{"id":272,"date":"2007-07-27T22:06:00","date_gmt":"2007-07-27T22:06:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/theblankscreen.co.uk\/selfdistract\/2007\/07\/27\/beat-it\/"},"modified":"2007-07-27T22:06:00","modified_gmt":"2007-07-27T22:06:00","slug":"beat-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/2007\/07\/27\/beat-it\/","title":{"rendered":"Beat it"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I need your help: I&#8217;ve either discovered a stunning secret to writing or I&#8217;m Joe 90.<\/p>\n<p>Any chance you find this yourself? Do you absorb things, do you for instance write better dialogue immediately after watching The West Wing? Or better gags, better pacing rhythm after a Sports Night? And do you growl at people in lazy Klingon after Star Trek?<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m almost serious. On the one hand I find it very hard to read fiction when I&#8217;m writing my own prose yet on the other I really can come away from something fired up. I&#8217;ve been doing the reading-ten-pages business, the suggestion that in preparation for entering the Red Planet contest you read the first ten pages of scripts you like and it happened that the one I looked at earlier tonight was The Bourne Identity by Tony Gilroy. Couldn&#8217;t help myself, though, I watched the film again.<\/p>\n<p>Had a long day, had a long week, but was sufficiently fired up by it to come back to the keys now.<\/p>\n<p>&#8216;Course, the intent of writing up this scene that&#8217;s been floating around my noggin&#8217; for a week has rather fallen by the wayside because I&#8217;m talking with you so I&#8217;d best go do that. But if I am an empty vessel that absorbs and moulds itself to the shape of anything I&#8217;ve just watched, I should do myself a showreel tape of the best things I can find. And play it a lot.<\/p>\n<p>Just a thought.<\/p>\n<p>Well, not just a thought, also a prevarication. Did I mention that I bought the Suzanne Vega album? Played it through twice without it making a single dent in my head &#8211; until a couple of days later when I realised I was humming half the tracks on it. Have since looped it incessantly on my iPod and am adoring it to the point of hating it.<\/p>\n<p>Sometimes I think it&#8217;s tiresome, even depressing, that the things I do to relax I can never relax to because I&#8217;m too aware of just how hard they were to make. But let&#8217;s just crank up iTunes as high as it&#8217;ll go, switch to my &#8220;Loud&#8221; playlist and get back to writing to the beat. Here come the drums, and all that.<\/p>\n<p>William<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I need your help: I&#8217;ve either discovered a stunning secret to writing or I&#8217;m Joe 90. Any chance you find &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/2007\/07\/27\/beat-it\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-272","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4chyI-4o","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/272","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=272"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/272\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=272"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=272"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=272"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}