12 Thursday Feb 2015
Posted in Scribbling
Oh, the notebook – the vital, lovely, indispensable notebook!
It’s taken me ages to learn to always, but always have one at hand. Ages and endless frustration (and a certain amount of tears) over lost ideas, scraps of descriptions, book references and all sorts of things – things that never became notes, because I didn’t have the means to jot them down at the moment. Continue reading
29 Thursday Jan 2015
Posted in Scribbling
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Technically speaking, I’m not procrastinating – and I have a red wordcount bar to show for it. Down there, in the left bar – see? To make a long story short, let’s say I gave myself a goal of 1500 words-per-day, and nine thousand and something words in five days means I’ve been meeting it, and then some.
Therefore, no: technically speaking, I’m not procrastinating.
Still, what do you call it when you tweak commas, and make yourself multiple cups of tea, and hunt for designs of Tudor mullioned windows through the Internet, and check your email again and again, and re-read an old play to make sure you are not recycling ideas too shamelessly, and mind your novel-related board on Pinterest, and plan what you’ll be writing between first and second draft, and do all sorts of things until you have an hour (or less) left before rehearsals/dinner/class/work/whatever – and then, in that hour (or less), pound out eight or nine hundred rather nice words?
And then you repeat the proceedings a couple of times a day, and end up breezing past your daily goal – all in panicky or sulky one-hour spurts of activity…
Yes, tell me: what do you call it, exactly?
I’m beginning to fancy “Microprocrastination” as a name – and yes, it seems to work at some level, and no, this doesn’t make it any less foolish and irritating. Because work it may, but in a this higgledy-piggledy way… There may be a method to my madness, but madness it is.
At whatever time I call it a night, I cannot see my met-and-exceeded daily goal without wondering : what if I had written all the time? What of the hour I squandered over those cursed windows? What if I had written instead of pinning like mad? 
Hence, I manage to write at a fairly reasonable pace, and be frustrated at the same time. I don’t procrastinate, and I do. I need to be under pressure, but I only manage to create the artificial pressure a couple of times a day… And believe me, I don’t feel spectacularly sane, when I watch myself writing things like this.
Ah well. What about you? I won’t ask whether you procrastinate – please, leave me with the fond delusion that everyone procrastinate at least a little, at least sometimes. What I ask is: how do you procrastinate? And do you ever microprocrastinate?
04 Tuesday Nov 2014
Posted in Scribbling
(via chasingtheturtle)
02 Thursday Oct 2014
Posted in Scribbling
It is said that, when the time came to kill off D’Artagnan, Dumas couldn’t bring himself to do the deed, and had his right-hand man Maquet do it.*
It is also said that Dumas killed off Porthos in person – and wept like a baby over it.
I think I rather understand him.
I have vivid memories of killing off my first hero ever, some twenty years ago. I sat up late at night to write, and it was my insomniac father who found me in tears, and wanted to know what was the matter…
“I’ve just killed Ned!” I sobbed – and if Dad was amused, he covered it well. I remember the exhilaration of having reached the last page, and the awfulness of having pushed under a cab this fellow I had imagined, and followed from childhood to early thirties, and put through all sorts of ups and downs, and grown to love… But he had to die in the end for the story to make the sense I wanted it to make. And so I cried my eyes out, but push him under the cab I did.
Poor Ned.
Back then I was very young and green at the game, but it would seem that, twenty years later, little has changed. Last weekend I reached the last-but-one, climatic scene of the opera libretto I’m writing for a composer. The scene involves a duel, in which my hero gets himself killed, poor lad. Now, don’t go and assume I kill of all my main characters… Oh well, I often do – but this time it isn’t exactly my choice. The libretto is a commission and a loose adaptation from someone else’s work, and I couldn’t change the ending, even if I wished.**
Wait, wait, wait! Why don’t we have another cup of tea, before we get drastic?
And yet, bearing all the above in mind, and having known from the beginning how it would end, I found myself dithering like mad, and tinkering past reason with the market scene that precedes the duel, and making myself multiple cups of tea – anything to postpone the fatal blow a little longer.
In the end, it took me twentyseven hours to kill the fellow – an inhuman length of time, I’ll agree – and I may not have teared up, but I very much wanted to. Like my much younger self. Like Dumas. Like, I’ll wager, a whole lot of writers.
Let no one tell you writing isn’t gruesome work. We do a lot of darling-killing, and it’s not always all that metaphorical. We make up people, we grow to know and love them – and then we kill them, and manage to be so very sorry about it.
Someone might call it not just gruesome, but weirdly so.
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* Sounds terribly felonious, doesn’t it? Actually, Auguste Maquet was a history teacher and a very minor novelist, who earned a living as a sort of writing assistant to Dumas. It didn’t end well.
** Not that I do: it makes such perfect dramatic sense…
06 Wednesday Aug 2014
Posted in Scribbling
So, imagine you are in the middle of… everything.
Pulling one of those translation stunts for a foreign university, and putting together not one, but two little websites for two new projects, and studying for a talk you’re giving next Friday, and editing a couple of stories, and designing a conference-cum-reading together with a bunch of actors, and conjuring up a project for another, quite distinct bunch of actors, and minding your two blogs, and helping with the launch of a new association you’ve been blackmailed into joining, and translating an old monologue of yours, and praying that another dormant commission won’t wake up just now…
Yes, imagine battling daily with all of that – plus several family members and lifelong friends urging you to take a vacation, because really, how can you not find a week to go to the seaside? – and feeling in turn thrilled and a tad overwhelmed, and failing to return library books because you thought you had already returned them…
Are you imagining? Yes? Good.
And then, in the middle of all this, what must happen, but a new notion for a monologue? One you really like. One that will let you explore an interesting character with a good twist to him, and experiment one or two techniques you’ve been wanting to try…
And you don’t, but don’t have the time for this. There is all the rest – and you are rather short of breath as it is – but ideas… oh, ideas! Ideas won’t let you sleep, won’t let you work. They’ll nag, and shout, and elbow their way to the front while you research the correct denominations of Ukrainian monastic orders. They’ll hijack your mind during meetings, when you should be listening. They’ll force you to whip out your notebook and take notes in the middle of the night. They’ll try to surface in your conversation at awkward moments – because that’s how ideas work.
And perhaps you think you know how to deal with the little pest, on the grounds of long and sometimes painful experience. You take copious notes whenever the idea starts pestering you, in the hope that it will be assuaged by your display of interest and offerings of ink and pages.
Sometimes it works – you put it on paper, and leave it there, and next time it rears its head, you will be ready and it will have grown.
At other times, though, all the notes in the world will accomplish nothing except whetting the little brute’s appetite for more, more, more…
Which is why, in the end, you find yourself opening a new Scrivener file at four in the morning, and giving up. Giving in: Come on, you bloody pest, and do your worst. Good thing is, when the bloody pest is this unquenchable, its worst tends to be worth the pain. And the lost sleep. And the occasional moment of fury. And the look in everybody’s eyes, when they realise you are writing in your head – again.
And not that I am complaining, but really, when people ask where do you find ideas, ain’t it a lark – considering?
12 Saturday Apr 2014
Posted in Lostintranslation
I turned forty yesterday, and my mother threw a surprise party for me, with a crowd of theatre and non-theatre friends, and we laughed, and sang, and improvved well into the wee hours, and the wine was very good – so today I am slightly vague…
You won’t hold it against me, will you, if just link this article on The American Scholar, on How to Talk Shakespeare.
While mostly aimed at improvisers in need of convincing pseudo-Shakespearean dialogue, it is of interest for writers too, with a series of no-nonsense tips that could come in handy when trying to devise an Elizabethan-ish language for historical fiction.
And besides, it is fun to read.
01 Saturday Mar 2014
Posted in Stories
No, not really – but this is the incredible So You Want To Write A Fugue (thanks M. for telling me about it!) and I can’t help thinking how well it applies to non-musical writing…
So you want to write a fugue.
You got the urge to write a fugue.
You got the nerve to write a fugue.
So go ahead, so go ahead and write a fugue.
Go ahead and write a fugue that we can sing.
Pay no heed, Pay no mind.
Pay no heed to what we tell you,
Pay no mind to what we tell you.
Cast away all that you were told
And the theory that you read.
As we said come and write one,
Oh do come and write one,
Write a fugue that we can sing.
Now the only way to write one
Is to plunge right in and write one.
Just forget the rules and write one,
Just ignore the rules and try.
And the fun of it will get you.
And the joy of it will fetch you.
Its a pleasure that is bound to satisfy.
When you decide that John Sebastian must have been a very personable guy.
Never be clever
for the sake of being clever,
for the sake of showing off.
For a canon in inversion is a dangerous diversion,
And a bit of augmentation is a serious temptation,
While a stretto diminution is an obvious allusion.
For to try to write a fugue that we can sing.
And when you finish writing it
I think you will find a great joy in it.
or so…
Nothing ventured, nothing gained they say
But still it is rather hard to start.
Well let us try right now.
Now we are going to write a fugue.
We are going to write a good one.
We are going to write a fugue … right now.
Oh, and a happy March, everyone.
02 Saturday Nov 2013
Posted in Scribbling
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(Photo credit: Pascal Maramis)
Well, not exactly, perhaps – but still.
I was working hard, the other day, on this opera libretto – or trying to. Actually, to say that I was frowning at the computer screen, and crossing out five words for every three I wrote, would be a more accurate description. It didn’t help that my neck and head were giving me grief, but let us not mince matters: the fact is, I felt more than a little stuck.
So, after a torturous couple of hours of this, the thought of the papers I had to mail flashed through my mind, very much like a glimpse of salvation. By then I was desperate enough that I would have clutched at anything, but a deadline was involved, and I really, really had to go.
Of course, as I might have expected, it was salvation of the most dubious kind: at the Post Office, I found myself at the tail end of the longest, slowest queue on record. I could only stand in line, fume to myself, wish I had brought something to read, and fume some more…
And then it happened.
I was busy devising inventive names for the giggling, chatty, messy, oh-so-slow clerk, when the first line popped up in my mind. And then another. And then another… Dig for a notebook (I always, but always have one with me), dig for a pen, scribble, scribble, scribble… For the next twenty minutes I happily counted syllables and jotted down line after line, and by the time it was my turn at the counter, I had a complete scene and a good chunk of the next one – far from perfect, of course, but still more and better than I had managed in two hours at home.
So, it would seem it is true. And yes, I know it is, but it always takes me by surprise: a little walk, a notebook at hand, something to take one’s mind from what doesn’t work – and may be a little fury – will go a long way towards unsticking what is stuck.
Will I remember it next time?
24 Saturday Aug 2013
Posted in Stories
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Right, new September (very nearly), new life, new blog.
In English this time – which is not entirely obvious since, let it be said at the very beginning, I’m not a native speaker.
I’m sure it shows something dreadful, too. But I have this ambition, I want to write in English. I have been writing in English for some time, and I might mention in passing that Joseph Conrad is my hero*. As for what I want to write in English, let us say theatre and historicals – either straight or with a fantasy bend.
So, this is the plan: one post each Saturday, to begin with. Books, theatre, writing, the odd historical tidbit, and suchlike stuff. Expect a certain amount of Elizabethan things, because I’m mad that way, and some musings about language, translation and editing.
And with that, I think you are warned, right? Onwards.
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* But let’s make a deal: the collaborations with Ford Madox Ford just don’t count.
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