The night before the morning after

Today is the 179th day I’ve got up to write at 5am. I can tell you that it was the hardest and the easiest of every single one of the previous 178 days because I got it wrong.

The alarm went off, I stopped it, wished to all the sweet love in the world that I could please just turn over – and then found that it was 1am.

I triple-triple checked that.

It was 1am and moreover, there hadn’t been an alarm, I hadn’t switched anything off. I had entirely dreamt that whole thing.

Please picture me at 1:01am punching the air and being asleep again before my hand came down.

And four gorgeous hours of fraught nightmares later, it really is 5am and here I am talking to you. That made it easy: the four-hour lie-in was great, but the boon was the certainty that I’d be writing to you. I’m not going to go all Hallmark-Card-ish over our little chats, though secretly I do all the time, but it’s also the harsh practicality that I knew for certain this was the very first thing I would do today so I will do it very first thing and it will set my day off well.

To be clear, I say 5am but, you know, there is the business of the bathroom, the fastest shower in history and the mandatory giant mug of tea. I can get to my keyboard by around 5:15am at a push, and I do push, and it’s great to just start immediately. (It’s also great to be able to start immediately. If I had to wait while a PC switched on, I’d make breakfast as well as tea. This could be the big Windows advantage: as I’ve got a Mac, I postpone breakfast to around 8am or 9am. After a longer, proper-er shower.)

But the reason I wanted to say this to you today is that I’ve learnt getting up early is worthless if you don’t have something specific, really specific to get up to do.

For it is hard to get up this early and yet it is very easy to waste the time when you do. I wrote about this 5am start in my book, The Blank Screen, and it was meant to be an example of how you should search for the extra moments that you are able to write. You don’t need to get up at stupid o’clock, you do need to find when you work best. With utterly bitter bile, I found I happen to write best this early in the morning, even though that goes against every late-night-jazz bone in my head. So I don’t like getting up, I really don’t like going to bed, and I’m not very keen on how tired I get by the end of the day, but the work I do is better. And, face it, it’s also more. I do more work and it is better. What’s not to love?

Everything.

But that’s about all the book said. I do talk in that about my particularly brutal way of making myself get up but that was as much about habit-forming and self-immolation as it was anything else.

And what I have really learnt since finishing the book is this business that you have to have something to do. Get up at 5am or whenever you like, but do not spend any time at all then planning what to do. Go to the keys and be writing immediately or you won’t do any writing.

It just occurs to me that this is a lot like people who lay out their clothes the night before. I have not once done that. Suddenly I see why they do it. I vow to you that I’m going to do that too, except I know I’m lying and, hey, I do enough with the making myself get up this early, enough already.
Maybe a better example is the type of novelist who ends the day by writing the first line of the next chapter. So in the morning, there’s line 1 already done. I can vividly understand that now.

It’s almost never that I’m lacking for a job to do. There was one time, back around the 150th day, that I’d finished a huge project and genuinely wasn’t sure what to get to next, genuinely wasn’t sure whether I shouldn’t instead breathe out for a bit. But usually there are plates spinning aplenty and it does take some figuring out to decide which is the most urgent or which is the most important. Fine. Just don’t do it at 5am.

There is almost always something you really want to do or that you really dread doing. The night before the morning after, write that down somewhere. That one thing. Don’t bother studying your To Do list and if your best writing time is 5am, you can probably ignore your calendar too because there’ll always be time for that after you’ve done your first writing. So just write down that one thing and when you get to the keys in the morning, start writing that one thing.

I do have several somethings I dread plus I also have a truncated day as friends are coming round and I’m noodling about what to cook them. Hmm. Noodles. That was easy. Thanks.

It’s 05:47. I’ll send this to you then I’ll check my calendar, I’ll whack through some emails that are on my mind, then I’ll take a gander through my OmniFocus list for the day.

And tonight when I go to bed, I will take just a moment to realise that it’s Friday and I can lie in tomorrow. A bit. But then on Sunday night, I’ll send a few moments figuring out the shape of Monday. So that I can go straight to the keys at 5am on day 180 and begin writing.

It doesn’t have to be some big project, it doesn’t have to be much at all, it just has to be something you need to do and when you do it, you’re igniting the rest of the day. That’s a bit Positive City Management Speak but while I’m half throwing the term around and half wondering how in the world it popped into my head, let me say thanks: you’re today’s ignition.

Now. Next crisis?

It's your fault

Here be spoilers. Well, there be spoilers: down there, a lot of spoilers a bit of the way down the screen. If you haven't seen the 50th anniversary special of Doctor Who, please do. Go watch it. It's very good.
All I ever want from a story is to be caught up in it to the exclusion of anything else. That's all. Analysis and whathaveyou, that can come later if it must. Just scoop me up, please. And Doctor Who: The Day of the Doctor did exactly that. Job done.
Only, I'm surprised that it did because at its core is something that goes against a thing. I was going to say it goes against a drama principle of mine, but nuts to drama principles: if it works, that's your principle right there. But we tend to have issues that colour our writing, things that we come back to because we're trying to find them in ourselves, beacuse we're trying to mine them for others or maybe just because we're good at them.
And I have one thing that is guaranteed to appeal to me, utterly certain to get me obsessed, and which you break at your peril. Yet Doctor Who broke it and worked. I don't know how. Let me tell you that right up front, if you can call this the front when I've already rambled on at you a ways. I want to explore this and see if I can figure it out because it matters to me.
Here's what it is. If you wanted to get all academic about it, drama is about obstacles. I seriously do not know why you would want to get academic if that means boiling down the richness of drama into a checklist with only one thing to check, but it's not unreasonable to say drama equals obstacles. Fine. Someone is faced with something, that is or at least that can be drama.
But for me, it's really only drama when the thing they face is their own fault. Having something done to you, that's awful. It's powerful. Having something done to you and it is entirely your own fault, though, that's wonderful. It's not that I'm especially in to my characters being punished for something and it's only a little bit that I am in to the genuine meaning of tragedy: a tale that ends badly because of something within the lead character. It's specifically the point that if this terrible thing is your own fault, you could have prevented it – and now there is absolutely not one single thing you can do to put it right. You can't undo the past. This is the real reason I am forever coming back to the issue of time in my writing: the regret, the permanent regret for things lost and things done badly. You can't rewrite history, not one line.
Except in Doctor Who. This is where the spoilers start.
The day in The Day of the Doctor is the one where the fella ended the Time War. This was a huge and so far never seen portion of Doctor Who history: immediately before we saw Christopher Eccleston's Doctor, there was this war, right. War between the Daleks and the Time Lords. And it was ended by the Doctor. We slowly came to learn that though he ended it – so far, so Doctor-heroic-like – there was something of a cost. The war was ended only by the complete and total destruction of both sides. Time Lords and Daleks, all killed. All killed by the Doctor.
Cor.
The Day of the Doctor undoes this and if you'd told me that before I saw it, I'd have thought again about going to the cinema. I read an interview with Steven Moffat on DigitalSpy this week that ran in part:

It was about a year ago. I remember thinking, 'What occasion in the Doctor's life is the most important?' Well, it's the day he blew up Gallifrey. Then I tried to imagine what writing that scene would be like and I thought, 'There's kids on Gallifrey and he's going to push the button? He wouldn't!' I don't care what's at stake, he's not going to do it. So that was the story – of course he never did that, he couldn't. He's the Doctor – he's the man who doesn't do that. He's defined by the fact that he doesn't do that. Whatever the cost, he will find another way. So it had to be the story of what really happened, that he's forgotten.

I see his point and he wrote it superbly in the show, but I'm mithered. I detest beyond measure the way that a soap, for instance, will get a character into a dramatic situation and then pull back at the last moment to say it's all right, really. It wasn't him. It isn't her. They're dreaming, whatever. Go away. I'm never watching again. So having this thing in Doctor Who that we know was big and then showing us it being even bigger but then taking it away, it shouldn't have worked for me.
I think it's that bit about 'I don't care what's at stake'. For me, the drama was in how there were these stakes that required him to do this. Now, actually, I have to play this both sides because a huge amount of the drama – can you quantify drama like this? a good 43% was angst, 12% personal torture and so on – was to do with how he had no choice. But if the Doctor has no choice, that is big and huge and enormous but it isn't the same as him having a choice and making the decision anyway. If the Doctor presses the big red button, everyone dies on Gallifrey. If he doesn't press it, everyone dies on Gallifrey anyway because the Daleks are attacking very thoroughly.
There is the fact that they're attacking because presumably they're seriously hacked off at the Doctor so nearly efficiently destroying all their plans, ever, so the whole attack is his fault. I'll have that.
So with this storm of issues going on, it does all come down to the small moment, the huge yet tiny moment where he has to do this or not do it. The fact that he does speaks to me about the stakes of the story but it also completely engages me in this Doctor character. The fact that he doesn't do it, that takes most things away. It reduces the stakes, because somehow he's now got a choice, and that reduces the character for me.
Except, maybe it worked for me, worked in this one story, because Moffat could undo the destruction of Gallifrey, he could rewrite one very big line of history, yet do it in such a way that the Doctor was left with the same burden we thought he had.
Doctor Who often reunites various different Doctors and there is always the issue of why a later one doesn't remember all this from when he was the earlier guy. The Day of the Doctor makes many little nods to this and does explicitly state that the Doctors' time streams are out of sync and that neither David Tennant's Tenth Doctor nor John Hurt's Nth Doctor can possibly retain the memory of what has happened. It's plot convenience and it's what has always happened before, but this time the lack of memory means that John Hurt's Doctor and David Tennant's and up to a point Matt Smith's one all believe they destroyed Gallifrey. They carry that burden for four hundred years.
Four hundred years. That's enough carrying of blame and regret and fault even for me.
Good people doing bad things. That's what chimes with me. Making irrevocable choices. That's me. But I thought it was a rule, an inviolate rule of drama that you do not ever undo a character's bad choices, you do not give them a reprieve, you do not give them an escape. The drama is in living with the things you cannot live with. And The Day of the Doctor says bollocks, William.
Quite right too.

 

Outlining: beat that

I've been using a thing called OmniOutliner to work out a book project that was just so stupidly unwieldy that I couldn't see the words for the trees. With immense regret, I have to tell you that it worked. I've previously been an extremely reluctant outliner, only doing it when mandatory for a contract, and my heart is still not in outlining at all, but my head might be. I realised this yesterday when I needed to figure out something else that I'd ordinarily have just got on with writing and exploring. And instead, I unthinkingly turned to this OmniOutliner.

Here's the thing. Some writers plan out in immense detail, some don't. I fixed Alan Plater's email once when he was having trouble sending attachments and the example document that we batted back and forth happened to be an outline. I didn't need to read it to fix the email, I couldn't read it because it was confidential, but I had to ask him. Why had he written an outline? He told me to read it.

It was a remarkably boring document. About as un-Plater-like as conceivable. But the very last line went something like this: "Now can I just go write the bloody thing?"

Outlines don't kill writers, outlining does. We get the fun and worth of the story sucked out of us. Alan put it better in a memo to a producer – which I've got verbatim because it's in my own book about his show The Beiderbecke Affair – where he explained:

“This kind of story is in part a process of discovery and deduction for the writer as much as for anybody else. I know the A and the Z and have a reasonable knowledge of B to about K… after that it gets complicated and misty.”

As I say, some outline and plan while others don't. My natural inclination is to explore on the page and I think I've been helped or encouraged in that as much by how well it's worked out and because I've written so much in magazines. Once I had the form in my head, once I knew how to write articles, I never planned again. Start at the top, write to the end, deliver. It's rarely quite like that but it can be and the number of changes I make are fairly few. Or they tend to be nuances and key points, they are never gigantic structural chunks being shuffled around.

Some drama writers call some outlines these beat sheets: you're listing the key moments in the piece like the beats in music and you end up with the overall shape of the work.

But I could always see the shape of the piece in my head when it was a 5,000-word computer feature or especially a 70-word Ceefax one. Books have proved to be somewhat harder: Beiderbecke was only 30,000 words or so but it was immensely hard to get everything in to that short limit. One of the books I'm doing now is 150,000 and that defeated me: I could not hold that in my head. Especially not when circumstances of when I could get certain research material, when I could speak to certain people, meant that I wrote about 100,000 of it completely out of sequence. I've asked the copy editor to please watch out for when I may have introduced someone twice because I first wrote them in chapter 6 and only later got them in to chapter 1. I think I've caught all that, but I have lain away at night worrying about it.

That worry was from the sheer weight of words, the sheer volume of the volume. Drama is different. I have a big stage play on the go now and I can smell it, you know? I know the opening pages because I explored them, testing out the idea. And I know the very last line because, I promise, it will choke you up. I even know about eleventy-billion things that will happen, right down to whole exchanges of dialogue between these characters in my head, but the whole eludes me. That's partly because if it works, if I do this right, it will be the most delicate, gauzy writing I've ever done and the faintest breeze will wreck where I'm trying to take you.

That's why drama is different. I was taught that you should write to express, not to impress. That's right and great and useless. Because drama needs to express and move and feel and share and transport. Off you go.

I find I'm noodling around this particular stage idea a lot on the bus. I used to do all my best thinking while I took long drives so I am least a tiny bit greener now. The other week I was thinking about the idea as I rode past the Birmingham Rep so I counted the windows: they sometimes put the title of plays up with one letter in each window across the front. It turns out they have just enough for this one, so. Probably not a deal breaker, but.

I'm going to outline it. I just know I am. Desperately broad strokes, please no more than that. Maybe I can do A and K rather than A to Z. I need to explore it too.

But there is a cost to exploring drama on the page, there is a price. I'd heard a thousand writers say and extol and evangelise outlines and they were rubbish at it. All of them. Until one television writer said something like "You can't have a blank screen on Tuesday night". It's true. You can fight about what makes better drama, structured planning or freeform exploration, but you can't argue that you have to write and produce something. A stunning work of piercing Tuesday night drama is no use if the script is delivered on Wednesday morning. Even if outlining guaranteed you a boring story, at least you'd never type "the end" on a full one-hour drama script and realise you had to throw it away and start a different one.

It wasn't always like this. It wasn't always that you're hired and we're airing it Tuesday, get writing.

John Hopkins was commissioned over a pint at the BBC once in the 1960s and didn't deliver. Not on time. Not anywhere near on time. The story goes that he delivered the next year. He wasn't especially pressed about it, though I understand the BBC did occasionally say, you know, how's it going? And then he turned in Talking to a Stranger, also known as the Hopkins Quartet. Four television plays set over the same weekend and all from the perspective of a different member of a family. I tell you, I read the scripts and when I reached the last one and realised why it was all done like this, why it wasn't just a gimmick, I cried.

If you want to tell me that Hopkins could do that from an outline, fine. If you even want to tell me that he did do it from an outline, fine. I have no idea either way. And that's the way it should be: whether outlines help or throttle a writer, it's the end result that matters, it's the audience that matters.

Oh, stop looking at me like that. You're not an audience, you're you. We're just talking. We could've phoned each other up first and devised the beat sheet for today. We could've decided that our chat should logically go thisaway: "1. What outlines are. 2. Outlines are bad. 3. Except when they're good."

But if we were that boringly efficient, we could've just left it with that and gone to the pub. And then where would we be? Exactly. I'll make us some tea.

1. Find kettle
2. Fill kettle with water
3. Switch on kettle...