Off the wagon

"A woman falls in love with a married man whose wife has just thrown him out. The wife discovered that he'd had an affair. The man is desperate to save his marriage ; so our heroine sets out to help him."
This is the basic idea for my next project. I've had it kicking around for ages. I got it whilst watching Twelfth Night (one thing I often do when I need a plot is to see/hear/read a Shakespeare play, and filch something from it).I've even described my idea as "Twelfth Night without the cross-dressing." I've put it to the back of my mind for various reasons. But recently, I read Cleaving, Julia Powell's follow-up to Julia and Julia (http://juliepowell.blogspot.com/) and it made me want to look at the issues of infidelity, trust, and marriages going wrong.
Cleaving wasn't an easy book to read. In it, Powell writes about an extra-marital affair she had, and it wasn't as genteel as Brief Encounter, either. When I heard about the book, I thought I might hate Julie Powell. I didn't. Although my heart went out to her husband, it went out to her as well. And I'm grateful to Cleaving for making me look at my Twelfth Night project again.
I've been telling myself that I'll start my Twelfth Night project just as soon as I've finished this one-act stage play. But I haven't done any work on my stage play for a few days, now ; and I've started to make notes about the Twelfth Night project. I feel like I'm being unfaithful to my stage play - the notes were even in the same notebook.
I've had another row with my wife. And again it seems like the end. And for some reason, I just couldn't face the stage play again. Why I should then look at a story about a marriage going wrong is a mystery to me.
But I don't want to give up on my stage play. For too long, I've been abandoning projects when the going has got heavy. And even though I don't feel this at the moment, I know that I'll never finish anything unless I stick with it.

Lotus-eating

One way which I've been getting back into my story each time is to reread what I've already written. But there has been a drawback. Sometimes, I open my notebook and my mind goes blank. It may have been two, three days since I last did any work on it. I struggle to remember what the project is. A stage play?One act? Two characters, both women, one of whom wants to throw an egg at Camilla Parker-Bowles as she passes.
So I turn the notebook pages back, and read what I've written so far. And I fall into the trap of admiring my own dialogue. Not bad, for me anyway. I get to the final line, and I spend minutes glowing in pride. Instead of writing the next line, following on from the last. Lotus eating.
The thing is, an individual line of dialogue might be good in it's own right, but still might have to go. If it's wrong for the character who's speaking it. If it doesn't add anything to the plot. If it slows the action down. If it's telling the audience something they already know.
And this is a piece which is going to need a lot of work in the successive drafts. As I've mentioned last time, as soon as I've finished the first draft, I'm going to write biographies for the two characters, Sue and Jackie Platt. One thing I can't quite decide is why Sue - the character who wants to throw the egg - feels so incensed at C B-P. I've got inklings : that Sue feels angry at the country in general, and feels that the establishment is to blame. She feels deserted by her youngest daughter, Sarah (who doesn't appear in the play), who went to university, married into a middle class family, and now feels ashamed of Sue. And Sue's husband, whom she loves, lost his job. Does that add up to a 60-year-old woman breaking the law, risking arrest and possibly getting shot by a police sniper? If not, I don't have a play.
It bothers me that I'm not thinking about this project throughout the day. I used to get consumed by my projects. There were times I couldn't think of anything else. These days, when I open the notebook, my mind goes a blank. It takes ages for me to get back into the story I'm telling - usually when my writing time is up, and I have to get ready and go to work.
These days, my thinking time is taken up by mundane matters like my job, my home and my marriage. But you can take this growing up thing too far...

A question of character

One mistake I've made with this project is that I didn't write biographies for Sue and Jackie. Now, I find myself feeling that I don't know my characters. I promise, the very next project, I will write biographies of all the major characters in it before I write a word of the first draft.
Whenever I've written biographies, they have paid dividends when I began the actual writing. You get a sense of who they are and how they think. For me, a sign that I've got a living, breathing character is when I tell myself : "No, he wouldn't do that," or "That goes against her principles." That sounds like a nuisance, because you want to try and follow the plot. But it's really a blessing. I've found, over the years, that the best stories, the ones which the reader WANTS to read (or the audience WANT to see) are the ones where the characters are solid and real. Better to adjust your plot - perhaps have something or someone force the character to carry out the action reluctantly.
Over the years, I've created a blank form which would be the envy of Scotland Yard. It has spaces for the charcaters' hair colour, daily newspaper and voting tendencies. I can write down the character's life story from birth to the present day, inventing such milestones as the character's first job, first romantic encounters, and wedding anniversary. There's even a space for the character's pets. I also have spaces for Person Closest To and Spouse/Partner (in case they are not one and the same).
This blank form is an adaptation from similar forms found in Stella Whitelaw's "Writing a synopsis that sells" and Donna Levin's "Get that novel started". I've also found a useful character creation checklist on Holly Lisle's website:
http://hollylisle.com/
The reason I didn't do it this time (and lots of other times, when I should have known better) was because it seemed like a chore. It always does. I seem to have been
planning, planning, planning projects for 20-odd years and then abandoning them. I want to write again, I want to feel like a storyteller.
Before I found out about character biographies, I just used to sit down and write. At first, my characters bore strong resemblances to my favourite television characters. Later, as I grew more sophisticated, I just used real people, without any thought of disguising them. Until the real people (the ones I cared about)started to get annoyed.
The problem now is, I want to abandon this stage play and go onto the next project.
The one where I'll plan it all beforehand, and this time do it correctly.
But I've made myself a promise. I'm going to finish this play, however badly it turns out. Whatever is wrong in the first draft, I can make better in the next.

Putting up shelves

It's the end of a long, stressful week in my private life, when I thought my marriage was going to end. I made a stupid, careless remark, my wife thought that I couldn't care less about my marriage, and I've spent all this time trying to say sorry. Perversely, my day job - which is normally stressful - became unusually calm, as if to compensate. But the upshot, as far as this blog is concerned, is that I had other things on my mind apart from writing. And when I did pick up my notebook, it was with a feeling of deep guilt.
To be honest, it's been a big problem ever since I got married. Because, when you're a writer, you have to carry a lot of stuff inside your head. You can't share it, at least until the first draft is written. I can't write if my wife is in the room, I have to put my notebooks and pens away. It is a secret, and that's not good.
My wife has never deliberately tried to stop me writing. On the contrary, she bought me an electric typewriter and a desk which she couldn't really afford. But people who don't want to write can't always understand people who can. And surely it borders on mental illness when you're thinking "How will this character react to this problem?" instead of worrying about your finances. But writers don't have the choice.
Incidentally, I made the mistake, a couple of times after I got married, of using things my wife had told me as the basis for stories. Sometimes, your loved ones don't mind "modelling" for you (sometimes, you'll even be approached by people who want to "model" for you, although I would suggest that you avoid those people). But my wife is a private person, and was furious with me.
I was younger, then. I learnt a hard lesson. If I could go back in time...
The only way I can create fictional characters is to first of all think of people whom I know in real life. Sorry, that's the way it is. You can take bits from two or three real people for your fictional character ; but those people need to be pretty similar to each other or the transplants will be rejected. It doesn't matter if you want to create a horrible character, and you base that character on somebody you don't like. But to create a likeable character, you start off thinking about a person whom you like. It's a dilemna.
I'm not the only writer with this problem. In fact, the only happily married writer I can think of is the late, great Jack Rosenthal. I wish I could ask his widow, the actress Maureen Lipman, what their secret was. I wish, too, that someone would write a manual for having a healthy relationship aimed at writers, or perhaps creative people in general.
Is it purely ego which makes us create? And is it any worse than the impulse to cook ? Is the man who thinks he can write worse than the man who thinks he can put up shelves?
Initially, I picked up my notebook again because I thought : Well, if we're getting divorced anyway...The dust has settled now, my wife is talking to me again. If I was sensible, if I had any choice in the matter, I would burn my notebook and concentrate purely on my marriage. Which would probably be happier if I was good at putting up shelves...
But no. The notebook has come out. Sentences have been written down. I need to do this, it goes beyond logic.
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The trickle has been, for obvious reasons, slow this week, but it is coming. I've felt a renewed enthusiasm for the project. And that means a renewed enthusiasm for life in general. Life is never so good for me as when I've got a project underway, especially when I feel good about the project. I'm a better human being then ; nicer, happier, sometimes verging on intelligent.
I've read back some of my dialogue, and it's not bad (by my standards, anyway). A metaphor has emerged in the writing. I was thinking about certain pop songs. Pop music is a great inspiration for me, and sometimes, as I'm writing a piece, I ask myself : Which song would go over the final credits? What is the "theme tune" of this piece?
I started thinking about The Who's masterpiece I Can See For Miles. On the surface, it's a song about a man who's been betrayed by an unfaithful partner. But actually, it's a coded song (like that Irish folk song Four Green Fields). It's about betrayal in general. It comes to you when you've been sold out by governments and institutions as well.
And it occurred to me that Diana Spencer's funeral was a sort of equivalent to the song I Can See For Miles. The event was coded. That behind the grief was anger - and not just the normal anger you might feel at a loved one's funeral. Anger at EVERYTHING.
So, my character Jackie Platt now has a few lines comparing Diana's funeral to the song I Can See For Miles.

Back in the saddle

I've started working on the play again. John Braine, in his book Writing A Novel, says that when you start writing, your heartache disappears ; and I can vouch for that. But this isn't writing, this is planning. This is the dangerous time for me, the time I could just say forget about it, roll the whole thing into a ball and throw it away. Luckily, I opened the notebook. I wrote one sentence, then another, ideas and lines of dialogue and questions and doubts and solutions coming to me with each word I wrote. At times like these, I tell myself : "Even one sentence can make a difference."I didn't write a great deal, but at least the project was going forward. And, as I worked, my heartache disappeared.
Whether I deserved to have my heartache to disappear is another matter...

Iceberg

I've been working on this project since Christmas, and I encountered many obstacles along the way. Sometimes, it seemed an obstacle every day. For instance :

1) The little voice in my head which kept telling me, "This is rubbish." I told myself, alright, then, I'll write rubbish. The voice then went on to tell me, more persuasively, "Alright, it's not bad, but it's flat. Victoria Wood and John Sullivan could have made a better job of it." To which I remembered a phrase (I think it was in Donna Levin's "Get That Novel Started") that Shakespeare wrote like Shakespeare because he didn't have Shakespeare to compare himself to. Meaning that you don't know if you can win the fight until you step into the ring. It's not up to me how good I am.

2) Being unable to get out of bed. I like to write first thing in the morning, early. I aim to be up by five o'clock, but often it's six. I aim to write three things each day. First of all, Morning Pages. This is something recommended by Julia Cameron in her creativity books, such as The Artists Way and The Sound Of Paper. For more information, go to:
www.theartistsway.com/

Morning Pages are flow-of-consciousness notes about anything which comes to mind, any worries, any ideas, anything at all. Julia Cameron suggests 3 sides of A4, but I normally write 2. Whatever I can do in half an hour, unless I'm going through a personal crisis, in which case the pages pile up. Morning Pages help me think about the day ahead, and often, solutions to problems - of any sort, not just about writing - come to me as I write them.
After Morning Pages, I like to work for half an hour on whichever project I've begun. Dorothea Brande, in her book Becoming A Writer, suggests you do this, and try not to read anything, or switch on the radio or television, while you are writing,lest you start imitating the style of someone else.
Lastly, on the tube to work (if I can get a seat) I do writing practice. This comes from Natalie Goldberg's books on creative writing, Writing Down The Bones, Wild Mind and Thunder And Lightning. Her website is :
www.nataliegoldberg.com/

Writing practice is similar to Morning Pages, but here you write on specific subjects, such as My Grandmother. You write about the subject as quickly and as frenziedly as possible, getting down everything which flashes through your mind (even if your Grandmother never even gets mentioned). This is a good seedbed for future projects.
But I went through a phase of being unable to drag myself out of bed. Work was horrible. The day ahead seemed flat, dull, unexciting. And so I would get out with just half an hour to spare, in which I wrote morning pages and nothing else.
To get around this, I bought myself an A5 notebook. Previously, I'd made notes on A4-sized sheets, and kept them in seperate pockets of a file-folder. But now I was going to work on the tube. I'm inordinately proud of my A5 notebook, actually, and I might write this way from now on. It allows you to write anywhere you can sit down. I write at the top of each page : Project Notes (any doubts about the project, ideas about the project, or tasks I have to do for the project, such as find out when Diana Spencer died), Text (the play itself - because I've begun to write the actual dialogue, to my own surprise) and Character Notes (anything which occurs to me about the characters themselves). In a way, I've combined the project-writing with writing practice. So I'm always doing something on it.
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I have batted away problem after problem. "Eggs", as I've provisionally called the one-act stage play I'm writing, was coming along nicely. I'd decided that the heroine, the Diana-mourner,
was a 62-year old called Sue Platt. The woman with her - who will eventually try to stop her throwing an egg at Camilla Parker-Bowles - is her daughter, Jackie. They're both Diana-mourners, but Jackie is calmer. They're both at a hospital (my local hospital has a food-only Marks and Spencers, where you can buy eggs), and C B-P will be arriving there to open a new ward.
It was going great guns. I even, as I said,began writing the actual dialogue. That felt incredible. I was a storyteller again, at last.
But now I've hit the iceberg. The problem I can't see my way out of.My wife and I argued over the weekend, and she told me a few home truths about myself. And now I don't feel like I can write. I shouldn't write. How can I write, how can I complain about the world, when I'm such a bad person? It goes deeper than writing. I'm finding it hard to do anything. I walk around feeling disembodied.My wife's comments keep coming back to me, I can't concentrate on anything else. Everything I do now just seems tainted. I don't know how I can get past this.

A new hope

"A woman throws an egg at Camilla Parker-Bowles."
This is the image that I had, the starting point. C B-P, as you may know, is the woman Prince Charles is now married to, now known as the Duchess of Cornwall. The woman he was, apparently, in love with when he proposed to Diana Spencer, Lady Di, the Princess of Wales. The woman he made Diana's personal assistant so that, unknown to Diana, he could carry on the affair.
I was thinking about the death of Diana, and more importantly, the people who mourned her. I am against monarchies, actually. My politics are left of centre, and I hate the English class system. Nevertheless, even I felt disorientated by the death. Like Michael Jackson, her death didn't seem to be possible. It was as though you were hearing about the death of Mickey Mouse, a much-loved fictional character. I couldn't help but feel angry about the way she'd been treated. Most erring husbands, when they have been found out, at least apologize ; but Prince Charles simply decided that he was the Prince of Wales, his ancestors had done the same, and as far as he was concerned, he could do what he liked. I kept telling myslf "It's not real life, it's not real life," although I suppose it was somebody's life.
The reactions to Diana's death and funeral were interesting. The mourners were all assumed, by the hip, trendy intelligentsia, to be stupid (most of them, after all, were working class women). The far left took pot-shots at her. They even tried to invent Prince Charles as some sort of ant-authoritarian pioneer, a modern-day Marquis de Sade, railing against established morality. Living Marxism magazine even described him as likeable and blokeish. Diana, meanwhile, had been too emotional.
But the funeral itself was more than that. It was a focal point for a nation which was angry about the way the country was being run. It was, I felt, against royalty. It was also angry at the cynicism and greed of politicians and businessmen, rising debt, and the soullessness of modern living. But all that was ignored. The mood was exploited. The heritage industry cashed in on her name and celebrity. She became Royalty's greatest hit. Today, you can buy Diana Spencer souvenirs at any stately home gift-shop. In her death, she has made millions for her ex-husband and ex-in-laws, who weren't exactly poor to begin with.
My fiction, though, is concerned with s0-called ordinary people. I began thinking about the mourners, like my wife, my mother, my late mother-in-law. The people who laid wreaths outside public buildings, and lined up outside Westminster Abbey to see her coffin. Who went to Kensington Palace to see her collection of dresses, and who bought Elton John's new version of Candle In The Wind. I felt angry, and angry on behalf of somebody. And I have found, for me anyway, that that is the best starting point for fiction. You need a cause to fight.
I believe that all the best art is born of passion ; but for the fiction writer, that passion needs to be anger. Nigel Watts, in his book Teach Yourself how to write a novel, says that a writer without an idea is like a white knight on a charger, looking for a damself in distress to rescue. And Sheila Yegher, in The Sound of one hand clapping (her manual about writing for the stage), recommends that you start off with an image which has haunted you.
I remember once reading an interview with John Lennon, in which he spoke about the writing of his song How do you sleep (a bitter attack on his former Beatles bandmate Paul McCartney).Lennon said, in effect, that on the day he wrote it, he'd woken up feeling good, but then realized he had an album to make, so he cast around for suitable subjects. In other words, he whipped himself into a frenzy. Personally, I feel angry pretty much all the time about pretty much everything, although sometimes it takes me a while to realize what has made me angry and why.
So : a work of fiction about mourners of Diana. At the same time, I was thinking about writing about something shorter than a novel. But not a short story. I've tried to write short stories before, by they're too...well..short. I can't write short. I don't mean that I ramble, or I try not to. But to fit it all in to 2,000 words...that's clinical. I don't read a lot of short stories either. They seem to abrupt. The literary ones seem to have no plot, and the genre ones seem to have no characterization. The best short stories I've ever read are William Trevor's. And I believe, although I could be wrong, that the best short stories are by writers at the heights of their powers, who have honed their craft on larger works. Short stories are not the nursery slopes.
How about a one-act stage play? It wouldn't need a plot. Or much of one, anyway. You can get away with two characters trying to change each other's minds. I don't want to write a monologue, cheap as it might be to produce. I want the audience to see my characters arguing with each other, so that they can make their own makes up about the characters' veracities. The lowest number of one is two. Two characters.
Two women. Because I read somewhere that there is a scarcity of plays written just for actresses, even though more women that men enter show-business. Another cause to fight. (Also, if I'm honest, something of a marketing point).
Since before Christmas, I have been brewing this plot. I was hoping to have it finished by today. My writing class begins tonight, and I had visions of triumphantly handing around a complete first draft. It hasn't happened, but at the same time, I've been making progress. And there's no deadline for this, after all. And after months and months of no direction, months and months of barren-ness, to feel this charged about a project, to feel this excited...I feel like celebrating. It's almost beside the point how good the finished project is, just to feel a burning to tell a particular story (as opposed to any story at all) is enough. Although I also know, from experience, that if you enjoy writing a piece, there's a great chance that other people will enjoy it, too.
This is one mistake I've been making for years : trying to write something to somebody else's criteria. I've been starting off writing in my notebook "A romantic comedy","A low-budget hollywood film." Because I thought that would be saleable. I've also written "Sympathetic central character" and "happy ending." And one day, I hope to write a hollywood-style romantic comedy with a sympathetic hero and a heart-warming ending. Because I love a good film like that, I'll even sit through a mediocre one. But my approach wasn't bringing me anything meaningful. And it's become clear to me since that when Richard Curtis wrote Four Weddings and a funeral, he also had a message about the state of marriage; and when he wrote Notting Hill, he also wanted to say something about the nature of celebrity. Here, I told myself : the characters can be as unpleasant as possible. Or, rather, I would be objective about both of them. And the ending can be bleak and nihilistic. Whatever seems to fit. And that approach came up trumps.
So : two women characters. From somewhere, the image of a woman throwing an egg at Camilla Parker-Bowles has turned up. It's something many of Diana's mourners would like to do. In fact, they might use something harder than stones. There again, most people, even if they hated someone that strongly, wouldn't try to do anything. My character has got to do something. Throwing an egg...I think, unless events prove me wrong, that if the typical Diana-mourner were to throw something, it would be an egg. Something that would humiliate rather than kill.
One of my women characters, then, is a Diana-mourner. She's in the vicinity of Camilla Parker-Bowles, she has eggs ready, and she wants to throw one, for the memory of Diana Spencer, because she thought C P-B's conduct was wrong. A genteel Day of the Jackal.
Other questions come to me. Why is she in the vicinity of C B-P? Did she know C B-P was going to be there, and came along with eggs deliberately? No, that doesn't feel right (go with your instincts). She's arrived somewhere where C B-P happens to be visiting. An art gallery? Why would you take eggs to an art gallery (or where would you buy them inside an art gallery?)?
Meanwhile,who is the other woman character?A Complete stranger? No, that doesn't feel right. A complete stranger might see our heroine with the egg, and wrestle her to the ground, but that isn't drama, even if it is dramatic. That would just be two women wrestling with an egg on a stage - great for a stag night,possibly, but not for a play. Drama means dialogue, it means one character trying to change another character's mind, either by arguing or lying. And a stage play must be made up of drama, it's not built for anything else, and it doesn't want to do anything else. Because when you see a good play,live on stage, something that touches you, all the gunfights and car chases and collapsing buildings seem shallow, false, unimportant.