It’s not as if I do it a lot, but I do perform, I do workshops and I get interviewed, and you know how it is. You end being asked the same things and you end up doing a lot of the same things if they worked once. And of all of these, there is a line of mine that I like.<\/p>\n
“Everything is interesting, everything is so interesting,” I’ll say before, after a really ridiculously calculated beat pause, adding: “Except football.”<\/p>\n
I know it gets a laugh because as a British man I am expected to follow sport. I do also know that it annoys a significant proportion of the audience wherever I am, but I also know that while that isn’t the point, while that isn’t why I say it or what I hope it will do, it helps. Specifically, it helps in writing workshops because when you hear me say it, you have no doubt that it’s true. I’m saying something that you couldn’t truly call controversial, but it is at least a surprise and what I’m telling the audience is that this is a space where I am relaxed enough to be honest. It’s a space where, therefore, they can be the same, where if I’m ever going to judge them, it will be on whether their writing could convey something better. It won’t ever be about them or what they’re trying to say.<\/p>\n
So the whole everything-is-interesting-except-football thing is true but because it’s become a tool as well, I’ve been forgetting just how true it is. <\/p>\n
Right now I’m once more feeling like I’m not doing enough, I’m not writing well enough, and time is roaring by without my doing anything. What gets me out of this low part of my cycle, though, is the absolute truth that everything else is so interesting. It can’t matter that I’m not contributing anything, because there is so much else by so many other people that is so fantastic I want to gobble it up.<\/p>\n
Even now, even here, in this world and after a week in which I’ve had to write about Trump more than I would want to, there is so much that is fantastic. I cannot get enough of the detail behind things you don’t think about. So while I might be burying my head to hide from some things I actually do not want to think about, just in the last week I have learned, for instance:<\/p>\n
\u2022 Toothpaste factories fill 1,000 tubes per minute
\n\u2022 When you download an attachment in Apple Mail, the document is saved with an email icon that you can click to go straight back to the originating message
\n\u2022 You don’t see hitchhikers with car trade plates so much now because they’re paid better
\n\u2022 “Mission: Impossible II” in the year 2000 was going to be about AI and the Y2K bug, except it’s initially planned director Oliver Stone thought writer Christopher McQuarrie was making all that up.
\n\u2022 Channel 4 has a head of High Risk television
\n\u2022 I have strong feelings about prologues<\/p>\n
Admit it. You’re interested in the toothpaste. So let me also tell you that I learned this week that approximately 20 billion toothpaste tubes are made worldwide every year.<\/p>\n
Now you’re off thinking about how you can never get that last bit out of the tube and so how much toothpaste is wasted.<\/p>\n
I tell you, we can sod Trump and AI and sod however you’re feeling about your work, because now we can just wonder about how can you recycle 20 billion tubes with bits in.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It’s not as if I do it a lot, but I do perform, I do workshops and I get interviewed, … Continue reading