Time to write is a predicament

I knew that finding time to write this particular week might prove difficult, but as I left the theatre at 2am this morning, it struck me that this week will prove less of a productive week forwarding the novel than I had hoped.

Here’s the dilemma; my seven year old daughter is in a Christmas play this week. Not just a school play (she’s in that as well on Friday, but that’s in the morning!) but a full blown total experience taking place at the city’s top theatre. She appears in four dances along with a diverse cast of one hundred singers, dancers and actors of all ages. Tickets are expensive, but have sold out quickly. The patron will get very good value for money paid.

My situation is that I’m working backstage for this production. This is a new experience for me. I’m used to being out front, directing people and being a lead in the presentation. The experience has been mostly fun, opened up new thoughts for my own playwriting, but all in the awareness of a director who lacks, well say we say, manners. To be fair, she was recruited late on as the team had been rehearsing for weeks and wants to lick them all into shape in hours rather than weeks. The director has wanted to make so many late changes to the script, the music, the lighting and the dances, that the cast and crew are spinning on her extraordinarily demands.

I am most certainly learning a lot seeing the show from the back and side, rather than from the front. This will stand me in good stead when I dither over my play writing. I now really know how hard the back stage crew work and how important their work is to the overall production. It’s no longer just all talk and waffle. The director will take all the credit and the performers will get their bow, but the crew should get their moment of glory for keeping it all together.

So I don’t expect to get many thoughts down on the laptop this week. I pick up my daughter from school at 2.30pm; we head for the theatre and I leave late. Don’t worry politically correct parents; she gets picked up as soon as her part of the show is over and she’s tucked up in bed and fast asleep while I’m still prowling the back stage zones.

I did think about balancing my laptop backstage, at least getting a few words down here and there, but having seen how the props people work, I wouldn’t want it to become centre stage just as Mary and Joseph find their long lost barn and then use Google to search for a better hotel.

Too many ideas

As a writer, can you have too many ideas? As it turns out – yes you can.

I know that most writers will initially say that they can’t have too many ideas. You get an idea, you make notes and you file it away for when you need it. This does, of course, mean than you have to encompass a note making filing system that is both accessible and effective. Who hasn’t been there and got the t-shirt in the ‘I know I wrote it down, but where did I put it’ syndrome?

The problem with ideas is having too many at the wrong time. By this I mean you’re thundering through a brilliant piece of writing, but you know it’s time to take a short break from the screen and favourite seat. You wander a few yards, look out over your favourite view and bang the new idea hits you right between your eyes. You go to make a coffee while exploring the idea further. During that fifteen minute break you’ve almost written the new piece in your head as your mind wanders.

Time to get up and make some notes. By the time you write you may already have lost some of your best thoughts, but hey; they’ll come back when you write the piece properly, won’t they? Now, do you go back to the section you were writing or do you plough headlong into the new idea, intending to do the real planning later on, afterwards?

This is my dilemma right now. I’m halfway through a radio play that I’ve spent time planning out in exact detail. I’m half way through writing the content and it’s flowing so well that I shouldn’t really stop. I might be ready for the first stage of re-writing in a day or so. Or do I start on this great new idea? It’s relevant for today’s market. It might move quickly through the radio systems of first read, second read, planning for production, casting, recording and the part we all strive for, airplay. My other play could be good for anytime. Which way should I hedge my bets?

Just as well I don’t get writer’s block; but then that doesn’t exist, does it?