Just get it written
Perfect is the enemy of done
Dear friends,
You find me in the midst of a number of projects, all at development stages. One which will definitely come out this year which I am not allowed to talk about publicly yet, but which I can’t wait to share with you soon. Announcement coming next week…
But in the meantime, I carved out a week to do a sprint on something I’ve been working on for ages.
And ages.
And ages.
It is a Big Play. I didn’t think I’d write another play so soon after my debut was on in December, but I found that the Big Play wouldn’t leave me alone. It’s an idea I’ve had a for a while which I tried as hard as I could to squish into a small play, but it wouldn’t go. It seems to demand to be the whole eight characters, two halves, 150+ year timescale. And taking on some ridiculously big personal and political stuff.
I did a lot of research for the Big Play over the last 18 months. I was lucky enough to get a Peggy Ramsay award to start it, and my beloved London Library turned out to be the perfect place to do the research. I’ve probably read 30+ books in service of the research for the Big Play. Science and nationhood and history and politics.
And after all this research, I hadn’t actually written a useable word. I’d written several versions of the first 30 pages, none of which I was happy with. I’d beaten out several versions in post-its on the wall, all of which made no sense to me when I came back to them.
So finally, I had no choice but to accept - I just had to f*cking write it.
I think it’s the least fashionable, and hardest to hear, advice for any creative person that at some point you just have to sit down and get it done. And most importantly:
Be prepared to accept it will probably be quite crap the first time around
And that is OK!
So, last week, I went every day to the London Library with the goal of just writing the thing in a week. And being OK with this first draft being a big mess, and full of contradictions, but hoping I would come out with at least some pages I didn’t hate, a better knowledge and understanding of the characters and a renewed enthusiasm to keep going with the project.
And you know what? It worked. I ended up with 80 pages and greater clarity and a feeling of having properly begun - more value in a week than I ever could have expected. Of course, the 18 months before and the research and thinking and noodling I had done all went into the mulch which helped to fertilise the idea, but at the end of the day that was nothing without just writing it.
Just writing it.
One of the things I tried out, which I haven’t tried before, is something I’d actually recommend. I wanted to share this very rudimentary process here in case it’s useful - as a way to trick your brain around something creative it’s procrastinating.
Write the pitch for the thing as if you’re telling a great piece of gossip to a good friend.
This is something I like to do with almost every project because it helps me feel like the thing is real. I then often share the thing with a few trusted people - even potential partners like producers and theatres. Some writers I’m sure would hate this. For me, it helps build the momentum of the thing in the real world, not just in my head, and allows me to include others on the creative process, which I love. I’m having a meeting with one of the people I shared the pitch with this week.
Write a list of the interesting things you’d like to see happen.
For me, this became a rudimentary scene list. I knew not all of them would make it into the play - though I originally called this a ‘set pieces’ list - it was in a completely random order and was just all the stuff I’d be curious about that I thought could happen in the story.
Each morning, show up at your desk.
Sorry but this is crucial. For me, there was building work going on in my London home so I had to get to the Library. For a week, it felt great.
Pick the scenes from the list that call to you, and Just Write Those.
This turned out to be a really useful process. I didn’t worry about chronology, or sense, or flow of scenes, or whether I conveyed information once or twice or not at all - I just wrote the scenes I fancied each morning. I thought this would leave me with the horrible hard ones at the end of the week, but in fact because I gained things like momentum and understanding and confidence through the week, I ended up writing some of my favourite material on the last day.
Print it out with a proper title page.
At last, I bunged the scenes in a simple order and printed the whole thing out. And god, it felt like A Play! I was so surprised by the value of doing this simple, practical step at the end of the week. It really felt like the work had created something. It will also make it easier to conceptualise / move around in this form, I think.
I confess, I had been planning to do another spurt of work on it this week and next, to get it into a really good state by 13th April - but I’m not going to manage this, and that’s OK. I had some other work commitments that couldn’t be avoided (and were great fun) developing two other projects, and then I was struck down with another bout of sinusitis. So, I’m going to keep going with it but at a slightly slower pace than I have been, taking my time with it and figuring out what’s there.
All in all, I honestly couldn’t recommend enough the mixture of discipline and chaos with which I’ve approached this project. Hopefully I’ll have more to share on it soon…
Thanks for reading, right to the end. You’re brilliant. I’ll see you next week,
J x