February ’25…
In the beginning, there was at least a plan.
It was a good plan. No really, I liked it. I was a fan of the plan.
Forged from the white heat of past experience, basking in the light of a proven track record, grounded in hard won certainties and doused with a heavy glug of common sense.
All of the key components were there. I was sure of it.
Sometimes, surely, the obvious thing to do might also just be the right thing to do….and visa-versa.
So, I would make a job of this writing malarkey, of this jumble of words and letters that had begun cluttering up the space between my ears.
By which I mean I’d treat it like a job. I would base the structure of my working day on something closely resembling the way it had always been.
7:00 am alarm, tea, wash, dress, breakfast, make bed, walk dog and be seated at my desk, poised, like a coiled spring and ready to propel myself into the world of literary greatness by 9:00am each and every day, Monday to Friday, without fail…. with weekends off for good behaviour.
I’d write in two daily blocks, four hours from 9am-1pm, take an hour for lunch and then four more from 2pm-6pm
It couldn’t fail, until of course, it did.
Just to say, this isn’t a blog about the perils of writer’s block or avoiding distractions, there’ll be other days to write witty diatribes about all of that, no doubt.
You see this, is a blog about the way writing completely takes over your life, bedevils your sanity and starts making you question all of the old certainties that you’d always taken for granted.
Until now.
What I discovered about myself was this:
I am, at my very core, a massive loser, with the basic inclinations of a work-shy fop and the intellectual rigour of a two-year-old.
In essence, no stamina.
It turns out that I don’t have the capacity to write well for any period of time longer than 2 hours in a single sitting.
Between 9:30 and 11:30, my fingers could be a blur across the keyboard, at which point, the black clouds of illiteracy would descend and I would transform into my split-personality-alter-ego, the other me, the knuckle dragging, Neanderthal man of this parish, utterly incapable of stringing together a single sentence of any literary credibility whatsoever.
This would mean hours on end that I’ll never get back, spent reading and re-reading the same last line that I’d typed, circa 11:29 am, over and over again, until the drool began to hang from the side of my mouth and my bloodshot eyes began to glaze over.
Only now do I realise that I’d started turning into a Bloodhound.
Therefore, to avoid full dog osmosis, there was suddenly a question to be answered and a big decision to be made:
Was there a way of making my own failings and feeble limitations work for me?
The outcome:
In a rare moment of clarity, I resolved to restructure my working day into three 2-hour writing blocks:
1) 9:30 am – 11:30 am
2) 1:00 pm – 3:00 pm
3) 4:30pm – 6:30pm.
On balance, though it’s still a work in progress, of course, where some days seem to pan out better than others, things definitely seem to run more smoothly like this, the days feel more productive and at least now there’s some kind of shadowy authority figure, directing the alphabet soup inside my head.
Although some things in life are never that simple, are they?
I’m talking about the days when you just can’t switch the sound off.
Sitting on a train, or out walking the dog, when your mind drifts effortlessly towards your writing (because it’s never far away) and the motivation for a character or the trigger for the next plot twist suddenly becomes clear and then, your doomed. The story has you in the palm of its hand.
And so it is, that whenever I’m away from my lap-top, now my almost constant companion, that’s when the ideas (that always seem so stellar at the time) are sure to flood your consciousness.
They can strike at any time, perhaps in the middle of a conversation of vital importance, to the other person, at least.
Now you find yourself having to stop the world, so that you can get off, frantically typing notes into your iPhone instead or worse still, if caught without a phone, desperately trying to remember not to forget…
These days, the terror of forgetting something that you think just might be a good idea is the greatest fear of all. It consumes me.
FOMO on steroids.
That’s why weekends aren’t really weekends any more. If inspiration strikes and I have something to write about, I write.
When trying to relate to their audience, TV comedians will often do that gag about getting incredibly sleepy just before they go to bed, desperately craving sleep until the split-second they actually close their eyes, at which point they’re wide awake again, in farcically deep dialogue with their inner-selves, worrying obsessively about the minutia of everyday life and counting down the minutes until the 6:00am alarm rings forth.
These days, I appear to have taken it to another level.
At least once a week you’ll find me sitting at my desk at 4am, typing up a killer line that sounded so good in my head, a few minutes earlier as I lay, snuggled in my bed and then catching myself wondering whether this kind of bizarre behaviour is normal.
Which of course it is……… for a writer.
