Action!

It’s been a good week. I wrote- beginning, middle and end- an entire film screenplay. Not a long one, I reckon it would only last five minutes. But anyway, it took me about two days to write. Who wants to watch a five minute movie? I don’t know. A work colleague, who’s been to film school, mentioned that he was thinking of trying to make a short film. He began the conversation by asking me about my own writing; and said he was thinking of adapting a horror story and filming that. Which made me wonder whether he was asking me to write something specifically for him.
I could be wrong. I could be badgering him when I present this screenplay (it can only last about five pages when printed out). And it could be that he won’t like it anyway, or that he’s changed his mind about making a film. But it did me no harm to write it on spec. It was an interesting experiment, a different way of writing. I’ve never written with the cinema in mind before. What’s that saying about telling a story for the big screen- that you get behind a camera and dream? I felt that that’s what I was doing.
It was a dialogue-free story featuring one character inside a council flat, because I assumed my work-colleague, if he was going to make a film, was going to make it on a shoestring. It’s in the horror genre and, again, it owes a lot to the short stories of M.R. James. I feel proud of myself for having started it and finished it.
If you’re suffering from writers’ block, and you’re reading this, you might be cursing me right now. I wouldn’t blame you. Ten years ago, I would never have dreamed that I could knock out a story that quickly. I’m not blasĂ© about this. Breaking through writers’ block like that is nothing short of a miracle to me. I read a creative writing manual lately with a chapter about getting ideas. The chapter began by saying that nothing could be simpler. This was obviously meant to be encouraging, but I frankly envied the writer, who has clearly never had the serious writers’ block where a couple of decades go by and you still haven’t finished anything.
You really do have my sympathy, if that describes you. I’ve been there, and it’s horrible. Even if the rest of your life is going well, you can’t appreciate it fully if you feel you’ve been denied your life’s purpose. Conversely- this week, for instance, when I’m short on money and I’ve got a load of other problems looming- I can feel on top of the word simply for having written something. A silly little story (and I’m not, incidentally, making any claims for its merits), but telling it made me feel as though I’d won a million pounds.
A combination of things got me through the block. My marriage got better. I discovered Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down The Bones, and began writing practice (that is, getting a notebook, writing down a list of subjects which interested me, and then, each day, writing about the next subject on the list for a set time). I discovered Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way, and began doing morning pages (three sides of stream-of-consciousness writing, first thing in the morning), regular solitary walking (for the purpose of daydreaming, which is all-important), and Artist’s Dates (once a week, doing something on your own which makes you happy- God, I phrased that badly).
I joined a terrific writers group. And I discovered authors whom I loved, a whole new genre (horror fiction) which I took to like a duck to water. There was luck, courage. A willingness to take risks. I don’t know- maybe even the writers’ block had a point. Maybe, if only I could have seen it that way at the time, I was in preparation for this period of my life.
If you’re suffering from writers’ block, give those above titles a go (as well as Julia Cameron’s Sound of paper). Read for pleasure, do things for fun, take walks by yourself. And write for, say, ten minutes a day, on a subject which interests you- write it without any thought of showing it to anyone else, let alone selling it. As J.B. Priestley put it, write as though you were practising a musical instrument.
I’m praying for you.

Comments

Popular Posts