On Writing …

So, I’m just over halfway through my master’s degree at the moment, and I’ve had some thoughts.  These have been a long time coming, so I thought whilst my brain was fresh (ha!), I’d attempt to get something on the blog to at least justify the hosting fees I still pay for it.

Byredo 1996, 4160 Tuesdays Both Sides of Clouds, Glossier You – explanation coming soon. Maybe.

College is great, there’s a lot going on in my personal life these days, and I’m not going to go into it here, but college has given me a structure to work within, and I am so grateful for that.  That my degree basically allows me to sit around and watch sitcoms a couple of days a week (the day we spent on Road Runner was particularly instructive, honestly!), and then bitch about them with other aspiring comedy writers is just the cherry on the cake to be honest. It’s an online course too, so I’m basically living in my pyjamas 24/7, and it’s bliss.  BLISS!

Oh, before I go on, I forgot to mention that my Master’s will eventually be in Comedy Writing,  specifically screenplays.  So far I’ve written a short film, a multitude of sketches, a couple of satirical songs (I’m particularly proud of my opus: “Don’t Cry For Me Work and Pensions“), a couple of pitch documents, more academic essays than I’d like to think about, interviewed a comedy legend, and produced approximately 127 pages of footnotes.  God, I love a footnote. Currently I’m writing a half hour sitcom pilot, which I can’t wait to get finished.

I say I can’t wait to finish it, but I’m having real trouble actually starting! Which brings me to why I’m writing this blog post at all really. Can we say “procrastination“, boys and girls?  Blogging is easy; you just put your fingers on the keyboard and spaff out whatever is on your mind. Real writing (and when I say “real writing”, I really mean “writing with intent”) is hard.  Really, really hard.  There are no editors on a blog, and it doesn’t matter if what you spew doesn’t make sense.

But putting a screenplay together is much, much harder than that.  There are rules.  And things need to make (a certain amount of) sense. But that’s not the real problem, once you’re into the midst of it, writing a screenplay is just a matter of putting people in certain spaces, moving them about it a bit, and putting a few jokes in their mouths  – please don’t get me started on the formatting though, I regularly spit my dummy out when I’m trying to do something Final Draft has decided should be buried three menus away – then trying not to cry when you eventually read it back to yourself.

I’ve cried a lot on this course. Occasionally with laughter.

What has been really difficult for me is the planning you have to do first, long before you even get your fingers to the keyboard.  Whole characters to think about (luckily, I come from a long line of “characters”, and almost everyone in everything I’ve written on the course so far has at least a tiny bit of one or other of my family members in them), as well as their backstories, who they play off against, the setting, the initial idea. And, it turns out I don’t always have the “initial idea” first, that’s been a huge revelation!  My current project came about from seeing a tweet about an item of clothing that I thought would be a good character name, and then finding an entire world for that character to live in.

Oh yeah, and then there’s plots.  Ah, plots. God, I struggle with plots.  And endings.  Especially endings, I’m spectacularly shit at them, but that could be because I normally give up on stuff when it’s not fun any more, so I rarely finish anything at all.  Hmn … [insert psychology joke here – Ed]

Anyway, almost everything I thought I knew about writing in over ten years of being a blogger has been turned on its head a bit by this course.  The idea of spending three or four months creating a single blog post is ludicrous, but that’s (surprisingly) a quick turnaround for planning a TV series, and the thing I’m really struggling with is giving myself the space to not know things instantly.  Anyone who knows me, knows I’m quick, quick-witted, quick (and sharp)-tongued, and sometimes having to think about things REALLY HARD before I commit to them feels … plodding(?) … somehow. I definitely have commitment issues.  Just ask my husband. He’s around here somewhere.  I think.

[cough] Usually, no sooner have I had a thought then I’ve either vocalised it, googled it and become obsessed with it, or the thought passes and I’ve instantly forgotten it. I’m so used to getting obsessed with something, mastering it super-fast, then looking for the next thing, that having to live with Just One Thing over a period of time is a whole new way of working for me, and, man, it’s way more difficult than I ever could have imagined going in.  I guess I thought comedy writing would be more like “have an idea, write something funny about it, move on” but it’s more like “here’s a framework, you can do anything you like with it, and you will love it when you get there, but first you have to do X, Y, Z.  And only those if you’ve done A through to W as well”.

Moving from a lifetime of instant gratification (writing-wise, at least) to trying to write more considered stuff is hard, but I will say that it’s bloody satisfying when I get over myself long enough to actually commit ALL THE THOUGHTS IN MY HEAD to paper. Till, of course, I re-read them and they make me cringe/laugh/cry [delete as applicable] at my own ideas.

Anyway. This post was just an attempt for me to get my thoughts in order* and just to experience the sheer joy of words flying out of my brain without worrying about a) word count b) grades c) someone “finding me out” and kicking me off the course or d) whether it makes sense.

It’s been therapeutic. Maybe I’ll even write about why there’s perfume on top of my scripts collection sometime soon.

* HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH! Sorry.