I’ve been a bad blogger. I’ve let myself down, and let my
blog gather dust, letting it resemble one of those un-updated pop group
websites that has ‘New album due in 2008’ as the latest item in the ‘News’
section. So I’m sorry about that, it’s been a cause of constant, but very mild,
and very ignorable, irritation for me over the past few months too.
My excuse is, of course, that I’ve been busy. I’ve written
and re-written about seven or eight hours’* worth of scripts over the past
three months, plus a 10,000 word article for Doctor Who Magazine, so it’s not
as if I’ve been lounging on a chaise longue waiting for inspiration to strike.
The thing is, it’s very difficult to justify the time to write a blog if you
have somebody who has paid you money to write something waiting for you to hand
it in. It just doesn’t look professional if, rather than working on the thing
that you’re meant to be working on, which has a deadline stampeding towards you
and studios booked and actors pencilled, instead you’re writing a blog on your
top ten favourite twist endings in Brotherhood of Man songs or doing something
utterly superfluous like reviewing the latest James Bond film.
So that’s the reason. Because it looks bad, and I don’t want
the people who I’m supposed to be writing for to see me frittering away my creative-typing
time rather than giving paid work priority. I don’t want to give them cause to
wonder what it is they are paying me for. I want them to have the (entirely
correct) impression that I am working hard on whatever it is I have been
contracted to do, slaving away into the evenings, nights and early mornings,
burning candles at both ends and not going out to the pub, cinema or theatre or
playing endless Killer Sudokus. Which I am not doing.
Oddly, this rule doesn’t seem to apply to twitter, which has
been an outlet for the ever-growing stockpile of marginally amusing trivia that
fills my brain. And if you have one safety-valve outlet, you don’t get the
pressure build-up that requires another. It’s all a question of plumbing. And
while, yes, I should be too busy to tweet (and sometimes, thankfully, get so
into The Writing Zone that I don’t) I’d
defend it in two ways.
Firstly, that it’s not really writing as such, but more the
equivalent of telling a joke to the bloke sitting opposite you at the office
based on what you’ve just heard on the radio. As a freelancer, thankfully I am
spared the social rigmarole of office life – the relentless bloody birthday
cards - and I can’t write if I can hear a squirrel clearing its throat in the back
garden, never mind cope with music or a prattling DJ, so for radio read ‘the
BBC news website, the Media Guardian website and, at a push, Chortle’. But
nevertheless there is that need to discuss, to feel connected, and to have a
social outlet for the fruitless guff that would otherwise clog up the cogs of
the mental machinery.
Following on from that, reason two, is that it’s a useful
reminder that when you’re writing, you’re writing for an audience, a throng of
punters, and it’s good to have that pressure, that feeling that there’s a
thousand people sitting in the auditorium with their arms folded and ‘I’ve had
a shit day, amuse me’ expressions on their faces. It’s good to be conscious
that what you’re writing will have readers, listeners or viewers, because
sometimes it can feel like the only people you’re writing for are the producers
or script editors of the project.
That’s why it’s so important to write with the hope (if not
the certainty) that what you’re writing will get seen, heard or read, that it
will get published in some form, because it’s bloody hard to motivate yourself
to spend days, weeks, months on a script if you think that the only person in
the world who will ever read it will be one producer who will take six months
to get around to it and won’t be giving it their full attention when they do
and who will only be reading it to look for reasons to reject it. I’m not
bemoaning the state of the world – I’ll save that for another day – just saying
how difficult it is to motivate yourself to go through that process when you
have other people offering you money to write stuff that will actually be read,
heard or seen. ‘Get paid and get made’ always has to take priority.
* This sounds vague. I’m not vague about how much I’m
written, I’m just vague on how many hours and minutes it will turn
out to be.
