive to have something else to add is with me. I wince to tell you this but I have made calls solely so that I could say something like “Pitched to British Council” on my monthly list.

And, sometimes or even quite often, that call works out.

So tomorrow I will be writing my unasked-for, unneeded yet boastingly boosting and useful monthly report about myself and my work to Room 204.

Give it a go, would you? It will help you too.

Bad Days

Posted by

0

When you’re under so much pressure from deadlines that you have to hold your chest. When you’re so lost for which urgent project to start next. The last thing you need is a book to read. But the first thing you need is a chapter.

Take a look at the free sample chapter from The Blank Screen book. If things are really bad today, just read the first page and do what it says. Then come back to the rest when you have time. It will help you.

Here’s the free PDF of Bad Days from The Blank Screen: http://theblankscreen.co.uk/sample/TheBlankScreen_BadDays.pdf

If you’ve read that and you’re looking for the whole book, here’s what you need to know: the UK paperback is right here, the US paperback is waiting thisaway – and there are also UK Kindle and US Kindle editions.

But think about the book later. For now, we need to get you working.

William