On Being A Tortured Artist

So here's the thing... In my spare time (what little there is that's not occupied by fretting about flathunting, jobhunting, work, or the morons at work), I'm still trying to do a little bit of writing every so often. It's difficult enough because the inclination to write and the opportunity to write do not often coincide. Then one must take into account how it all happens...

I'm not sure how it is for other people, but my writing tends to happen as a result of imagining certain characters in various situations. Frequently I find a story begins with a single line of dialogue which leads, by a circuitous route, to the scenario which prompted the dialogue.

The trouble begins when I go through great, long periods of utter silence from all characters.

So when I was asked to write a story featuring one of my characters as a birthday present during one such period of drought, it should come as no surprise that I missed the deadline.

By about two weeks.

On the plus side, it did leave me with two new avenues I might pursue with this character, having abandoned them as 'birthday story' ideas because one is rather sad and the other became hopelessly complicated and demanded ever more time and thought the further I followed it.

Also on the plus side, I did eventually finish a short, sharp story that I'm very pleased with. Having wrestled with one idea then the other, the third and final idea came to me in a flash of inspiration, late at night, when I found myself unable to settle enough to fall asleep due to overthinking on one of the earlier ideas. While the first two ideas occupied me for hours apiece over the course of the last month, this one became a complete short story within about an hour.

I'm still nowhere near where I was a few years back, churning out scenarios left, right and centre (fourteen and counting for one character!), and spinning them (occasionally) into stories of 30,000 words or more, but this little exercise, stressful as it was, turned out quite well.

In other news, it really does aggravate me when one of my Editors (one, specifically) gets all a-fluster over my team's workload when it's having a direct effect on the progress of her magazine, and whines repeatedly that she doesn't want anyone staying late in the office on her press day.

Like it's any of her damned business. It's my bloody team.

Like her 'wants' are at all relevant to anything. I don't want my team to stay late, but occasionally it's a necessity. It's not really a question of if they stay late at all, it's a question of when they stay late, and how late they stay... and it's the difference between doing the job (producing ads and editorial for a magazine) and doing the work (picking up individual ads/editorial pieces between the hours of 9am and 5.30pm).

And does she express any concern when the late running of her magazine affects the next one in the cycle? Not that I've heard.

At least she hasn't turned on the waterworks... yet.