About ten years ago, maybe a little more, I was writing a mammoth 150,000-word book about Blake’s 7 and while I relished the conversations I had with practically everyone, while I’m still friends with one in particular, the interviewee who was the most deliciously open and downright acerbic was writer Chris Boucher. And while I can’t find the quote now, I know he said something to me along the lines of how you should never give an actor a pencil.

We were talking about an unproduced Blake’s 7 script that actor Paul Darrow had written. I’ve read that script and it was poor, it also just didn’t seem finished, but I don’t remember it having precisely the actor/pencil problem Chris meant.

The problem he said — and he is far from the only writer/producer I’ve heard this from — is that an actor will write a brilliant part for themselves and the rest of the script won’t work. I’m not sure how I feel about that: I believe that the show comes first, to the extent that if the best thing for the project is for me to be chucked out, I’ll find the door. But then on the other hand, if I were able to act, I don’t know that I could resist writing myself a lot to act.

Plus I can’t count how many actors have told me that they had to turn to writing because it was the only way to get the acting parts they wanted.

And I’ve friends who are both actors and writers, and I would trust them all with pencils.

Funnily enough, those same actor/writers have mentioned feeling as narked as I was over actors like Lisa Kudrow who seem to truly believe they created the character they play. There’s an interview with her in which you finally hear the exasperated interviewer asking “wasn’t that in the script?” And she looks shocked, like she’d never thought to read that.

Actually, Gareth Thomas seemed a bit like that to me about his character Roj Blake. I feel I can tell you that now since he’s died, but then so has Paul Darrow, so has Chris Boucher.

And you know this is all on my mind this week because so has Matthew Perry.

I seem to remember there being some criticism of him when his book, “Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing: A Memoir” was released. But since he died, of course all you hear is the good stuff about the man.

Why I rated Matthew Perry, though, was a story I heard during production of Friends. Reportedly, he would spend a lot of time in the writers’ room. Specifically, he did that and none of the rest of the cast did. I seem to remember, but I’m not sure all these years later, that the writers asked him in.

I hope so. I mean, otherwise, he’s an actor barging his way into a script session.

I just liked the completeness of it. I liked how he saw the writing as vital. And amongst all of the tributes to him this week, I saw one that mentioned this business with the writing staff. The story claims that Perry would pitch ten jokes for each episode of Friends and would consistently get two in.

There’s no way to know now whether he gave himself those two jokes, but then that’s the thing. If you can’t tell that an actor is destroying the entire fabric of a show by giving themselves the best lines, then they aren’t.

I’m obviously pro-writer. I mean, unlike Lisa Kudrow, I read that pilot script to Friends and right there on the page it’s very good. I just see that television is better when everyone is working together and it always seemed that this is what Matthew Perry thought too.

Ten years ago, possibly even fifteen, I was asked to find a book for someone. You’re in the business, they said, it should be easy. I don’t remember now what the title was or the author’s name, or even remotely what it was about, but I know it had been written by some reasonably distant relative of theirs and they were very curious to read it.

So curious, so intently interested, that to this very day I am blamed for not being able to find it for them.

Except, I did.

More than that, I found it in the first half an hour of searching, at absolute most.

Only, this book was self-published by whoever it was, so it wasn’t in any bookstores, wasn’t on Amazon, and since they weren’t selling it on their own website either, you had to think it was going to struggle to become a bestseller. But this someone wanted to read it, so I gave them the sole and single and unarguable solution: they’d have to ask their relative for a copy.

For whatever reason, though, they didn’t want to do that. Okay, it’s hardly my problem, I did the job, let them do what they will, or what they won’t.

It is a long time ago now so you’d hoped that maybe they caved and asked, or that surely they had forgotten it as thoroughly as I had. But I suspect not because the last time it was mentioned, I was again criticised for not finding this book. I had let them down, apparently. I failed them and I am a continuing disappointment.

Sometimes the only winning move is to walk away.

Totally unrelated, this is the 800th Self Distract blog post. Writing to you is part of my Friday mornings, you are part of my Friday mornings, and you have been for such a long time: thank you.

The BBC has cancelled its daytime soap series “Doctors” after 23 years. I actually remember orbiting some executive 24 years ago, when it was being planned and I was told off the record that the BBC was going to do a new soap that was either about a medical practice or, I think, lawyers.

It was a quarter of a century ago so I let myself off being unsure whether the alternative had been lawyers, but I can’t let myself off for not remembering who the exec was. It could have been Mal Young, who I interviewed for Radio Times when he was head of drama, but while he seemed a nice guy, he was really steeped in soaps to the exclusion, I felt at the time, of other drama.

Sometime around then, I wrote for a UK soap called Crossroads but was fired for the flimsy reason that I was crap at it. What they needed, I couldn’t write and what I both could write and loved to write, they didn’t want. I got them to reverse the order of two scenes in the mandatory story breakdown I was given, but I think that was my sole contribution to the show.

Doctors was different, though. While technically a soap, it also had a story of the day. Every episode would be some mixture of the continuing drama of these doctors and other medical staff, and one complete story. As a writer, you’d be told the usual huge amount of what you had to do with the continuing storylines, but the story of the day was all yours. I mean, it had to be approved, there were constraints, but you were creating characters, you were creating story, it was a lot freer and therefore, to me, more interesting.

Interesting enough that this executive recommended I try out for the show back whenever it was. I truly do not remember how I blew it, but I did.

And I also cannot, cannot recall how I blew it again a few years later when I got another go. This time I have a memory of being in the Doctors offices, I want to say that I was taking a typing test, but whatever it was, whatever I did, I failed.

I’m not doing very well for recollection today, and unfortunately that was a problem on the third time I tried to get to write for Doctors.

This time I’m shaky on when it happened – it was at least ten years after the second go – but I do remember everything else, I just can’t tell you it all. What happened was that I met a new producer on the show, I obviously said all the right things, he got me writing up ideas for the story of the day, and the wham, it all stopped.

What I presume happened was that he’d pitched me to the show’s executive producers somewhat later than he’d implied, they had someone look up their “Blew It” database and said no, not again. That does not sound remotely likely, except that officially Doctors was a training show for new writers. It wasn’t, it unfortunately never was, but this was the official line and it does seem likely that there would be things the show could point to as proof that it was really hot on new writers.

If it’s true that there is such a database or something like it, I’d have appreciated this producer checking it before I wrote him twenty detailed plots. (I’ve used two in plays since.) But then equally this producer would have really, really liked me to have told him that I’d tried before. I didn’t mention it because it never occurred to me: one failed pitch at least a decade before, another failed pitch back around the year 2000, it did not enter my head.

I felt very bad about that and I even had the impression that I’d caused this new producer some problems.

A few months ago, incidentally, he and I were both judges on a Royal Television Society Awards panel and we met on a Zoom call. He mentioned being very fond of his time on Doctors, I didn’t mention my blowing it.

For all its story of the day, Doctors was a soap and I’m just not a soap writer. I shouldn’t have even tried out for it, they were right not to use me. I think the obvious reason to pitch was that at times it’s been the chief route in to TV for writers, but there’s also that the show is made in Birmingham, in the West Midlands, where I live. It’s our soap.

When the news that it was cancelled broke this week, my first and continuing thought is for friends who are writers on the show, for people I don’t know who are writers on it, and for all that crew and cast who are abruptly out of work. The BBC says that the cancellation is for budget reasons but that it’s okay, all of the money will be still be spent on shows in the West Midlands, so that’s fine. Except that it isn’t. Even if the money stays in drama — the BBC keeps worryingly mentioning that the cooking show MasterChef is moving to the Midlands — then it will always cost less to make one more episode of an existing show than to create a new one. So there will be fewer hours of drama, there will be fewer opportunities for writers, actors, directors and all.

Oh. Grief. I really thought my memory was astoundingly poor today, but I have recalled something. That fact about it costing less to make one more episode of an existing show, I know it was Mal Young who told me that. It’s called the slot cost: how much does it cost to fill a particular hour in the schedule, or half hour, with a show. Whatever the figure is, it’s less when you extend an existing series instead of a new one because there are no startup costs, no extended development time.

Anyway, if my first thought was for the writers, my second with this. I’ve decided I’m never going to try pitching to write for Doctors again.

You know this: the more elderly someone is, the smaller their world becomes. There’s a practical reason in that at aged 100, you’re unlikely to go late-night limbo dancing, or at least not on a whim. But mentally, too, what’s in sight becomes an obsession and what is not, is dismissed.

It’s not a happy thing to witness but it was pointed out to me this week that it’s normal, that if I live that long, there will come a point when the same thing happens to me. There will come a point when my entire world collapses down into just myself and what is happening to me. I shuddered and asked if it could at least shrink down to someone else instead.

But here’s a thing. Yesterday I was in a school working with writers aged between 7 and 9. Writers and a toy rabbit. It’s quite hard to be serious when someone is balancing a rabbit on your head. And it’s now very hard to know what to do when a crowd of 8-year-olds start hugging you.

Anyway.

They were fun and clever and they wrote well, it was great. Only, watching them, seeing hundreds of other children going by, and trying to be useful talking to groups in the school library, I did wonder about whether their world was small. There’s a practical thing in that they’re not going to drive to the late-night limbo centre. But mentally, too, I’m wondering whether the fact that they seemed to be interested in everything is more that they couldn’t stay on any subject for long.

I wonder whether we start off with a small world and we end with one. I’m wondering whether we start being self-obsessed to the exclusion of everything else, and whether we end that way too.

It’s hard not to then also wonder whether we aren’t really like this for our whole lives and we just don’t see it.

And yet right now, everything is interesting, everything is exciting.

Obviously except football.

I want to be able to write something where the good guys lose, and I don’t seem to be able to do it. I did try writing a novel about the end of the world in which the world ends. But then while I was typing away, some bastard character saved it at the last minute. I threw that novel in the bin.

But recently, I saw a musical that did this thing about good guys failing and I can’t tell you which one because it would ruin it for you. (I wrote a piece about the musical for the theatre’s programme and despite not having seen or read the play before, I managed to accidentally nearly spoil the ending. So now that I am fully aware of how it ends, I am shutting up.)

Except the good guys lose and it’s still a kind of triumphant finale. I am struggling to think when else that ever happens in stories. It does in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, but then it would, that series did everything. Still, “Take Me Out to the Holosuite” by Ronald D. Moore (series 7, episode 4, here’s the script) is the only other example I’m certain of.

Wait. I was so careful not spoiling – buggersticks, I nearly named the musical – but I casually ruined DS9. That episode aired in October 1998, you’ve surely had enough time to catch it now, a quarter of a century ago. God in heaven: a quarter of a century. That was its original US air date, though, so it would’ve been sometime in 1999 when I saw it, which is merely 24 years ago. Phew.

I don’t remember seeing it then, but from the dates it would’ve been one I watched on a break at BBC News Online in the BBC’s White City building. Nostalgia, I haven’t got time for it, I’m too busy trying to create new nostaligiable moments.

Anyway.

That DS9 episode centres on a baseball match or something — it’s sport, I don’t know from sport — and the regular cast, the good guys, lose.

Maybe you can argue that Ian McEwan’s novel Atonement ends without victory for the good guys, but that’s a bleak ending. It’s a marvellous ending, but it’s bleak. DS9 and the Musical That Shalt Not Be Named are both upbeat.

It’s killing me. Upbeat failure.

I suppose the original film of Fame does it too, at least to an extent. That film is more about failure than fame and rather than characters bonding together they tend to become separated and alone. And then they do come together for a closing number that is so rousing it can bring a tea to my eye — I Sing the Body Electric by Michael Gore and Dean Pitchford — but Christopher Gore’s script doesn’t aim to suggest they’re all happy again now.

It does occur to me that I am failing in my attempt to either find more examples or, more importantly, to write anything that has an ending which is failure yet triumphant.

Hang on, I’ve pulled off the failure, let me try this. I’m now going to go rewatch the Deep Space Nine episode and to track down the film the musical was based on.

It’s not a triumphant ending, and overall the stakes seem rather low, but I will enjoy that show and that film, so it’s up beat. A bit.

I’ll take the win.

Back in the day, when we all watched television either as it first went out or very nearly so, I used to overthink about high-rated episodes. Pick any show and there will be some episodes that were watched much more than others and the easy presumption is that they were the best ones.

Today with streaming, I think that might well be the case. You hear something was tremendous so you go look it up. Right now the series Suits is doing incredibly well on Netflix, for example, even though it ran on the USA Network starting in 2011 — and ending in 2019.

Meghan Markle acts in it, at least for the first few seasons, but I don’t see how it can be royal interest that has brought the show a second wave of success. Not since if that were the cause, it should surely have happened years ago.

I think it’s because Suits is very good. I’m suddenly reminded of hearing someone say that their teenage daughter’s favourite band is Fleetwood Mac. That would have been impossible for a teenager in any previous time except when the band was at its height, but now they are just another streaming group like anyone else. I can’t imagine how hard it is for artists to get found, but I can well imagine that bands are no longer restricted to having fans who knew them back then and have grown up with them.

This has all got to be a good thing, but as well as meaning life and reach for good work, I think it has also ended the unfairness of high-rated episodes.

Follow. Back when you couldn’t just order up any show and instead had to wait a week to catch the next episode go out, you could have a brilliant, brilliant episode that few people saw. Enough of those people raved about it that others tuned in next week to see what the fuss was about — and so next week’s episode is the one that gets the higher rating.

Whether or not it deserves it.

And equally, last week’s episode, the one that did warrant the attention, never got it.

This wasn’t all that long ago either. In 2003 or 2004, I can’t remember which, Ronald D Moore’s revival of Battlestar Galactica aired initially as two feature-length movies run on consecutive nights. I don’t know the ratings figures but I do know this: the first night did okay — and the second night did very well.

It was unheard of: part two of a show never exceeds the ratings for part one, except with Battlestar Galactica that one time.

Moore has said that he had assumed the second night’s ratings would be down and when he saw they weren’t, that’s when he knew the show would be picked up for a series.

In that case I think both parts were exceptional, so maybe I’m arguing against my own theory.

But the reason this is on my mind now is that if a good episode lifts the next one in the series, a poor one can end things. For instance, I really relished the Spanish series “El Ministerio del Tiempo” (The Ministry of Time) until it had an episode I couldn’t even finish. I never went back to the show.

And this one hurts a lot because there’s a show I wish I’d written, a show that is superb at so many things I relish, but it hit a similar bump. Only a little similar, but similar. Months and months ago now, I was enjoying “Leverage: Redemption” a lot until it had an episode that just seemed to clunk, I can’t explain why.

I also can’t tell you which one because I stopped watching the series and it’s long enough ago now that I’m blank. And if I feel bad about that because I admire the show’s writers, I also feel a bit stupid because earlier this week I caught a later episode in the series and it was excellent. And so was the one after that.

But it was only chance that I came back to it. I’d have missed out on a lot if I hadn’t, certainly, but there’s so much choice now that when you’re dented out of a show, you can be gone. I can be gone so easily.

I’m also wondering about all this now because I believe I have lost my chance to see “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny” in cinemas — and I appear to be okay about that. I wanted to see it, just obviously not enough. And while that appears to have been true of most of the cinema-going public, I wonder if this is proof that one instalment affects the next.

For I believe I am unusual in thinking that the previous Indiana Jones film was quite good — until about halfway through. Then it was shite altogether, and maybe enough so that even 15 years later, it put me off the new one.

Now I’m wondering whether you’ll read next week’s Self Distract. That’s going to worry me.

I did stay up to watch Trump arrive in Atlanta but then fortunately insomnia met the certainty of his giving a speech and I went to sleep. There’s that line in WarGames that goes “the only winning move is not to play”, and surely if anything, the only thing to do with Trump is ignore him.

Except you can’t make others ignore the man and — I’m obviously in a homily mood today — all it takes for Trump to get in next time is for good people to ignore him. Mind you, good people, politics, I can barely think of a couple.

I like to talk to you about writing and there’s no possibility that Trump has written a complete sentence in his life. But just as the most brutish, stupid man can be capable of surgically precise abuse of their partners, so Trump is shaping a narrative over and over.

I fell for it, too, watching live footage of an aircraft subtly bearing the name Trump, land in Atlanta.

He’s like when you have a tooth out and your tongue keeps going to the gap. But where that stops after a time and possibly corsodyl, one reason Trump keeps prevailing is that others join the narrative.

This is making my teeth hurt. Late last week — you know this bit, although it seems lot longer ago than seven days — Donald Trump did that thing of saying that on a certain day he would reveal definite proof of his innocence but then he cancelled the whole thing.

In the days since, the reaction I keep seeing is that it was his lawyers who told him to cancel. That this was actually a sign that he was finally listening to his legal team.

Bullshit.

There was never going to be an announcement, it was always pre-cancelled, and he got three news cycles out of it: the claim, the cancellation, then the analysis of him apparently listening to advice.

But what that inane analysis also did was give just a little substance to the announcement. Seriously. By focusing on this idea of him listening to advice, all of the news media chose to ignore that his proof was going to be nonsense — and that’s enough.

I would have liked BBC News, or CBS, or CNN, or anyone to say: “Tonight’s headlines: more bollocks from Trump. Now the weather. Or even the sport.”

Instead they were looking in the wrong place and by shining such a light on that part, on making such a big deal of lawyers allegedly telling him to cancel, they validated the claim that he had something.

Just enough.

Certainly just enough for his fans to believe a little longer.

It’s easy, distressingly and disturbingly easy, to mock Trump supporters for being fooled by the crook. Yet all of the media that considers itself unbiased, or which has run a thousand news stories about his demonstrable lies, every one I saw was taken in by this particular performance too.

And there I was, unable to sleep, waiting to see a mugshot and only persuaded to turn over — either in bed or the channel — by the thought of having to look at his mug as he basked in attention.

So earlier this week, I was called a shit hot writer. But I think I imagined that middle word.

Anyway, whether I’m a writer or just a fool to myself, I think a lot about this stuff and after so much thinking that I successfully put off writing for hours, I have a strong opinion about characters being killed off in stories.

Let them die.

Please.

I saw a film recently in which a major character was killed and not only did I not feel a flicker, I don’t believe it was physically possible to care at that point. This was a good character, we’ve been with her through a lot and of course she’s well played, so this death should have been enormous and it was played on screen as if it was.

But it just wasn’t.

Because we’d seen her die before. She was shot early on in the film, then we went through that familiar feeling of no, come on, she’s a major character, this is a trick, she’ll be fine, and then we’re told no. We are directly told nope, she’s dead, deal with it.

And then she was fine. It had been a trick. Terrific.

So later on when she is killed and everybody’s is acting like this is really the end for her, you can’t engage because all you can think is that it was really the end for her last time too. By the time it is really sure she’s gone, you’ve been out of the film for long enough that you don’t care. Important character, big death scene, shrug.

Even now, talking to you about a month later, I don’t expect that this character has survived and will be in the sequel, I really don’t, but if she were, it would not be an enormous shock. It would be played as one, but it wouldn’t be it, you wouldn’t feel the shock.

But that possibility aside, at least this film killed her. I am wondering when we got so we couldn’t just let characters die. The name Lazarus is coming to mind, but then only slightly more recently there is Star Trek, in which I think every major character has died at least once and is always back next week.

I know the reasoning is that you have a popular character so killing them off will be this enormous thing that everyone will talk about – but they’re also so popular that they’re why audiences keep coming back for more. So kill them off, absolutely, but don’t kill them off, no.

Only, let’s say this particular character I just saw die on screen does come back for the inevitable sequel. As popular as she was, as good as she is, if she comes back and it’s all some trick or dream sequence, I won’t ever quite engage with that character the way I did.

That kills me.

Last week, it was pointed out to me that I started off sounding nicely silly, then I turned a bit serious and possibly a little uplifting. I promised to stop that this instant.

But while I know this is just you and me talking, still I do think about you during the week, I do think about what we can natter about, and yet I don’t think I have much control over the way I say it.

I must do: if I were writing you a news story you would know. Yet it seems to me that unless there is a specific requirement for a certain tone in my writing, my writing is just the way it is and I can’t do anything about it.

Which I would have been fine about until around seventeen minutes ago when I installed QuarkXPress on my Mac. Quark is the publishing app that conceivably you use, but more likely you only vaguely remember, and even more likely you’ve never heard of. It’s not my first choice for a publishing app, I’ve only installed it now because I need it for a job, I wouldn’t think to mention it to you.

Except.

This app has a tone and I am fascinated.

I don’t think about apps, I think about what I can do with them, and this one has been written over decades by countless developers — yet it has a single clear and actually rather strident tone.

It is proof positive, I think, that the writer’s voice comes out through whatever medium they are working on, and whether or not they’re working alone.

Or maybe it just does when the tone is arrogant.

Yet Quark shouldn’t be arrogant, it should seem like a scrappy underdog, trying to get back to its glory days of the 1980s. The business shot itself in the foot back then and the best you could say is that it aimed well.

Doubtlessly there is a Business 101 class somewhere about how Quark ruled the publishing world and then surrendered it all to Adobe InDesign. I’d take that class.

But today, all I want to do is install the app so I can do a job. And instead installing QuarkXPress was a job itself. Where usually you find an app, click the Buy button and then start working in it, Quark steps you through a 1980s corporate-style installation sequence that says you — oi, you, I’m looking at you – are binding this app to this machine and you’d better not forget it.

If you try to forget it, if you try to do some work in another app while Quark gathers its bits together, tough shit. Quark is a good Mac citizen in that it will allow you to switch to another app — but it’s s crap Mac citizen because it then covers up that other app so that you can’t use it.

Consequently, I read a book while ignoring various warnings, and then I got to wondering. There must be a reason why I actively removed this app some years ago instead of simply leaving it there in case I needed it again.

And just as I thought about that, QuarkXPress was fully installed — and I found out why I had removed it.

Remember, this was a copy of the app I had just now, just right now, downloaded fresh from the official site. But the moment it had finished installing, it immediately told me there was an update I had to download. From the official site.

And then, I promise you this is true, once that updated had installed, Quark told me there was an update I had to install.

I suspect what happened is that the first one was an update to the installer, and the second was an update to the app.

But.

This is QuarkXPress 2019. There have been several releases of it since and there is just no chance that it is getting serious updates the instant I download it or — oh, come on — again now as I talk about it. Seriously. Right now. Fantastic.

QuarkXPress updates when the wind changes direction and maybe you can praise the writer/developers for constantly improving their app. But you won’t. Because all work stops while it updates, I’ve had to wait now while it knocks on the glass of my screen demanding attention over and over again.

I am agog at how strongly you can feel the attitudes and the personalities of the writers of something that is not a story, not a drama, and instead just a tool.

But as I say, I installed this for a job. And now that job has turned in to figuring out how to get the client to ditch QuarkXPress.

Bugger. Now my tone is clearly sarcastic, possibly a little petty, definitely annoyed. So there it is, there is no way to write anything without a tone coming through. I just don’t think that the makers of Quark are any better at controlling their tone than I am mine.

Previously, if you ever told me that you plan writing out in detail before you do it, I mean if you say you do an outline first, I’ve magnanimously said that whatever works for you, works for you.

And when I’ve casually mentioned how I’m happy to write something and then throw it away if it doesn’t work, I’ve doubtlessly also thrown in how I did exactly that to a 100,000-word novel I wrote over lockdown.

Them’s the breaks when you write without prissy little guidelines, that’s what you have to deal with when you’re a real writer.

I seem to remember you saying “bollocks”.

Look, I do really mean that whatever it takes to get you to the finish line is a good thing. Outline, paint storyboards, do whatever you need. But for the longest time I have just started writing and then genuinely been quite fine about throwing everything away to start over again.

To be clear, I have always provided an outline when the commission requires it. But I have been the sort that if I possibly could, I would rather write the whole script or the whole book and then make up an outline afterwards.

Except a producer once pointed out that you can’t have a blank screen on BBC1 on Tuesday night at 21:00. It has to be filled and there is no scope to just write a script and throw it away if you don’t happen to like it. Outlines, argued this producer, get you to the finishing line on time. Maybe you’d write better if this weren’t true, but you might not write better on time and that’s the killer point.

I hadn’t thought of it like that, but the instant it was said to me, I couldn’t disagree.

I just didn’t do it.

Only, last week it looked like I was going to get a commission for a thing and this week I got it. There isn’t a massive amount to it, it’s more that the work is spread out over the next year, and in fact it’s not replacing anything, it is just going to be something extra I do.

But because it’s new, because it’s a producing job as much as anything, and especially because it is over a set period of time, I still didn’t outline.

I project managed instead.

Just before you and I started talking, I sent the people a Gantt chart for the whole year with something like forty points in it. That’s just for them, I know as I work through that project I will be creating many more tasks and the giant majority will be solely for me. But for now, this is where we are, I said, and this is when it looks like we need to do this, this and the other that.

It’s a Gantt chart. This bit of work has dependencies, for instance, so it can’t be started before this other work is done, and I have to finish it before I can start this next thing. And that next thing has to be done by this date, so this other task must be started by another date.

And finally I get it.

All this planning, all this assessing of sequences and balancing of resources, it all does exactly what outlines do.

It lets you feel busy while you put off the actual writing.