Writing

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.

Exorcise regime

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You’re never too old to learn something, fine, but apparently it’s also never too early in the morning, either. For it’s not 08:00 yet as I write this to you and already I’ve learned something vital today. I’ve learned that the bins aren’t collected as early as they used to be.

If you heard the words “oh, no” at 07:08 today, it was me. Reaching for the kettle, thinking about you, freezing with a hand on a teabag when I remembered the bins need to be out by 06:00.

Fastest bin-putting-out-ing I’ve ever done. And now, with that kettle boiled and you right here, there’s no sign of the bins being collected yet. I know what you’re thinking but I checked: the neighbours’ bins are out and haven’t been collected, it’s not that I missed it.

It’s that I forgot because I was away. Sitting right here on my couch, barely even wearing pyjamas, and with nothing but a pint of water next to me, still I was away. Can’t tell you where yet, but wherever it was, I was there in a script. Today marks 71 days since my BBC Radio 4 play was destroyed – I’m learning French on Duolingo and every single sodding fucking day it tells me how long it’s been since the play died on my 1,000th day of Francaise. Anyway, after 71 one days, you can tell I’m quite clearly over this career low, but I can tell you that sometimes I’m doing better than it seems.

Such as for an hour sometime between 05:00 and about 07:00 weekday mornings. I’ve only been doing this for a week or two now, but I’m writing a script that steals the essence of the failed radio play. It steals the essence, I think it may even improve on it, but what I’m certain of is that it can’t be stopped the way the play was. No one’s waiting for this script and the odds of any one project getting made aren’t gigantic, but Alan Plater had this nice line in “Misterioso” about keyboards as weapons. A piano player is in a kind of musical fight with a trumpeter, and points out later that he won because he can play ten notes at a time. “Kept eight for myself and used to two to insult him. You only need two fingers to insult anyone.”

My keyboard is QWERTY and I don’t want to make it sound like I’m picking a fight over the consonants – I’m not a vowel-ent man – but I’d be okay if my punctuation were interpreted as revenge. I’m quite disciplined about the regime of clearing time before the rest of the day’s writing work, it’s just a bonus that I’m exorcising some radio demons as I go.

More importantly, for my politeness and mental well-being, I’m now 41 pages into a TV script that cannot be blocked by legal issues, cannot be stopped by anyone. As I say, no one’s waiting for it either, so don’t let me get carried away, this might be rubbish and it may never be shot at all. But right now, for these weeks, that doesn’t matter, if it ever matters at all, because this is mine.

It’s got so that every night for a week now, I’ve actually been looking forward to the morning and to climbing back into the world within this script. I try to write for just one hour, and that hour can be anywhere between 05:00 and 07:00 depending on when I can make myself get up, but today it was all the way between 05:00 and 07:00, it was the full two hours, because I wasn’t here, wasn’t on this couch, I was away in where the script is set.

People who want to be writers because they want to go to the Oscars and be as rich as JK Rowling, well, they haven’t paid attention to how writers are treated or how we fare, but they are also missing out on why writing is the best job ever created and then some.

I wish this happened more often, it’s actually quite rare for me, but these moments like today, when you’re in your own script so deeply that you forget the bins, there’s nothing like it. The closest, perhaps, is when you’re reading a superb novel and its world is enveloping you, except you are creating that world, you are pushing it along. It feels like you’re inside a small and delicate bubble and if you press on the sides just right, you expand it out to where it needs to be.

Where it needs to be is about 80 pages and right now I’m on page 41. I do not know what can possibly go on page 42, I do not have the smallest pixel of an idea what will go on there. I want to find out, and I will early tomorrow morning, but then I also don’t want to reach the end. I want to stay in this script.

I want to stay in it today, too, but I know that however good or bad my script is, it’s better if I limit it. Write until you drop and, well, you’ve dropped. Write until you have to put the bins out, and then you leave it in a good place, you’re in a good position to pick it up fresh tomorrow.

It’s not rare that I get absorbed in the writing, but it is rare that lose myself in a piece this much. So maybe the lesson I’ve learned today is that writing, whether I’m actually doing it well or not, is everything I want.

Alternatively, it could be that I’ve learned the bin collection schedule has changed and I could stay in bed longer.

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.

The good, the bad, and who’s fault it is

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You know the way that music appears to slot into decades. A 1970s song is unmistakeable from a 1990s one, for instance. Clearly that cannot be true, there is no possible way that all musicians get together to decide on a style to last from January 1, 1990, to December 31, 2000. It’s our perspective, imposing this division by decades, it has to be.

And yet it’s also definitely true.

I’m minded of this because I think a lot about how no writing, from songs to drama, can be entirely divorced from when it was written. That would presumably be because no writer can be, either. But for me, it’s been an issue of degrees. All shows are of their time, but some seem it more than others, and some continue to stand up well despite their age. That’s the phrase, that they stand up well despite being old. But films and TV don’t actually age, they are frozen in the moment of creation and it’s we who age around them.

So when I wince at something I’m watching from the 1980s, perhaps it’s blameless and I’m the one who has aged.

The reason this goes around my mind a lot and the reason I listen to this little storm in my head is that I’m usually wondering about something I’m writing. I can’t see or appreciate what it is about it that’s later going to seem so obviously bound to today, but I also can’t see whether the piece is any good or not. I can’t see whether it’s me making it good or bad, or whether it’s leaning so much into its time that it’s nothing to do with me.

For instance, there is music I like perhaps less because of itself and more because of the time it connects me to. There are a couple of tracks by The Eagles that I think are musically quite remarkable and I feel their undertow, I feel they are somehow right and good. But then I listen to an Eagles album and think it’s rubbish. The songs I know from way back when are enormously better than the songs I don’t know from way back when, but which were written and made exactly then.

Possibly I just like the band’s hits. Yet I have wondered whether there isn’t any such thing as objectively good or bad, whether it’s the luck of what time and place the piece connects audiences to. Connect enough people and you’ve got a hit.

But then I rewatched Oliver’s Travels last week.

It’s a 1990s five-part TV drama series by Alan Plater and I strongly suspect it’s really a six-part drama but nobody could make it to the end. There is some poor direction, there are excellent actors in entirely the wrong parts for them, and if it doesn’t scream 1990s to me very loudly, it’s because I’m more deafened by how it yells Alan Plater.

Everything I relished about my friend’s writing is right there in Oliver’s Travels and not one pixel of it works. He told me about problems with the production and there isn’t an actor, a critic or even just a viewer who doesn’t instantaneously realise the piece was poorly cast. But it just isn’t written well and if it’s hard to see that – not to mention hard to say – then for once you can look beyond direction and casting and the whole production because Alan’s original Oliver’s Travels novel is rubbish too.

Sorry, Alan.

But it’s a good thing. It tells me to shut up about drama being bound to the time it is written in and it tells me that the key part is not time, it’s written. If it’s not on the page, it isn’t ever going to be on the screen.

And it’s writers who put it on the page.

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.

Tower of Babble

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I have no religion, no faith, and yet some distant spiritual history came up into a script I wrote this week. Short version: nothing ever leaves us and everything comes into our writing at some point. And as soon as I say that, I’m thinking that there is a truth I hold self-evident, which is that I am not telling you anything you don’t already know.

Still, I’m so devoid of faith that it surprised me. You don’t need to know the details and I expect there’s a coffee, tea or alternative beverage that will be more worth your time just now.

But since I seem to need to tell you, here’s what happened. I do a weekly YouTube video for writers who use Macs, iPhones and iPads, that kind of thing. This week’s “58keys” happened to be the fourth time I’d tried recording this one and that wouldn’t matter to anyone, except the three failures taught me something relevant to the topic.

So the fourth version was also a rewrite, and the new script included the phrases “three times… something” and “three times more… something.”

You could watch, but it’s quicker if I tell you: I unthinkingly wrote and performed those words in my best Biblical preacher voice. True, you have to be told this because it’s not a very good best Biblical preacher voice. Yet without fully remembering the root of the words, I had the sense of them and it got into the writing.

Not enough so that I’ve looked up the original, mind. Someone denied someone three times and this is definitely bad, I was taught, though my schoolboy brain was probably focused on what pressure the denying person was under. Like the way a fella – this is religion, it’s always a fella – had reason to doubt something and has since been pilloried over it for two thousand years and counting.

Considering it’s supposed to be all about forgiveness, religion can’t half hold a grudge.

I wonder if I’m sounding at least brusque for how I’m repeatedly saying I don’t happen to have faith. I also wonder if I just want to hang on to you for a minute more, to natter on for little longer before getting down to work.

Let me do this. Let me tell you that there are three things that I do believe, that in fact I believe with a passion that could shake walls.

I believe that we are better when we work together. I get that not everyone agrees there, or we wouldn’t have Brexit now, and we wouldn’t keep getting this incendiary bollocks about immigration being anything other than great.

Then I also believe that it is better to be crew than passenger. I’d rather work my passage than be waited on.

And lastly, I believe that the show comes first. As I’ve got older, I’ve become a lot more careful about projects and work I take on, but if I’m doing it, it’s going to be done.

Which doesn’t really tally with how seconds ago I admitted that I’m using you as an excuse to stay babbling rather than get down to work. Okay, you got me there. You’re harsh this morning. Harsh, but fair.

I’ll get on with the day now and that’s the truth. Gospel.

I drove by my childhood last night

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Didn’t mean to. I did have to mark an occasion of sorts yesterday, but that was for later. Mid-evening I was driving to a familiar place through a less familiar route and at unfamiliar time.

Also, there were quite a lot of roadworks, including one set of temporary traffic lights that caught me outside what is now a Subway, but was once a bank. Through dusk and red lights, I could just see me going to that bank as a boy. It wasn’t to do any banking, you’re not looking at any kind of fiscally responsible man then or now, but instead it was part of the very best and certainly the most elaborate school trip I got to go on.

No, not part. Whole. That was the entire thing, a geography trip to this bank. It was a trip that in round figures was a stroll, easily contained within a single lesson. But last night, I could again see why we were marched off to it.

For down very low on the bank’s wall, where thirty of us once had to take turns crouching down to see, and where last night I had to sit up a bit to see over a bollard, there is a crow’s foot mark. It’s an Ordnance Survey marker, and it’s to do with establishing a base line in order to measure the height of hills and buildings.

Before I could remember what height I would’ve been back then, traffic moved on now and – perhaps not surprisingly – I was then driving by my old school. We didn’t get on, my school and I, but there is something about it still being there that is practically haunting.

As there was with this. The reason for the new route was that I was required to pick up a fish and chip supper. The chip shop I was directed to turns out to be very proud of the fact that it opened the year I was born. The year is on signs and everything.

So for every minute I have lived, for every thing I have done and thought and said, this chip shop has been a living business, a going concern, and for a moment it felt like it had been expecting me for all these years.

That’s probably not why a woman working there said “Sorry for the wait”.

Much later last night, I marked this occasion that I needed to mark and if I did it without looking back quite as far as school afternoons, still it was a whole bunch of looking back. I did this thing by watching Alan Plater’s “Doggin’ Around”. You can catch that on YouTube if you look in the right corners but – get me – my copy is from the BBC’s own archives. Which doesn’t sound relevant, does sound suspicious, but turned out to be poke-in-the-eye relevant for literally every second of the film.

For the BBC archive’s viewing copies of shows from the 1990s are effectively ROTs, Recordings of Transmissions. You don’t just get the show itself, you get the continuity announcements either end because BBC just recorded the whole output and later chopped it up into the shows. So it’s like you’re back watching on the night.

Except BBC archive viewing copies also have a timecode burnt in. I’m used to that from preview tapes, but this was not a clock showing the running time, it was a clock and a calendar showing exactly when “Doggin’ Around” aired. Precisely.

It was on BBC1 starting at 22:06:30 and on, it says here and throughout the film, the date 16-10-94. Ended 23:36:17.

By chance, I watched it at pretty close to those same times now, 27 years, 4 months and 26 days later. I watched it now on an iPad in my bath and simultaneously, it felt, in 1994 on a Mac in my rented London flat where I appeared to live on pizza bread, waffles and sweetcorn.

At about 23:36:18 on 16-10-94, I know I phoned Alan Plater to say how much I had enjoyed it. Three decades later on 10-3-22, I know I wanted to phone you to say the same thing.

But.

I’m also really not ready to look back in quite so much detail. It seems that the past can be a more lovely place to visit than I’d have thought, but, god, I don’t want to live there.

With or without a timecode.

So let’s you and I consider this as occasions marked and moved on from. It’s time to do something new.

Key on a keyboard

116keys

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Tomorrow is the second anniversary of 58keys, a YouTube series I do for writers like me who use and write on Macs, iPhones and iPads. If you don’t happen to write on those, 58keys is of no earthly use to you. But still, I want to share a general writing lesson I think I’ve learned from doing it.

And that’s just this: you can change what normal is.

I first thought of a YouTube channel in 2012 and even shot a couple of minutes of footage. I’m going to let myself off a little here by explaining that all I really had was an idea for one gag. Didn’t know what a channel of mine could be about, didn’t know what I’d be interested in, didn’t and really still don’t know what anyone watching could be interested in.

Nonetheless, for seven years I did bugger-all.

And even in mid- to late-2019, I did bugger-little. Shot a title sequence. Figured out what I could do. Chose the name 58keys. Now I write it down, that seems more than I thought, but really it was all held back by me being me. Until January 2020 when, little knowing what could possibly be ahead of us all, I was determined to launch the channel before the end of the month.

Today I am making some little money from it, but if that’s not the reason I do it now, it definitely wasn’t the reason I launched it on January 29, 2020. The sole and specific and exclusive reason I launched it was sheer frustration with myself for not doing it, for constantly putting off a writing job I wanted to do. I can be very unhappy with me, but this time I was angry.

So I launched it. Just to shut me up.

Somehow I got 7 subscribers in the first week. I’m now on 2,400 or so. In that same week, the watch time, the total time anyone played any video of mine, was 584 minutes, which would amaze me just as much if it were this week. Except I record the statistics at the end of each Friday and last week the total for the preceding seven days was 218.2.

Hours.

So that’s 13,092 minutes of me watched last week. Since I’ve got all of my statistics plus a pocket calculator, hang on one sec.

God in heaven. Since I began, the total watch time is 6,514,500 minutes. Six million minutes of watching me, that’s insane. I have a sudden urge to comb my hair.

And still it’s not what I learned, it’s not what I want to talk to you about. Nor is the money: YouTube pays less than you think. I’m getting between £20 and £40 per month, but then I also separately got a lot of funding about 17 months in, so the real per-month figure is considerably higher. There are also book sales that have come from it, and various courses I run. Plus I’ve just been booked to make a lot of videos for other companies.

No, truly, what I learned is this thing about the new normal.

There have been no breaks in the two years, no gaps, just at least one video every week. I’ve done extra editions in short runs so the total is 117 videos in 104 weeks. And now I know that there will be a 118th next week, 119th the week after. It’s still the same amount of work, it’s still the same amount of effort, but the doubt is gone. I don’t doubt that I’ll do another video, because I no longer think about whether I should doubt, or at least not as much.

For better or worse, for as small as my channel is compared to others, for as little as it pays directly compared to the time it takes me, 58keys is now a normal part of my working life.

And since I’ve scripted at least 90 of those episodes, writing non-fiction YouTube scripts is also a normal part of my working life now. That’s been startling: I can see my scriptwriting is better than it was, which had been an aim but I hadn’t guessed how very much I would feel it would help me.

You can very easily argue that there are other things I could put the effort in to, but I don’t think you can argue that writing effort is not being made. Or that things are happening because of it.

Which all gives me encouragement just where I need some.

It encourages me because there are other things I have put off, there are other things that I want to write, other areas I want to write in, other failings that make me angry at myself on the hour and the half-hour. There are areas where I feel both that I am starting from scratch and that I should have started a long, long time ago.

Can’t do anything about what I haven’t done, but I can pull my bloody finger out and make these new areas be part of my normal working life.