Push on

Posted by William Gallagher

I’ve said this before but I happen to work best in hour-long chunks. It took me ages to find that out but it’s true and I try to stick to it now. Except, once you’ve set a timer for sixty minutes and begun working, there comes a time.

It’s usually between thirty and forty minutes into the run when you are spent.

Seriously, you’d give anything to to stop now, that’s enough, I’m out of ideas, it’s all over, surely I’ve been good, I can take the rest of the hour off, please, I’m begging now.

Push on, okay?

I’m saying this to you now because I’ve been reminded of why. I did an hour on a project I’ve been putting off for a while and, yes, just over thirty minutes in, I wanted to stop. I tapped on my iPhone to see how long was left and it was about 26 minutes. Rarely has 26 minutes looked so long.

But I did push on and in those final 26 minutes I pretty much finished the project. Got over the difficult bit, found a clever – I think – solution to an issue, drove on into new territory and found new things. When the timer sounded, I flicked at it to shut the bleedin’ thing up, I’m working.

I do also believe very much in stopping after the hour, in stopping when you are at that full flow. It sounds wrong but if you leave at the top, you come back later ready and rearing to go. If you stop when you fizzle out, you come back pre-fizzled.

But anyway, how great is it that I wanted to continue? This thing I’d been putting off, this thing at with 26 minutes left to go I was thinking kettles and biscuits and breakfast, now I’m on a burn with it and am near-as-dammit finished. That is finished in the writer’s sense of the word where it means finished, yes, but nowhere near done yet. But still, finished.

And because I pushed on to the end of the hour.

I think you can smell the smugness from there and I can only apologise. But it’s worth my looking irritating to you if it makes you try this too – and I think if you try it, it will make you feel this good as well. The only thing I don’t know is whether you need an hour. It’s so right for me, somehow, but plenty of others work best in half-hour sprints or two-hour marathons. Just pick a time, a duration, that’s a bit hard. If it’s easy, you don’t get that half-time slump so you don’t get the chance to rise above it.

I’m all for rising above things, I should do me some more of that, but it’s a combination of the satisfaction of rising above a problem and the resulting liberation that matters. At that 26-minutes-to-go point, I had a problem I couldn’t solve and ended up just trying different approaches until I found one that broke through. After that, I was just slamming down points and ideas and issues and they were coming out of nowhere, or so it seemed. That rush after the dam is fresh and it feels new and good.

‘Course, I’m a writer, I may look at this later and think it’s all nonsense, I can do much better than this tosh. But at least I’ll be thinking I can do much better. And it is always and forever easier to change something on the page than it is to make the first scratches on the paper.

Actually… today was my 245th day of getting up at 5am and it was the hardest in a couple of hundred. I’ve not come so close to turning over and carrying on sleeping since the very earliest of the days. So I pushed on then and I pushed on during the hour. No wonder I reek of smugness.

Sorry about that.

If strangers talked to everybody like they talk to writers

Posted by William Gallagher

I think the video one about If Gay Guys Said the Shit Straight People Say is funnier but I do recognise a lot of this…

There is something unique about the way people talk to writers. Strangers seem very willing to offer career advice — “self-publishing is where the money is!” — literary advice — “People love vampires!” — or to oddly ask you to guess what work they’ve read in their life and if any of yours is among it. It got me thinking about what it would be like it people talked about other professions in this way.

“Ah, a middle school teacher? Have I met any of the students you’ve ever taught?”

“Cool, I always wanted to be a car salesmen. Maybe when I retire I’ll settle down and just work on selling that Buick I’ve had in my head for years.”

“Huh. A chef. Do people still eat food?”

“An accountant? Wow, I haven’t even looked at a number since high school.”

If Strangers Talked to Everybody like They Talk to Writers – Lincoln Michel (6 June 2014)

Do read on.

They’ll hate you anyway

Posted by William Gallagher

Most people do not create things. At least, they don’t create anything that many other people will ever know about. You can cook for your family for twenty years, nobody outside the ungrateful brats will ever know. You can save your multinational corporation a billion pounds and they definitely won’t tell the world. But if you do something that goes out to people, if you do create something or write something or produce something, you will be hated.

You’ll also hopefully be liked or even loved but the guaranteed one is hated.

In a study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, researchers examined predispositions towards topics that subjects knew nothing about.

Some critics are harsh by nature, not because of what they see in the creation they are criticizing.

They found a reliable trend in the responses of certain participants. Despite being asked about a myriad of unconnected topics—and asked again about new topics at a later date, to confirm they weren’t just in a bad mood—they found two abnormal groups who they classified as “likers” and “haters.” The “likers” tended to rate most things positively with zero external information, and the haters… well, you know where this is going.

Born Hatin’ – Why Some People Dislike Everything, Gregory Ciotti, 99U

I’d like Ciotti to use the word ‘myriad’ correctly but we are many years into that process by which the misuse of a word becomes the correct use just because nobody can be bothered to stop it. Nonetheless, the rest of the piece is particularly interesting about how all this applies to what we write online – and why we get some hatred back.

Lessons from being a director

Posted by William Gallagher

Seriously, listen to me here, I have such a long history of directing. I directed my first play this morning.

It was a ten-minute short written by myself and the Burton Young Writers' Group which we've worked on in a few of the monthly sessions I've led with them this year. Writing West Midlands, which runs the groups, funded the hiring of a real cast to perform the kids' work and it went tremendously.

But the other day, someone asked me if I were directing it and I just said yes.

I had to, there was nobody else who was going to do it, it was just obvious that it would be me as the group's leader. But as soon as I'd said 'yes' aloud, the voice in my head continued with the word 'oh'.

I'd been thinking of the project as a writing one and I suppose a little bit as a producing one. I've been becoming very irritating about producing lately: there's a way to argue that I produced six events over the last six weeks and yeah, yeah, enough already, shut up William. My wife Angela Gallagher has been an event producer and it thrilled me to be doing the same thing, to be able to really learn from her. It's one thing asking her every detail of what she's doing when she's doing it, it's another to be needing to put that into practice for myself.

But I didn't think about directing.

Until this week when I was one of the people casting.

So I recommend becoming a director by default and preferably at speed and even more preferably while also writing and producing. Keeps your mind off it.

And then I now also further recommend directing with as little time to spare as you can.

I had an hour today. But I knew exactly what I wanted. And this is the productivity lesson I taught myself:

If you know what you want, people will do it

If they're good, they'll also question it and improve it and grow it with you, but they are bringing their talent to what you want so just bleedin' get on with deciding it and telling them.

We changed a lot, not least because one actor had a ferociously bad day trying to get to us in time and didn't manage it. We changed oodles.

But I have never been so clear about what I wanted a production to be, not even when I've been writing scripts. And to see it work, to see talented actors do what you want and take it further, I tell you, I'm hooked.

Maybe you have to be a writer and possibly an English writer to really get this but I am used to adapting to what everyone, anyone else wants and to do it this way around felt like just getting on with it. I like getting on with things.

And I loved directing this play. Ten minutes? Young Writers' Group? Sold: it was a career highlight. Especially seeing the faces of the kids as their work was performed. I feel priviliged and happy and that I've learnt a lesson or three.

Go direct something, would you?

A Whole New Way to Underachieve

Posted by William Gallagher

Writer Ken Armstrong's weekly blog this time covers the technological way to feel like you're not doing enough. Or anything. He has a Sky+ box and:

…now, alas, my beloved box seemed to have turned on me. It has become, for me at least, a whole new way to underachieve. It’s over there now, taunting me. I can feel its red eye upon me.

A Whole New Way to Underachieve – Ken Armstrong (May 2014)

Just read it. And the go read the Ken Armstrong Writing Stuff every week. Like I do.

More advice on how to get hired at a job

Posted by William Gallagher

There’s this firm, right, and it’s looking to hire various people but one particular group is proving a problem because they write rubbish applications. Apparently Project Managers are so bad at managing to project an image of themselves that the person hiring them was driven to write an article about how they should do it. Remarkably, just as with so very many other pieces of advice for job applicants, the answer is to write better.

You can do that. You’re a writer. We forget sometimes that what we do is hard and that many, many or even most people just can’t do it. So use your skill, use your talent, write your way into a job interview.

I also think that Product Managers need to write better resumes. Designers have, for the most part, figured out that it’s more about showing than telling. It’s easy to go to someone’s sites and portfolio to get a sense of what they’re about. Product Managers still appear to be stuck in the “Let me tell you how awesome I am” rut, though. This is a generalization, of course, but what I’m mostly seeing right now is resumes that excel at vagueness. It’s not uncommon to see a sentence like “Applied world-class methodologies to create a successful customer-centric product”, or some variation of that. What does that mean?

It’s great to see proof of success, yes — stats about conversion improvements, etc. are extremely useful. But hiring managers need more than that to assess Product Managers. We need to know how you think. We need to know how you approach problems, how you work, what methods you like and don’t like, and why. And for some reason most PMs I speak to seem surprised by those questions and have trouble answering them.

How to Get Hired as a Project Manager – Rian van der Merwe, Elezea

It’s the way you tell ’em

Posted by William Gallagher

I’ve been a TV historian – as in, I write articles and books about television history, not as in I’m Michael Wood – and it’s been a problem with my writing. I was in a script meeting where a fella wanted me to do a scene in a certain way and I couldn’t because I’d already seen it in TV dramas. A lot. I mean, a lot. To me, it was a roll-your-eyes cliché and while I wasn’t rude or stupid enough to use those words, I did make it clear that I wasn’t going to use those words.

“You know it’s been used before, but the viewers don’t,” he said.

I thought then and I think now that this is bollocks. We have all seen umpteen thousand TV dramas and maybe we didn’t all concentrate on them as much as I did, but I suspect we did. I’m trying to remember this specific scene so I can tell you and you can roll your eyes.

I thought I had to come up with something new. I was and I am aware that this is a painful thought as there is so much I haven’t seen, so much I haven’t read that the odds of my finding something genuinely new are about as high as the chance I’ll find a way to end this sentence without saying low or nonexistent.

Still, it was okay for me, I felt it was okay, if the thing I found was new to me. If it were new to me and it did something, it took me and the audience somewhere, if it meant more than its surface, if it had more to it. I believe this today.

But.

This is going to sound a bit obvious but it came to me yesterday like I was on a bus to Damascus.

You can take an old idea and find something new in it.

Follow. Yesterday morning I was reading through my Google Alerts and there was reference to a new novel called The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August. By the time I’d read the reference, I’d got the sample chapters off iBooks and by the time I’d read those, I’d bought the novel, and by the time yesterday was over, I’d finished reading it. Some 400-odd pages during the day. This may be the least productive I have ever been, and as I’m the laziest man you’ll ever meet, that is indeed saying something.

The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August is about a man who dies after a reasonably long life and is immediately reborn right back at the start. He is the baby he was, just with a lifetime’s knowledge. And then many years later, he dies again – and is right back at the start, right back to being the baby he was. Just with two lifetimes of knowledge and experience.

It’s an interesting idea and you can see a lot of drama potential, but the reason I got the sample rather than going straight to buying the whole book was that I knew that idea already. It’s Replay by Ken Grimwood.

This reborn as yourself idea isn’t so common that you roll your eyes, it isn’t one that crops up every two years in EastEnders. But it is extremely distinctive. If you’ve ever read Replay, it’s stuck with you and you’re going to think of it when you hear of this new novel.

But apart from this one, gigantic, unmistakeable same idea at the start, Harry August has a second gigantic idea. One that could not work without the first one. It’s this. As he’s coming to the end of his life in the 1990s, he meets someone else going through this born-die-born cycle. But as he’s a dying old man, she is a little girl. And she has a message she needs him to take back to when he was born in 1918.

That idea could not exist without the same Replay-style idea at the heart of the book and it makes this a totally different – and I’m going to say totally new – type of story.

Don’t abandon things because they’ve been done before. I think that’s what I’m saying. Don’t abandon them just because they’ve been done before. But don’t do them the same, either.

See? Nobody has a writing process

Posted by William Gallagher

Well, maybe that’s putting it strongly. But earlier in the week I mentioned how one writer I know has been trying to find her own process, to find how she works best. And how then by chance another writer I know blogged about how there is no such thing as one process that we can all adopt.

That friend, Ken Armstrong, refers to how there is a belief that creative people must work to a certain pattern yet he doesn’t agree with that. Now Casey N Cep of Pacific Standard says of this that:

Charles Dickens wrote while blindfolded. Virginia Woolf took three baths a day, and always with ice-cold water. Stephen King eats a blood orange at every meal whenever he is working on a book. Joyce Carol Oates writes only in Comic Sans.

None of those things is true. Before you go and stock your kitchen with blood oranges or switch the font on your word processor, let me assure you that I invented every one of those writerly habits. But what if I hadn’t? What if you had read them in an interview or in any one of the million aggregations of writerly routines? Would you really stop taking hot showers or start blindfolding yourself when you write?

The Myth of the Artist’s Creative Routine

Yes.

I’d do anything.

In particular, I would do anything rather than write. Hot showers balancing an orange on your throat? Easier than writing. Give me a list of habits I must adopt and I’m happy.

The idea that any one of these habits can be isolated from the entirety of the writer’s life and made into a template for the rest of us is nonsense. What none of these lists tell you is that sometimes these highly creative people weren’t waking so early on their own, but were woken by domestic servants. Or that some of these highly productive writers also had spouses or children or assistants enlisted in the effort. Or that often the leisurely patterns of drafting and revising were possible only because generous familial support made the financial demands of everyday life irrelevant.

Read the full piece for more.

Use the Force – and edit later

Posted by William Gallagher

One of my books was peer-reviewed by an academic who criticised the first draft with the comment that the first third was plainly rushed. The last two thirds, he or she said, were clearly far more considered and therefore vastly superior.

You know where this is going, don’t you? I’d spent five months writing the first third and one week doing the rest.

That wasn’t through some disinterest in the ending, it was more that I found it hard to start. Not in the sense of putting my backside down on the chair, rather that I had to find the right point and the right tone to start the book or the whole thing wouldn’t work. It was very important to me and I wanted to get this one right, more than ever.

But pondering turned into paralysis and though I was writing away all the time, I was really rewriting. I have no idea how many goes I had at the opening chapters. I just know that the deadline got frighteningly close and that suddenly I was having to write at speed and at 2am.

Stuff it, I’m going to tell you. The book was my first, BFI TV Classics: The Beiderbecke Affair (UK edition, US edition). It was important to me because everything is, of course, but also it was my first book. Plus it was about The Beiderbecke Affair, the 1980s drama serial by Alan Plater that either you don’t know at all or you are already humming the theme. It’s astonished me how many people have written to say they loved that show and also that they really believed they were the only ones. It was a show that felt like your own. It was that personal. I think it was Alan’s best work and that’s saying something because he wrote 300 or more scripts for television, stage, film and radio.

He was also a friend. He died in 2010 and not many months after that, I phoned up the British Film Institute to propose this. Someone should do a bio of Alan but I can’t, that would turn a friend into a journalism subject. But I could do Beiderbecke. I could really do Beiderbecke. It’s personal to me just as it is with so many.

Here’s how personal it got. I have roller blinds on my office window but I’ve never got them to work. They’re just hanging up there at the top, half stuck in knots. And it’s a big window. So at 2am, the lights on in my office, the dark night outside, that big window is a mirror. Even under deadline pressure, I was getting really, really, really intense about a particular point to do with the show. And I promise you I saw Alan Plater reflected in the window. He was leaning back in his chair, lighting up a cigarette, and saying that it’s only a TV show, William.

I didn’t have time to rewrite the last two thirds much. But I also didn’t need to.

Even when I went to the second draft – and I must say that anonymous academic had a lot of really good points that I stole, as well as some that I just ignored – I didn’t have to change the back of the book.

Sometimes, you just have to press on and, sometimes, that works. I’ve discovered that my top writing speed is twenty pages of script or 10,000 words a day and that I can keep that up for about eight days in a row. Whenever I’ve had to do that, it’s been with the full realisation that I’m going to have to change a lot later. Edit, improve, fix, rewrite. It’s true. But even in those times, it is remarkable – to me – how much doesn’t have to be fiddled with.

Stop analysing, just do it.

And then analyse later. I’m not advocating being careless about your work, but I am saying it’s easier to change something than it is to make those first marks on the page.