I try to adhere to the ‘write something every day’ school of writing. Sometimes that’s driven by pure inspiration, sometimes by specific deadlines and on others by a ‘place your bum in the seat and get something done’ mentality. The last one has been a big part of my approach in 2020, for a variety of reasons including reading THE SUBTLE ART OF NOT GIVING A F*** book by Mark Mason. I’m glad I read that just before all this kicked off, that’s for sure.
Before CV-19 had such a big influence on our lives, I’d actually been very productive. Too productive in fact to actually remember to keep things updated here. Revisiting a few comics projects paid dividends and I have three mini-series pitches in with one publisher and one in with another. Some of these are co-written by my longtime collaborator Stephen Aryan and I’m hoping to hear about them all soon. I also finally took my horror screenplay idea and worked it up from the initial one page synopsis into a full twenty page treatment and sent that off to a producer to look at. One week into March I was on a writing roll with lots more planned for the coming months too, and then things changed.
There’s nothing like a global pandemic to knock your muse off course and to make you unable to get your head into the right place to get things moving. Things became overwhelming very quickly and the bit of my brain that comes up with ideas went into shutdown almost overnight. It wasn’t just due to mental space, physical space played a part too. My home office, where I do most of my writing, has become my weekday 9-6 actual office which has made me less inclined to stay there in the evenings or to get in there before my working day starts. So my usual write every day writing routine ground to an abrupt halt.
Thankfully things loosened up for me last weekend and not beating myself up for not writing actually helped with that. Making use of housebound weekends now seems like a far better plan than trying to force something out Monday to Friday. Last Saturday I wrote the dialogue for the first half of the next issue of Seven Shades, that book is done Marvel style so having Dave Clifford’s pages in front of me was a gentle way to ease myself back into creative thinking. The second thing that I managed to do last weekend was a short script for the BBC Writer’s Room’s InterConnected opportunity.
““*New Opportunity* We want original scripts, 5-10 minutes in length whose 2-4 characters now find themselves in isolation, but connecting via video conferencing. 4 will be produced with professional actors & released on BBC platforms.” ”
I spent about a week thinking of ideas for a script, all of which just didn’t quite feel right and seemed either contrived, too obvious, or not really workable with the constraints of what was needed. In the end not thinking about it allowed my subconscious to work it’s magic and then forcing myself to sit and write it meant that I got it done before the pending deadline.
With over 6800 scripts submitted my chance of having mine produced is extremely slim, but I’m pleased with what I came up with and it was a cathartic process from a writing perspective and also as a personal way to say something about the crisis too. Re-energised I have a couple of other potential new things on the horizon, it’s very early days on both projects and they might come to nothing, but it’s good to have things to focus on during these uncertain times. It’s also ok, I keep telling myself, to not write today and maybe even this weekend at all, as it’s just as important to switch off occasionally as it is to try and keep getting things done.