Friday, November 03, 2006

No Deeds To Do

No promises to keep
I'm dappled and drowsy and ready for sleep.

Yep today is one of those days when the scripts have been delivered, the deadlines met and I can kick off and relax.

Yes I know, I should be getting on with something else. And I did promise my agents six story lines for the new project. And by mid-afternoon I'll probably be bored shitless and get on with that anyway.

But I've a nice rosy glow right now. Not caused by alcohol. I think the script I delivered was pretty good. I could well be proven wrong of course. It's subjective, after all, but after a while you get a sense of what is actually pretty good and what was phoned in.

But the main thing is that right now there is nothing that I HAVE to write. So anything I do write will come straight from the gut. It's from me, for me.

I don't want to give the impression that I dislike writing episodic TV. I love ice cream but I prefer Phish Food to Walls vanilla. I'm also a terminal procrastenator and as such have a semi-permenant feeling of guilt about deadlines. Today I am deadline free. It's like that feeling you get when you finally put that shelf up that you've been promising for weeks.

But the subconcious never really stops. As I typed this I thought of a great line I can use in something and had to break off to write it down. I've always contended that being a writer is a state of mind rather than a profession. Whether you are writing or not you are always a writer.

I recall a story about James Thurber. He and his wife were giving a dinner party. His wife noticed him staring off into space. She slammed the table and shouted 'Stop writing, Thurber!'

2 comments:

wcdixon said...

"I've always contended that being a writer is a state of mind rather than a profession."

My 2nd fav quote from today's blogland...

The first was:

"It's easy to trash a tv show. But try writing one."

English Dave said...

''It's easy to trash a tv show. But try writing one."

Now there's a truism.

Take into account the hundred and one things that can go wrong, from premise, to story, to writing, producing, directing, editing and scheduling and it gets a bit like the 'dancing bear' . It's not the fact it dances well. It's the fact it dances at all!