…or, in this case, several blank pages, ripped by misplaced Sellotape and with an errant tea stain.

I am enthused about my next film. Enthusiasm is something that’s easy to lose as an independent filmmaker when scripts go unmade, attention from the right people feels impossible to garner and alliances that one hopes will come to fruition do not.

These factors enflame the affliction I bear along with many writers: procrastination. There are always dishes to be washed, laundry to be done, facial hair to be shaved, friends to be texted, paid work to be sought & dutifully fulfilled, physical exercises to be performed, (if this photo is anything to go by) tables to be sanded down & revarnished and, now, blogs to be written. So, I’ve made a deal with myself; bloggage will take no longer than 15 minutes out of my day.

After the release of my last feature film, I created several viral videos, with the aim of bringing attention to the film. Though they were fun to make, they didn’t have the desired effect and took the best part of a day to collate props, film, edit and publish. When you know something is going to take up that much time, one is less likely to do it regularly. So, 15 minutes it is. 

Inherent in this blog will be the risk of tangential musings, grammatical and spelling errors and a lack of pinpoint accuracy, which is most unlike me when it comes to my work and public-facing material, but the aim of it is partially to be more loose and free when it comes to my thought processes. The design path I have trodden in my other professional capacity has seen me focus on precision over and above artistic freedom, but this has been a bonus in that role – getting things “just so”. But, it also leads one into a rigid frame of mind. In terms of writing, where writing is re-writing, I always find re-writing my own work to be one of the most challenging elements.

Several exercises I was assigned during the art and design courses I traversed from school into university aimed at loosening students up in the ideas process. One that I am especially reminded of at times like this was on the first year of a General Art & Design course at Richmond Upon Thames College – we were to take an everyday object (in my case, one of my old shoes), and to choose five words from a list—e.g. soft, malleable, fractious, sticky & inflated—and produce 20 rough interpretations of the object per each word. In the end, having 100 ideas from which to take one idea to a final piece of artwork. At the time I found producing 100 mixed-media shoes extremely tedious, but it did teach me that, when we think we have squeezed out every idea we think we have, there are further depths to plumb in the quest to generate something new and original.

I’m now at that stage with this current script; more than enough time has passed since I wrote the second draft that I now feel detached enough from it to look at it somewhat objectively.

So, why are the ripped paper and tea stain relevant? Because, in sticking together several pages upon which to dump ideas and—horror of horrors—putting the final piece of adhesive tape on the wrong side of the page, the procrastinator of yesterday would have started all over again. But no; it’s time to be loose and free. Precision is for the final draft.

And, while, I am tempted to write more, I’ve been writing for 23 minutes. I will get better at this too…