The Process (feat. Billy Ocean)
Everyone has a different writing process, and I’ve seen a few articles about different people describing theirs. I shall briefly describe mine here, but only as a flimsy pretext to show you something brilliant in a minute.
Firstly, my walls are littered with charts about character arcs, plots, timelines etc. These are devided into two sections.
Printed charts for ongoing work that I’m not currently adding to. This is mainly for television series’ as it means I can immediately look and see if an idea would fit in as soon as I come up with it.
And here we have my giant whiteboard, for whatever script I’m focussed on at the moment. I can wipe it clean I can scribble over it I can change things, it’s perfect. Except that everything I write on it I have to write in really cryptic notes so that my flatmate doesn’t read them and mock me. It’s ok though, he’s dead inside.
I then have a collosal “Notes” foleder which contains unsorted lines, ideas, vague fragments, words I like or anything else I feel like writing down. A lot of it makes no sense. The phrase “breakfast at every hour” shows up at least 6 times for no reason other than it sounds vaguely poetic to me.
Then when I decide what it is I’m going to be working on, I look all the way through this file and copy out anything that might even slightly be relevent to what I’m talking about, and put it in its own notes file specific to that project. Then it’s time to start writing.
When it comes to 2nd drafts, I save the original, print it out, then open up a totally new file and just type the whole thing up again. Forces me to read the whole thing again and think about every single line. I know people who do the same thing but just type it up from memory, the idea being if you don’t remember it, it wasn’t that important. Which makes sense really, but I also find it insane.
Finally the bit I actually wanted to tell you about and the reason I actually wanted to write this. Music.
So I love music, I write it, I arrange it, I play it, I listen. Off duty, I listen to anything massively complicated, technically ambitious and basically a bit wanky. When trying to write though, I get distracted by all that good music. But I don’t like the silence either. The solution? Listen to the worst music I can find.
I’ve got Westlife albums, B*Witched B sides, and most recently old 90′s nu metal I have cut up so that there are no chorus’s. Just the verse, over and over, on repeat, for hours.
Anyway, the point is in my search for something truly horrible, I’ve created something wonderful.
This is a version of Billy Ocean’s “When the going gets tough” cut together with the superior saxaphone solo from the otherwise inferior Boyzone cover. If anything’s going to make you work faster, this is it.
Enjoy!
