Sometimes We Write In Pieces

This week: lots of bits and pieces, including a tip for writing in lots of bits and pieces.

Hello from out here on the Thames Delta, where I am re-familiarising myself with the stop-and-start cadence of doing production on one show while writing another, doing the paperwork on another thing and doing calls on yet another. Luckily for me, we're coming up on the US Thanksgiving gap, which will give me the space to land the whole of WRITTLE 2 in first draft. And I've just had art samples dropped for the artist search on PROJECT MONTMARTRE, and I've got to tell you, they're all so good that my heart is singing.

DOING THE BIT YOU CAN DO

As I write this, I'm stuck in WRITTLE 2 episode 104, because I'm an idiot and I didn't outline the episode well enough, so I have a ten-minute hole in it. I'll figure it out once I figure out who else needs to be speaking and what story they have to tell. Once I have an idea I like, I'll probably write that on its own and then go back and fit it in to the episode.

A thing we don't talk about enough, as writers: the myth that we write a thing by starting at the beginning and just progressing through to the end in purely linear fashion. Very few writers do that. The rest of us jump around in the story, write sections out of order and go to the piece we feel capable of that day.

In writing fiction, we are wearing the clothes of multiple characters every day, standing in different places every day, inhabiting different moods and minds. You'd be a fool to think you can be any of those things on any given day. Some days, you just don't feel funny. Some days, you can't summon up the bleak, or the loving, or the vicious, or the kind. So, it's completely fine to jump to the piece you can do that day. Even in comics, which tends to be strict deadline work, you can jump to a bit at the back before you do a bit at the front. You're still hitting your page or word count for the day, and you're writing the bit you're going to do best that day.

So right now, episode 104 has a bit at the front and a bit at the back and a bit in the middle, because those are the bits I knew and the bits I felt I could do right.

And the thing is? Nobody will ever know you jumped about in the manuscript. It's the finished thing that matters, not how you got there. I hope some of you find that permission useful. I had to learn that one on my own.

Reminded recently of this note I made in 2019 on Neal Stephenson's FALL.

hello i am famous Elon Muskrat of the twitters with exciting employment opportunity!!!! please venmo $8 admin fee to [email protected] for details

Link of the week: 14 of Kurt Vonnegut's books got a remake from a design studio as part of a centenary exhibition, and they're gorgeous:

Turns out I can recommend other newsletters hosted on Beehiiv. This is one I like. I just thought I would try this function.

CURRENTLY READING

VARIOUS BOOKS

I'm across a few different books this week.

Incredibly peculiar prose, incredibly evocative descriptions of a life lived in hotels, sentences both stunning and staggeringly difficult to unpick: the language of someone who constructs their speech to keep the world at bay. (UK) US)

THE THINGS WE'VE SEEN by Agustin Fernandez Mallo is not as explosively inspiring as his NOCILLA trilogy, and some of its longer sections are tiring. But the opening is marvellous, and the long second section I'm in now has a wonderful conceit: it's narrated by the secret fourth astronaut on Apollo 11, the one who held the camera. It has Pynchon and Sebald in it, and has great sentences even in its slowest pieces. (UK) (US)

And STONE MATTRESS, nine short stories by Margaret Atwood:

As I write this, I'm in the middle of the second story, which is linked to the first, and I wonder if all nine are interlinked. I will find out! Given the title and the material so far, this seems to be a collection of stories about ageing and death (and sex: and, perhaps the death of sex by ageing, judging by the second story). (UK) US)

CURRENTLY LISTENING

WINTERLONG

I have the worst taste in seasonal music, but, I have to tell you, this old thing gives me irrational joy.

Some of you will have absolutely no idea what this is.

I am trying to get back to daily posting of some kind at LTD. If nothing else, colleagues and friends may find it useful as a barometer of executive function on any given day...

Okay, that's me done for this week. I have a ton of stuff to get to, and some research to dig into. For some reason I've decided I need to know the organisational structure of MI5/ the Security Service, so that's where I'm going next. After I've sat outside with an espresso and listened to the birds, and probably the rain, like I'm Jack Hargreaves in the cold outdoors thinking about country things. It does me good. Find the thing that does you good and do it, because there's no reason why you shouldn't and we're here to live well. You're allowed to be content. So do the thing that makes you smile, look after yourself, and I'll see you next week.

W