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.