Shamed August 18, 2008
Posted by sfjones in Daily work, Life, Writing.Tags: The Tempest, Resistance
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After a few weeks of de-cluttering and re-organising my my life, my desk and my research notes, but otherwise not getting up to much of note, writing-wise - call it procrastination, or that damn Resistance of Steven Pressfield’s - a friend mentioned that they liked an extract of The Tempest that they’d read. It’s strengthened my resolve to get back in the saddle and actually do some work and finish the other books. I regularly dip into Pressfield’s War of Art and am shamed by his determined routine, and despair at ever recovering one of my own. At the moment I don’t feel like a writer, I feel like a fake. And that’s pretty depressing.
Sure, I’ve written a play that’s going to be performed, I’m bubbling with non-fiction ideas for Tyger’s Head, and I’m definitely progressing with a long-term NF project. But actually getting anything written that will help me now (and start bringing in some cash) is proving another matter.
Perhaps I should have been one of those mad 18th century poets who wandered around the countryside eating poppies while their costs were paid by equally mad patrons with more cash than sense. Then again, I suspect such blessed poets are probably figments of the unwilling imagination of procrastinating “writers” like me who don’t seem to be able to get their act together and feel they need to blame their lack of productivity on not having a perfect writing situation. Oh yes. We’re aware of our sins.
Just to underline how lackadaisical my life is becoming in general, I was supposed to be at work today (part-time job) but came home at lunchtime with a headache the size of Winchester. I’ve had it for a couple of days, and suspect it’s to do with two days of doing nothing but sleeping, to avoid dealing with a depression. Normally I’d stay at work 1) So as not to be a wimp; 2) Just to get the hours in, as I don’t get paid unless I’m there, but when my employer said “Just go home, it’s quiet here” I was only too happy to cave in. By this time I was feeling particularly dizzy and spaced out; perhaps my employer was right, especially as I had to drive home. At home I popped two Migraleve tablets on my mother’s advice and felt even worse, but was suddenly desperate to get some writing done. And lo and behold, I’ve suddenly got back into work on one of the other novels, which according to the file properties I haven’t touched since March. Why is that? Why is it that I can feel on top of the world, and have all day to seriously get some words on paper, I just can’t settle down to doing a damn thing; but when I’m feeling crap, I’m supposed to be in bed (or at work) and have taken medication to stop my head exploding, I have to sit down and bash away at some text? I remember that years ago some of my best writing was written on scraps of paper when I was supposed to be data-entering or phoning lease drivers or some equally tedious temporary job. Why is that?
Maybe it’s obvious but my head just isn’t in any fit state this afternoon to work out the logic.
Robin, assuming I survive the night then I’ll be in an hour earlier tomorrow to make up for today. And I promise to keep off the poppies, unless they clear my head significantly better than the Migraleve.
Play editing / Tempest MS reformatting July 27, 2008
Posted by sfjones in Daily work, TV, Film & Theatre.Tags: Chiltern Players, drama, The Tempest
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14:59
So far the day has been bitty, as since Friday I’ve been house-sitting and had to decamp at 13:30 to walk the resident dog prepare for the owner coming home. However I did manage to finish editing A Falling Star. The play concerns the printing of Overbury’ epic poem called A Wife: it occurred to me that there are two married couples in the play, and yet I had made no allusion - even in passing - to the conduct of the wives in it, although they are primary characters. It’s a plotting point no adjudicator worth his/her salt would miss, so I re-jigged Scenes 10 and 11 so that the wives are alluded to in both, and the behaviour of one of them in particular are brought into focus. It means that Scene 10 is slightly longer, but as stage setting should take only a couple of minutes and the play reading took 50, we’ll still be well inside the 60 minute festical play limit.
(Assuming we actually perform it, as there’s still been no official email.)
Recalling the things I’ve needed to know on the fly whilst reading play scripts in rehearsal, I’ve also included a summary of scenes, a props list, and added the scene names in the page headers.
This afternoon I need to do some more life admin (grrrrrr), but I might also get on with Act I Scene 1 of Slow Train to Carlisle.
——
The guy I work for part-time is also a writer (children’s fiction) and is currently using a reputable literary consultancy to tweak the structure of his latest book to give it the best possible chance in the market. He’s very impressed with them, and as I really ought to make some headway with marketing or publishing The Tempest beyond Lulu, I may give them a go and see if it can net me another agent. However, it does mean I have to re-hash the original MS into submission format: the formatting of the Word file was necessarily messed with when I imported the text into Quark, for type-setting, and I face a long job putting it back to normal. Yes I should have taken a copy before I changed the formatting, and to be honest I thought I had done as I’m pretty diligent at making back-ups … but I can’t find one. Damn.
Against Resistance July 25, 2008
Posted by sfjones in Daily work, Life, Writing.Tags: procrastination
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It’s one minute past twelve and I haven’t started work yet.
I was up at 9:30 this morning; I had a cup of tea, read the paper, had some breakfast, and thought about setting up in the garden to do some work. However strong the thought, though, it was 10:30 at that point and it’s taken me an hour and a half to actually get out here and do anything productive. I wasted about half an hour waiting for the postman as I knew a couple of CDs would be arriving; if they didn’t fit through the letterbox he’d have to ring the bell, but I wouldn’t hear it from here, he’d take them back, I’d have to collect them … Turns out that the parcel did fit, and when I found it in the postbox I spent another half an hour ripping open the parcel and listening to one of the CD tracks that has been going around in my head for days. Then my mobile told me it was running out of juice, so I’ve had to go find the charger and plug it in out here (I have to keep it with me and switched on in case the person I’m dog-sitting for this evening changes his plans). And of course I want to rip the CD onto the laptop so I can transfer that one particular track onto my MP3, so I’ve had to dig out the MP3 and all the bloody cables.
[pause]
… I’ve just wasted another ten minutes trying to catch the registration number of a Cessna that buzzed the garden at extremely low latitude several times, dipping his wings - in our experience probably taking photographs, either to try and flog back to us as “Breathtaking aerial shots of your property!” or to sell to property developers who will then send us letters telling us about the “exciting opportunity” they can offer us if they build on our garden (my father’s standard response, incidentally, is unprintable).
Air safety law (at least in UK) states that the lowest these planes can fly over a residential area is 500 feet. Or so my father tells me, and he was a pilot for 32 years. So if you’re out in your garden this summer and some prat in a bi-plane thinks it fun to deliberately buzz your garden, or to show off to friends at a particular address in your street by stall-diving to 300 feet and pulling up at the last minute - as someone did in our street, two days ago - get the plane’s registration number and report it to the nearest civilian / commercial airfield. With any luck the pilot will have his license revoked, or at least suspended, and we can all have some peace and quiet. If you’re not sure how high 500 feet is, it’s the level below which people in the vicinity start running around and shouting “What the &*$£ is that £$&^ DOING?” If you don’t have Superman eyesight but can still clearly read the registration number without squinting or the use of binoculars, the plane is almost certainly too low. Report it anyway. We do.
Obviously, planes forced to a low altitude through difficulty or emergency are another matter but the differences between one in that situation and one piloted by a moron on an adrenalin kick are pretty obvious.
Once again I’ve digressed, but it serves a point.
The writer Steven Pressfield has a word for all this procrastination and lack of focus: he calls it “Resistance”. If you’re a writer and just can’t seem to get down to work, invest in a copy of The War of Art. It’s a small paperback and doesn’t cost much, but what lies between the covers is worth it’s proverbial weight. Pressfield personifies Resistance as a sentinent force that tries to scupper your every move towards productive working; the book is split up into small sections that offer short insights into how Resistance will try and beat you, and what your attitude must be to beat it. Short chunks of advice are always easier to digest anyway, but they also force you to stop/start/stop/start reading, and in this way leave ample room for your own responses to pour in and force you to examine your own attitudes to your work. As a former procrastinator par excellence, I recommend it first-hand.
Another thought-provoker for struggling writers is Stephen King’s On Writing, which is more biographical but is peppered with stories of his own misfortunes and how he conquered them to become the success he is today. The book was largely written as he recovered after a major accident: many procrastinators would leap at such a seemingly valid excuse to not do any work, but King used the experience as it unfolded to create On Writing. I have a poor record at actually finishing a book I’ve started to read (I have a butterfly mind) but this one held me to the last page.
Incidentally, it’s now 13:05.
A Falling Star July 24, 2008
Posted by sfjones in TV, Film & Theatre, Writing.Tags: Chiltern Players, drama
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Early in July I camped for a week in the Channel Islands; I went with the intention of writing a play, and for once I found the discipline to start what I planned, and actually got it finished.
Mind, when you have a view like this to inspire you, and no internet or laptop …
Shell Beach, Herm Island
[* waves * Hi Kevin & Sarah on pitch 40!]
I’m tinkering with the idea of going once a year, or maybe bi-annually, as a writing retreat. Whoever it was that said lying on a beach is uncultured ought to chill out on a towel with a pen and paper … it might do their own writing muscle the world of good.
The play is a one-act piece about the murder of Sir Thomas Overbury, a courtier of King James I. I had a head start as I already knew a lot about the scandal: the bookseller who published all of Overbury’s writings - and several independent pieces concerning the marriage of Robert Carr, who was eventually convicted of involvement in Overbury’s death - was Laurence Lisle, the father of Colonel George Lisle in my English Civil War novels. Well, I’ve heard it said that you should always write about what you know.
I wrote a large chunk of it during a 12 hour wait at St Peter Port for my return ferry (La Manche was in full tantrum), and then wrote it up and edited it on the laptop at home. After a passing mention to someone in the Chiltern Players, we organised a reading a week or so later and now it looks like we’ll be performing it for the festival season next year (that’s not official, by the way, as the Chairman’s email hasn’t gone out yet, but we were talking about it again during a theatre outing last night, so I guess it’s as good as). It’s shorter than I anticipated when I wrote it, about 50 minutes, but that’s an ideal length for a festival play. What began on the beach as two short acts is now a single long one, and I need to get my editing head on to swap over words that people had trouble with during the reading. I also need to get a grip on the idea of directing the thing, as it’ll be the first time I’ve done it. *Gulp*. Oh, and having it pulled apart by grizzled adjudicators who have been-there-seen-that-bought-the-programme. Hmmm.
I thought that full Jacobean costuming was probably beyond the resources of the CP, and so had been thinking of a performance in modernistic dress a la the RSC’s productions. However, to their credit everyone seems very keen to get their teeth into either making the clothes or borrowing them off a neighbouring group. Apparently there is a costume library in Oxford, although hiring anything would cost a few bob that we probably haven’t got (unless this season’s pantomime pulls in the pennies like last year’s). I have a few pieces of kit left over from my re-enacting days, although they’re fashionable c.1640s rather than 1613. Fashions didn’t change so quickly then but they still did change, and there is a distinct difference between 1613 and 1643; so I can only pray that the adjudicators have as much idea about seventeenth century dress as I do about nuclear physics.
Personally I also suspect that they’d rather we try something different and use the modernistic approach, rather than trying to use contemporary Jacobean dress and ending up with an obvious hash. But what do I know? I’ve only been involved in two festivals (one when I was ten years old, during my first CP incarnation; and this year’s production). Perhaps they’ll love it. Or perhaps I’ll be sent back to the Channel Islands as a permanent exile … ?
Oh, and why “A Falling Star”? Come watch the play, and you’ll find out.
12 months … July 23, 2008
Posted by sfjones in Life.add a comment
… and after a year dominated by essential life administration rather than writing (*sigh*) I’m finally ready to get back to work.
Ebb and flow, as they say.
Writing battle scenes August 25, 2007
Posted by sfjones in Writing.8 comments
A few people have asked me how I can accurately re-create historical battles in a fictional format. The answer is: with a lot of reading and research, and a good dollop of intuition and imagination to fill the gaps where the historical accounts let me down. Take the Battle of Cheriton in 1644, which I’m writing about at the moment. I’m a big fan of research calendars, that is, compiling a great long list of what happened when and to whom, peppered with source references and URLs (incidentally, though I’m no fan of Microsoft I must recommend its “OneNote” software for organising research notes). I usually start by gathering together all the sources about the battle I can lay my hands on, primary and secondary, contemporary and modern, then trawling through them and writing out what happened piece by piece, more-or-less like a storyboard. I combine everything together in one long calendar. This part of the process can take several days, as laying out the accounts side by side always shows up inconsistencies between contemporary reports and always prompts some measure of further research into personalities and places. For example, a few days before Cheriton the Royalist Sir Ralph Hopton was lodged at Eastgate House in Winchester. As an important Council of War was held there, I’ll have to do some extra research and see where the house was and if there are any images or descriptions of it extant. Possibly it may even still be standing: many large houses of the period have survived, for example the magnificent “High House” up in Stafford. I’ll also have to do some general background research into Winchester in order to describe accurately what Lisle (the main character, for those who haven’t read The Tempest) would have seen when he arrived. In fact, as Winchester isn’t a million miles from where I live, and I pride myself on seeing as many of the locations I write about as possible, I really ought to take a drive down there in the next week or so and get my head around the place.
After the calendar is complete as I can get it, and where possible I’ve been out and visited the location myself, it’s time to start writing. Usually by this point I have a broad idea of what events I’ll be including in the run up to the battle, and what I’ll do with the characters during it and afterwards. In Lisle’s case I already know exactly what he did during the battle, so most of the really hard work will be getting him there and then getting him out again afterwards and linking up to the next historical event (on this occasion it’s a retreat to Reading via Basing House and an evacuation of the Reading garrison). I insert the calendar into the actual manuscript on the word processor, and then use it as a rough template to write from point to point, deleting each calendar point as I go so at the end I have a completed battle section with the framework removed.
Whereas a film director will have a paper script and have to make it visual, I see the battle like a movie in my head, and have to deconstruct it and get it down on paper. This is where I have to turn my brain into a movie projector, and run the action backwards and forwards frame by frame to see how everything fits together. Naturally I can’t show every event that occurred, as some are irrelevant to my characters and in some cases the battle is just too big. At the major battle of Edgehill, in October 1642, Lisle was stationed with a regiment of dragoons in some hedges on the extreme left wing: it’s unlikely he would have had any comprehensive idea about how the rest of the fight had gone until after it was over, so in The Tempest he knows little until he speaks to Sir Charles Lucas afterwards. On the other hand Cheriton was a relatively small event and he was a brigade commander stationed in the middle of the front line: I doubt that much of note would have escaped him, particularly as he then had to cover the Royalist retreat.
So what do I do when the historical battle accounts let me down? These are the spots where I have to create “filler”, that is actions and events involving the main characters which move the novel’s storyline forward to the next known event but don’t change what happened historically. Whilst not changing history, this fictional cement does give creative scope for imagining why actual events occurred, where history has not provided an answer. Where history is the warp, well-informed fiction is the woof.
Time, anyone? August 2, 2007
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So that explains why on my best writing days I get loads done in just a few hours but seem to have been writing all day, and on my worst I struggle all day to write, but the available time vanishes before I get anything worthwhile completed. A clear difference between being “in the zone” and not.
The question being, then, how does one deliberately and consistently “get in the zone”?
Back July 29, 2007
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Apologies for the blog being down for a couple of weeks - I was re-organising it. Much of the material previously found on here is now on my static website.
Cords June 27, 2007
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It’s said that a person’s greatest asset is also their greatest weakness. What I like to think of as one of my strongest mental assets - seeing possible links and parallels between apparently different topics and situations, and being able to leap from point to point, subject to subject - sometimes comes back to bite me, as I can find myself thinking like a butterfly and jumping around when I should be concentrating. Potentially this is a problem, as being in charge of my own time I have to motivate and manage myself. Recently I’ve begun trying to re-think how I work, and the environment I work in.
Some habits I’m trying to get into:
1) “Do it now“, even the smallest things, before they get forgotten - if they absolutely can’t be done now, make a “to do” list.
2) Do everything electronically if possible: use Notepad rather than a scrap of paper, scan in or “page capture” stuff rather than print it off and keep it physically
3) Shred paper daily, before it builds up (sensitive stuff, that is; everything else gets recycled)
4) Check emails less often - do it just a couple of times per day
5) Finish one task before starting something else (I can be an amazing multi-tasker, but sometimes it’s a skill that’s more trouble than it’s worth).
As well as properly organising myself, I’m turning into a freakish minimalist and simplifying absolutely everything in my life which will bear it. That doesn’t mean living in an empty room; just being tidy, dealing with everything straight away, and not hanging onto anything for the sake of it. If I haven’t used an item in the last year, it’s shown the door (unless it’s official documentation or an heirloom); If I’d completely forgotten about it until I found it in the box, it gets slung out as a matter of course. And when the cardboard box is empty, that gets slung as well. Joy abounds, and I get to reward myself with another cup of caffeine.
And bloody hell, it’s liberating. I moved back in with my family three or four years ago after living away for a decade, and as a result I had become the proud(?) owner of all kinds of miscellaneous household dross. Most of it was packed hastily into scruffy cardboard boxes when I exited my last flat, and the boxes ended up in my parents’ loft. Finally I’ve made an effort to start going through everything, and the relief at being able either to shred, recycle, donate or just bin it is indescribable. I have this mental concept of every physical item I possess being attached to me by an infinitely long, invisible cord; when I’m walking around or living my life, these things are silently dragging in the atmosphere around me and weighing me down. Binning something - anything, even a stack of old birthday cards - is like cutting one of those cords and finding myself a ton lighter.
Strangely, it also makes me more focused and creative: it’s almost as if getting rid of something leaves room for more useful energy to flood in.
To act, or … ? June 20, 2007
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Local stage play. November. I’m in it.
Not through any great talent on my part (believe me!), but there was a shortage of people available to the group on this occasion, and I didn’t stick up my hand at the appropriate moment and object. And nobody objected to me, so now I just have to wait and see which play is finally chosen and what I have to do.
I think I was right, when I said last week that I must have been lying to myself about not wanting to do any acting again. I’m surprised at myself - not least that I don’t feel at all phased about getting up on stage - but also pleased that I didn’t question my hunch about re-joining, but just went ahead and did it. I’m cooped up here in the house most of the time and as a writer I’m just the faceless force behind the pen; it’s very isolating, and it doesn’t do much for the self-esteem, especially when readers are faceless as well. Perhaps having to publicly do something creative in front of an audience, in which I can see the audience and they can see me, will give me a little more self-confidence in all respects. Kill or cure, I suppose. Re-enacting isn’t quite the same thing: on living history sites it’s very “ad-lib”, depending on whatever the public happen to ask you. Although acting skills are certainly involved, you’re generally talking to the public one-on-one so it’s more of an expert-meets-interested-non-expert sort of exchange, rather than a “sit down over there and watch what I’m presenting to you” experience (unless it’s a scripted cameo). Battles, on the other hand, are pretty impersonal, and not really acting at all, unless you’re working the crowd line solo or it happens that you die near it and have to make your demise vaguely convincing. Much of the time it’s easy to forget the audience is there at all, as in a large-scale re-enactment they’re often several hundred yards away and once in the grip of adrenaline (and the primitive need to wreak revenge on whichever pike block flattened yours last weekend) it’s generally more important that you don’t forget your musket drill, walk in front of a loaded cannon or get in the way of the cavalry. Officers can pose about in small groups looking dramatic; but generally the plebs get to stand around in a very un-dramatic homogeneous mass until ordered to march, wave weapons about, rout, or die.
So yes … a bit of spotlight acting after twelve years of behaving like an extra will be a huge challenge, but I’m looking forward to it. So far.
