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Be a fraud

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I am reasonably sure that there hasn’t been a single day in my adult life when I haven’t written. Maybe it’s just a sketchy idea, maybe it’s this right here, writing to you, but it will have been something. Something where I thought by writing, by typing.

Also, frankly, by shrugging. I don’t have “Write Something” on my To Do list. If I didn’t do it, I’d now be a bit surprised, but hardly concerned. There isn’t a rule that writers have to write every day and I don’t imagine you’d think there was, except enough people do that it’s a little issue.

It came up at the National Writers’ Conference earlier this month, for instance. Don’t let me make it sound like the whole conference stopped to gasp, it was just one small moment in a large day — but consequently, it’s also come up in conversations since.

The idea that writers should write every day is the kind of thing that anyone who isn’t a writer would barely register being said. And if they did hear it, did register it and even if they did happen to believe it with a passion, it doesn’t affect them.

Yet there are enough writers who are troubled enough by this idea that it comes up in conferences. I think I’m already making too big a deal of it, so let me just offer that any kind of idea that makes writers feel guilty is bollocks.

All that matters is what lands on the page or the screen, and I don’t see that worrying about not having written yesterday is in any way a help to you writing today. It’s easily the opposite: if you build up this idea that you’re a fraud for not writing every day, I suspect it becomes harder to write any day.

Do whatever you need to get to the finishing line and if that is writing every day, fine. If it’s writing just when you can, well, I’m going to look you in the eye and suggest there’s probably a bit more you can do, but I won’t do that very firmly.

Because if your failing to write every day means you’re a fraud, then be a fraud. Be very a fraud. All that matters is what ends up on the page and the screen, whatever it takes, however long it takes, whether it’s a daily effort or not.

I happen to find it easy and normal and ordinary to write every day, and that’s nice for me. The real worry is whether you or I write anything that’s actually remotely good, and here I need to stop looking you in the eye.

Three increasingly specific rules of writing

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There are no rules in writing, but if you break them, you get a very annoyed reader. Now, I don’t actually mind annoying readers or audiences. Engendering any feeling, even annoyance, is an amazing thing. But just as I wouldn’t sit here trying to think what would be most likely to offend you, I can’t do annoying just for the sake of it.

At least, not deliberately.

When I am intentionally annoying, it should be for a purpose and hopefully you’ll come to think that purpose was worth it. For instance, it must be twenty years since I read Olivia Manning’s Fortunes of War novels and just saying the title to you takes me back to being ferociously annoyed on a London tube train, reading what would then become some of my favourite books.

That’s where I was when I got to the bit where Guy takes that thing of Harriet’s. If you know the books, you know the thing. And if you don’t, I have an enormously recommended solution.

Anyway.

It turns out that there are three things that are guaranteed to make me wish I’d not started reading, and to stop me reading or watching or listening a minute longer. Your mileage may vary, but I propose that the three things that should be banned in writing forever are:

1) Endings where it’s all been a dream
2) Any story that uses multiple universes
3) The finale of Spooks season 1

Granted, that last one is a bit specific. Spooks was a superb BBC espionage thriller whose first run ended with an utterly compellingly fantastic final moment — that was destroyed in the opening seconds of series two.

To say that someone was trapped in a house with a bomb is to so far undersell everything that was happening in the first season finale, to so far undersell the blame and the fault and the tension, that the only reason I’m willing to not bend your ear for an hour about how great it is, is season two.

Where season one ends with that house blowing up, season two begins by revealing no, no, it was this other house that blew up, see? Everyone you’ve ever heard about in the show is fine. It’s okay. Calm down.

I did not even finish watching that second season opening episode.

But if it’s unfair to make that specific example be a rule alongside the dream endings and the multiverse, it’s also completely fair because all three are really the same.

Don’t cop out.

You can take us into tense and frightening areas, but you can’t cop out afterwards. I’m struggling to recall examples where I knew that pulling back at the end was imposed by someone, probably a broadcaster. There used to be a rule in US network television, for instance, that no character could quite aim a gun exactly at the screen, not quite, because that would frighten the poor public. This is about the same level of patronising.

Grief. In this moment, right now, I’ve flashed back to a meeting with some Top Gear producers, possibly solely Top Gear website producers, but I think it was the show. This was back when the BBC was under fire for faking the result of a vote to name a dog in Blue Peter or something. In its thorough way, you cannot count the number of meetings and rules the BBC put in place after that.

But during one of them – I can’t remember why I was even involved and it was certainly just as a spectator – the Top Gear people mentioned that show’s habit of staging races between its presenters. Three presenters, three cars, a race to do something, or to get somewhere, I don’t know.

My producer at the meeting got into an argument with them over the races. I remember this because I didn’t rate that producer and this was the sole time I agreed with him.

His position: everybody knows the races are faked. Their position: doesn’t matter.

They believed the races were compelling because they were races. His position was that if you know it isn’t real, you don’t give a toss, no matter how excitingly edited they are.

Things don’t have to be real, they just can’t be fake. And any cop out, any dream or multiverse or yeah-right-different-house-blowing-up is as bad as fake racing, for all the same reasons.

It comes from the same insulting belief that you can build up tension for the poor public and then take it away before actually doing what you were building to. I’ve seen where writers and producers are proud of how tense they’ve made something, to the point of congratulating themselves, somehow believing they were daring and brave, even though they had then destroyed everything they’d worked to create.

Here’s the clearest sentence I’ve ever written. You can do something or you can not do something, but you can’t do it and also not do it, you cannot have it both ways.

I’ve enjoyed many a moment of misdirection where we were at a different house than we thought — Slow Horses just did exactly that with a rather smaller moment and it was excellent — but for the big ending that’s meant to guarantee we come back next season, then saying it’s fine, they all lived, they woke up. No. Goodbye.

It’s a different house is an insult. It was all dream is another way of saying you just wasted the last 90 minutes watching A Midsummer Night’s Dream, although to be fair there is a clue in the title.

A story where it’s revealed there are multiple identical or very-nearly-identical universes is a story where the writer couldn’t cope keeping it in our one universe. Though to be fair, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine would sometimes play with two universes and cause scarringly deep emotional consequences in both.

Bugger. DS9 pulled it off. Shakespeare wrote dreams.

But that ending of Spooks was still shit, so there.

I think we’re alone now

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Whatever you write, and even whether you do it with a partner or in a writers’ room, there are hours and hours when you are on your own with the keyboard or the pen. Nobody with you, nobody making you write either, and probably every other writer has a new book out, is promoting their new play, is doing all the talking and the socialising that lies the other side of thousands of hours of lonely work.

If you can’t do the time, you’re not a writer.

Only, even though there is no way around the solitude, even though you’d better enjoy it or else, there is a way around the solitude. Hello. As I write this, it’s early on Friday morning but I know you’re there, I know we’ll be talking, I am writing this to you.

But then also tomorrow I’m attending the National Writers’ Conference in Birmingham. (Booking has closed but you can read more about it here.) It’s the first time I won’t be working at the conference so it’s the first time I’m not thinking about the job, not thinking about the writing, just looking forward to seeing writers I know and admire and relish, and meeting writers I’ve not seen before. There’s also an actual programme of events at the conference and that’s the practical, sensible reason for going, but it’s the being with writers and specifically these writers that’s why you really go.

And two days ago, I was in my office alone, but I was also on a Zoom call with, I think, 100 or more members of the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain. It was the Guild’s AGM so again there was an actual programme and the Guild is a trade union, not some writing group, so the order of business is serious. Plus we are in such hard times for writers in the UK and the Writers’ Guild is all that prevents us being screwed over, that the order of business is very serious.

So very serious that you can’t believe how funny and happy the AGM was. We are alone, but we’re alone together.

And as of the end of that meeting, I am one of the two Deputy Chairs of the Writers’ Guild. I take that so seriously, and I am just daunted enough, that you can’t believe how good it feels to stand there with this Guild and to try stepping up to that exceptional team.

It was as I sat down today to write to you that the “I think we’re alone now” song, written by Ritchie Cordell and for me permanently linked to my then age-appropriate crush on Tiffany, popped into my head. But it popped in here not because of the alone part, but because of the we. That song is about sex and I am suddenly blushing as I look at you, but it’s about two people and they are alone together.

Anyway.

Writing is peculiar in that the deeper you can push inside of yourself, the more you can connect to other people. Usually the idea is that you’re doing this to write something that reaches people, but really always it’s about you as well as it is about them and it’s so great, so essential that we have each other.

Only connect, eh?

Right now, wrong then

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I should have seen this one coming. Usually if someone changes my mind about something, they do it quickly and I can never see things the way I did a moment before. This time, this week, that did happen, but it was less a new idea, more a confirmation of what I now realise I’d been working towards.

Previously… I used to believe that a story idea belonged in the form you first thought of it. If you thought of a radio play idea, then trying to do it as a novel was contorting it. It was contrived, it was wrong. The idea, the story, and the form are all part of the same thing, I believed, and if you change any part, you are going against the grain of the whole. If you want a TV idea, go think of one, don’t distort a stage story.

The person who changed my mind this week didn’t listen to all of that and then conclude that I was talking bollocks. But she did disagree and she did point out why.

And I was left with nothing else to say but the truth: “Then I’m wrong, aren’t I?”

I don’t want to let go of the opinion entirely, except I do. Maybe I just want to hang on to how I think the medium is important.

This woman’s entirely persuasive examples were centred on dramatisations of books and how interesting it is to see the process of bringing something to a different form, of how it naturally brings out other aspects, how it gives other opportunities. The example I gave back to her was the same. Slow Horses is better on television than it is in the original books. Screenwriters Will Smith, Morwenna Banks and co haven’t lost any of the strengths of the novels, haven’t changed anything, but have made it richer somehow.

But then five years ago I had a chance to do a short stage version of a radio play that I’d been struggling with. Struggling so much that actually I only finished it last month. Central to the many problems was a certain point where I needed one character to encourage another, but they physically and literally cannot meet. I think my ultimate solution in the radio script is a bit of a fudge, but for stage, I just had one of them walk by the other and whisper.

Didn’t matter that it was physically impossible in terms of the plot. It was right. The stage format allowed me to let that happen and it was right.

Similarly, I have a new stage play that comes from a TV idea and theatre lets me do things television never could. That story must start simultaneously in two time periods and for TV, I’ve made one winter and one summer to give it a visual start to the difference, before you then separately piece together just how many years apart they are.

For theatre, I put my characters on a train and had a train guard announcing to one “arriving London, 1987”, and to the other “next stop, Hull, 2019.”

“Seems a long journey,” says one of my characters.

“Try doing it standing up,” says the guard.

A small warm exchange and a simple, direct telling the audience what’s going on, but also done in a way that gives you a flavour of what’s coming next. Using an aspect of theatre that is pure stagecraft, that would be out of place on radio, out of joint on television. Using the form the story is being told in.

Sometimes you can still be contorting and contriving as you move between forms. But now I think the medium is only part of the message.

The waking ally

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So lately I’ve been watching Doctor Who from the start and earlier this week I got to a 1964 episode called The Waking Ally. I’ve seen it now and I cannot figure out who the waking ally is. So very, very foolishly, I looked it up.

It’s days later and I’ve spent a ludicrous amount of time delving into Doctor Who trivia. And as a consequence, I’m experiencing what I can only describe as double-decker nostalgia. Two layers of nostalgia. I’m apparently nostalgic for a moment when I was nostalgic.

For in October 1964, around the time of this episode I’ve just watched, the cast and crew of Doctor Who had a party in the Bridge Lounge at BBC Television Centre. They were there to celebrate having made 50 episodes.

And thirty years later, I was there too.

It’s not as if I stood there, too scared to mingle, too young and timid to interrupt Verity Lambert talking with William Hartnell. But it felt like that’s what I was doing. Just for a few minutes, I sat on the side of a table in that room, quite possibly where they had sandwiches three decades before me, and I listened closely to nobody’s conversation, I heard nobody give a speech.

And now, today, there’s no Bridge Lounge.

It’s gone in the sense that this part of BBC Television Centre has been demolished, but scarily also in the sense that I couldn’t remember quite where it was. I used to walk by it every evening I worked there, every time I headed for the restaurants. But I have a 1950s architect’s sketch of the building and I’ve been staring at it, completely unable to identify the Bridge Lounge.

Brilliantly, however, Google Maps documented the building before it was demolished and I’ve just been using that to walk around this deeply beloved place. And despite not remembering where the Lounge was, not being able to pinpoint it on a map, “walking” through the building, I went straight there.

It even looked as if I met me coming back.

TVC in Google Maps has ghosts like that figure all over the place, but frustratingly, it isn’t complete. In this case, it stops just short of where I want to go now, where I went before. It takes me up to the bridge part and there’s a sign over the entry saying Bridge Lounge, but it won’t let me go further along that part or then left into the room itself.

But zooming along up to that point, racing faster as I realised that I was right about where to go, I could taste the air in that corridor.

I’m nostalgic for the atmosphere you can’t see, for a party I was thirty years too late for, and in a building that no longer exists.

I still don’t know who the waking ally is, but I’m grateful for the journey he or she has sent me on.

Channelling writers

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I didn’t think this was going to be about me. Two days ago, I was asked a writing question that I didn’t know the answer to, and yesterday I was told the answer by writers who do. That was it, I was solely a conduit, a channel, passing a question one way and an answer the other, and I was very happy to do it.

Only, of course conduits and channels cut into the land and of course rivers reshape that land as they flow. I’m not saying I’ve been dramatically changed, but I’m also not as unaltered as I expected.

Here’s the thing. The question came from a friend on behalf of someone else, someone I don’t know, and the question was to do with this someone else being known. She’s from what I’m told is a pretty strict religious background and family, and her writing examines issues that pretty strict religious backgrounds and families think will go away if you don’t write about them.

Through this friend, this woman wanted advice on how to get published yet insulate herself from being discovered by her family. And the answer came back from Room 204. This is a writer development programme run in my region by Writing West Midlands and my getting on that about ten years ago was possibly the single most useful thing in my career. The programme is only supposed to run for a year, but a decade on, it’s still helping me and an ever increasing number of writers.

Some of whom gave me practical advice to relay back to this woman, others of whom made suggestions that are supportive and useful, and others of whom emailed me privately to make recommendations. All of which I’m sure will help, all of which I’m relaying back, all of which I am grateful for.

But.

I am also left thinking how fortunate I am that I don’t have family or society pressures stopping me writing what I want.

But.

I do.

We all do.

There are things I don’t write about because they’re just of no interest to me at all, and there are things I don’t write about simply because they never occur to me. But if I’m completely honest, I’m not completely honest: there are things I do not write about because I am afraid of the reaction.

I do know that on the three or four occasions I’ve written about these things anyway, the reaction has been startlingly positive, like I’ve tapped in to something that connects us. Which would be what writing should do. And obviously I also know that I’m just wrong to presume that I’ll get any reaction at all.

But I do hold back and unlike this woman I don’t know, maybe most of my inhibitions are self-inflicted.

I should write about these things. We should all write about the things we are afraid to.

You go first.

Voice control

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I was told this week that a character I’d written was clearly my creation, my type of character, and yet simultaneously also straight out of an Alan Plater drama. It was meant as a compliment and I took it as high praise.

Partly, actually, because one of my favourite things about Plater’s writing was when he dramatised Olivia Manning’s Fortunes of War books. Watch the series, read the books, it’s clearly Manning throughout and yet the TV series is also simultaneously in Plater’s own voice too. I cannot fathom how he did that.

But I can fathom voice. I used to be proud of being able to adapt to any house style, any requirement, and now, not so much. I’m not proud of it and I don’t think I can do it anymore. Not when I now so cherish how a friend once recognised I was the writer of a particular piece, even when the job had required me to not sign or byline it. That reminded me of the radio broadcaster Fi Glover: the first minute I heard her on air, I knew who it was because I’d read her book.

She writes the way she speaks, which is fantastic and damn hard and may not be the only way to write but I have such a fondness for it that I think maybe it should be. Perhaps just on weekdays.

There’s also that I know, from direct experience, that you can encourage a writer to find their own voice but until the day they do, they’re as likely to have no clue what you even mean. Maybe we all start off trying to write like our favourite writers and maybe there just comes a day when you say sod that and write like yourself, but there comes that day, and there comes your voice.

Only…

I think the start of writing is finding this voice, but I worry that the end of writing is holding on to it too tightly.

This week I came across a few pages of The Golden Age, an unfinished theatre play script about 1960s British television. It may be that only those few pages were ever written, because I can’t find any trace of a full play being performed. I shouldn’t tell you who wrote it, but if you read it, you’d recognise the voice immediately. Just as you’d know it was a theatre script, even though at no point does it say that, or anything like it.

Suddenly, I’m wondering if I’m wrong and it was an unfinished TV script. I don’t think so. Plus, incidentally, the 1960s weren’t the golden age of television, we’re living in the golden age now. But I reckon that the play was started somewhere in the early 2000s, so the writer wasn’t to know.

It’s fine. Good gags, a wry and very clear opinion, but it’s the same opinion as in this writer’s other work. And though the specific words of the jokes are different, they’re really the same. The same kind of setup and the same kind of payoff, the same type of character making the same type of point.

Look, it was never finished so maybe this writer thought the same as I do.

But it’s like when you watch an Aaron Sorkin drama. There’s never the slightest pixel of a doubt who wrote it, and there are a thousand points to love and relish, but he has a very precise voice, he has a particular shtick.

And while his writing is so good that I have watched and many times rewatched his Sports Night comedy despite caring even less about sport than I know about it, it’s also so good that it stays with you. And consequently, I couldn’t watch his The Newsroom series, even though I really tried.

The trouble for me is that while the lead character in that, Will McAvoy, is apparently very good, I could never quite see him through the crowd of previous Sorkin characters standing in his way. This line sounds like Jed Bartlett from The West Wing, that one is clearly Danny Tripp from Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, and this is unquestionably Will McAvoy quoting Casey McCall from Sports Night.

In Sorkin’s case, he does also repeat stories between shows, which doesn’t help. A couple of characters in different series discover their father has been having an affair for decades, for instance, and a window gets startlingly smashed by someone in roughly identical situations in Sports Night, The West Wing and Studio 60.

There’s also the, to me, totally riveting issue of a man pursuing a woman. In Sports Night, you’re rooting for the two to get together. In Studio 60, the same story is creepy as hell.

So there is a difference in Sorkin’s characters, but again, you always know it’s him.

I think that’s great. I think a clear and strong voice is exciting and is so different to all the could-be-by-anyone dramas.

Only, his voice gets in his way for me, at least with The Newsroom. And on a rather smaller scale, I worry that having long found my own voice, it’s become too locked in for my own good.

Dimmer switch

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I think you and I can be sure of two things. First, you know that there are stupid people in the world. Second, I cannot know whether I’m one of them or not.

But I can know when I’m being patronised. Such as last Monday, cooking in the kitchen, listening to a live album recording of a reunion concert, the name of which I am never going to tell you. Most of the time, the album just kept making me wonder if the music was this bad 40 years ago, but at one point I was patronised.

It’s not a great album and it doesn’t sound like it was a brilliant reunion concert, but there is no possible question that the only people who went to it on the night are fans of the original. Maybe also a few sorry plus-ones. But the plus-ones aren’t going to be converted into fans for the night, they are the designated drivers, they are the bodies filling up the arena and making the acoustics right.

For the fans, these are live reenactments of songs they’ve either cherished for decades or, like me, used to like a lot and are treating the night as a tunnel back to their slightly embarrassing teenage years. It’s unlikely that there is a detail they don’t remember, and if they’re putting up with these flat versions, they’re not going to storm out because one tune is slightly less well known than the others.

And yet there it is. One of the many performers gives us a version of a raucous song with as little feeling as if he were reading instead of singing, and then says “You know that came from X, right?”

Okay, he didn’t say X.

But I know where it comes from so now I’m standing in my kitchen, giving him a Paddington stare.

He wasn’t to know that I would have sharp knives with me when I listened, nor could he possibly guess that he did this to me three days before Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban did it worse.

JK Rowling wrote the book, I suspect you’ve heard that, and Steve Kloves wrote the screenplay. But I am certain, groundlessly but entirely certain, that either Kloves did not write one specific line of the script, or he did it faced with a gun and a cut in his fee.

Azkaban is the one where our heroes go through a horrible experience, then go back in time to the same moment and put things right. It’s the one where on the first time through, ‘arry Potter is rescued from death by who he is certain is his dead father somehow come back to life to do some magic.

And it’s the one where the next time through, when Hermione has taken them back in time, that we and ‘arry realise the saviour is Harry himself. It’s moving and effective, and I think the whole film is excellent.

But.

We’ve seen this scene from both sides now. We’ve seen it because of Hermione. We cannot, just cannot fail to grasp what has happened in the story unless we are either dim or are watching while writing on Twitter. Cannot. If there is one thing more certain than our being fully aware of what happens, it’s that so is Hermione. She was there. She was right there, and it’s her time-turner device that enabled it all to happen.

And yet there it is. Leaving the scene, ‘arry explains to her what happened and I am wincing, until he ends his with explanation with “does that make sense?” and now wincing is not enough. In that moment, I did not believe I could be more patronised.

And yet there it is. Hermione has to say “No, it doesn’t.”

Hermione is that rare thing, a character in drama who is clever. She’s also that un-rare thing of a clever character who is often derided for moving the plot along while we are supposed to be with the less clever yet somehow more heroic and admirable others.

“No, it doesn’t” does serious damage. Three words and what they tell me as I am shunted out of the story, is that someone in the production worried that the dimwits and the inattentive will feel bad about being dim and inattentive, unless we have a character tell them it’s okay.

It’s not okay. It also doesn’t do the job it’s supposed to, either. People who were inattentive two minutes ago are not going to be any more attentive now, and I offer that since “No, it doesn’t” comes something over two hours into the film, the dimwit element will have lost the plot and stopped viewing quite some time ago.

Instead, what it does achieve is showing us that Hermione is stupid. You can tell us over and over that she’s the cleverest, as this film and the others in the series do, but no, she isn’t. Here she is, right in front of us, unable to understand something she witnessed, something she enabled, and then unable to comprehend a painfully simple explanation.

She’s the best character in the series and she gets shot in the face by this one line.

All of which is on my mind because a couple of weeks ago I was accused of assuming too great an intelligence on the part of my readers of some article or other. I don’t know that’s true, I don’t think I can ever know it’s true, but I can know that I’ll take that, I’m fine with that.

High yearnings

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I need to write a character who is yearning for something and I don’t seem able to do it. I also need him to be stupid but that’s easier, I’ve got form on that, not to mention a mirror.

Possibly I’m a bit fuzzy because right now, I mean exactly as I type this to you, I’m rather hoping that my COVID self test is going to turn out okay. I’m quite keen that it does, of course, a little anxious since I just was in a school talking with 150 people and am now feeling a bit rough, but still, that doesn’t feel like yearning. I’d appreciate your sticking with me for the next 15 minutes, however. Let’s talk so I don’t keep watching the clock.

The other night, I rewatched the first episode of “Hearts and Bones” by Stewart Harcourt. It’s so long since it aired back in, I think, 2000, that it practically counts as a first watch. But if I remembered very little of it from back when I must’ve reviewed the preview tapes for BBC Ceefax, what I knew in my, well, heart and my bones, was that it is achingly full of yearning. Some deeply hidden, some overt, all painful and all real. I need exactly that for this thing I’m trying to write.

You keep being told that characters in drama must want something or it isn’t drama, and I would go off on one there about how I understand this is a very Western view of dramatic form and there are others. Mind you, I don’t know the others. Shorter conversation than I expected.

If Western is all you can write, and now I suddenly see you wearing a cowboy hat which you are frankly pulling off better than I could, then I know that it doesn’t really matter what the character wants. They just must want it and if they get it immediately, the story is probably over. There’s a bit of me that wants to think bollocks, you just have to find a better story for immediately afterwards, but the principle isn’t wrong. Want something, blocked by something else, there’s at least the start of a story and, most importantly, the start of a character.

“Hearts and Bones” leads off with one character, Emma, longing, yearning, for another, a man named Rich, who happens to be her boyfriend’s brother. Dervla Kirwan plays Emma and I’m not sure she’s ever been better because Harcourt gives her moments of silence where the depth of feeling she portrays will squeeze your chest. I wish I could read the script.

Maybe it helps that she wants something specific, someone specific, but really she doesn’t. I mean, she does, but as well as the pull of attraction to this man, there’s the push of wanting, needing to get away from her life being the way it is. So it’s a specific, definable desire that actually embodies a vague, indefinable need.

I’ve realised that I don’t fully care whether my character gets whatever this nebulous thing is he wants. I’m not being coy or secretive about what he needs, I am really just struggling to vocalise it. Odd how it can be so clear in my head and yet what’s clear is that this overriding desire is something impossible to grab hold off and define.

Perhaps that’s the difference between fancying a particular man or woman and needing something impossible to define, to imagine, maybe even impossible to get. If all that happened in “Hearts and Bones” was that Emma fancies Rich, it might be soap, it wouldn’t be drama.

Okay. I see what you’ve done here. You’ve realised that I am yearning to write yearning. Smartarse.

If nothing else is clear, though, my COVID test is. Thanks for holding my hand.

Fifteen minutes of fume

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I know Microsoft does this, Microsoft has a weekly email that tells you something or other about your wellbeing and your computer use. I don’t know what, exactly, I have never done anything but delete it instantly and briefly wonder if there was an unsubscribe button.

It’s Microsoft, there won’t be.

Apple is as bad. Apple has this thing called Screen Time where each week it tells you exactly how long you’ve been using your Mac, iPad, iPhone, and what apps you were in. Sometimes the total number of hours is up on the week before, sometimes it’s down, never can I do anything about it. I used what I needed, I did what I needed, get off my back.

But.

The one that makes me so ticked off that I appear to have blocked which particular technology monolithic corporation does it to me, is one where I am encouraged to read for so many minutes a day. Like reading is good for you and that’s why you do it, that it’s a health and fitness thing rather than just bloody reading because it’s great.

No machine is ever going to tell me I should read for 15 minutes every day and I will not ever have any machine pat me on the back for doing it.

Only…

About a week ago now, I tried adding something to my To Do app’s daily routine. Read for 15 minutes. If there’s a time set for it, I don’t remember, it’s not a calendar appointment, it’s something to do. Strike that: it’s something I want to do.

So it isn’t that a reminder pops up at a certain time or that there are fireworks when I do it. It’s not that there is this 15 minute block, it’s that I’ve made reading part of my day. It’s on a To Do app, but really in this one case it’s on an Excuse for Doing It app.

There are fewer than half a dozen tasks I have to do every day but I do them every day without fail and have done for many years. I wouldn’t and I don’t think I can add many more to the list, but popping reading on there means that at some point in the day, that’s exactly what I do.

And as well as the “Read for 15 minutes” being on an Excuse for Doing It app, it’s also bollocks. The 15 minutes part. It’s never just 15 minutes. Not because I have some awkward rage against all machines, but because starting something, even something you really want to do, is tough. So much easier to do the next job, especially if it’s for someone else.

So hang on, I can work some of this out. I think it was a week ago that I started this so call that 7×15 minutes. In theory I’ve read for 105 minutes.

In practice I have no clue and no care – but I finished a Star Trek novel that’s been on my desk for months and I also re-read Jane Austen’s Emma. I don’t know if this has made me healthier, I only know for sure that I had a good time.

I’ve been a bit in my head lately and there are better heads to be in. Such as Austen’s, now I think of it. So tomorrow when Screen Time pops up, I will dismiss it with a shrug like I always do, and on Monday when Microsoft bothers me with this crap again, I will growl a bit.

But I might do both over my shoulder as I read.