I have written pretty much since I was eleven, some seventeen years ago now. Never anything earth shattering; the usual ideas for books that will make millions but never get further than two pages in. Short stories as a bluff because I can't follow a plot through. Angst riddled poetry of your average irritating fifteen year old.
Still, I wrote. Endless journals, observations on scraps of paper at work, slightly better poetry when I was a bit older.
And then, one day, as if somebody had told me it was all or bust, I decided to give everything up and go to university. To write. The first thing we got told was that we are writers now. Don't call yourself a student (we writers must begin our illustrious careers as we mean to go on, undoubtedly with a lie) and it was as if a fire had been lit in a place where the sun doesn't shine.
I went home and wrote a poem I am still proud of. I met a great, great friend on my course and we are writing a sitcom together which genuinely makes me laugh out loud. Then, one day, I woke at three in the morning. This isn't one of those boring “I awoke to an epiphany!” stories, I have a baby and so waking at three AM is a fairly routine occurrence. But as I lay back in my bed, I had a brief idea for something I thought could be a pretty alright stage play. I jotted it down so I wouldn't forget, baby brain is a cruel thing, and went back to sleep.
The next day I looked at my piece of paper and I knew. I knew what was going to happen, I knew my characters and I knew my first and my last scenes. This had never happened before. A fully formed idea with a beginning, a middle, an end and a reason. It had just enough of me in it to make the feelings and the motivations work, and just enough of a plot to make it interesting. It was an intimate idea, which I enjoy on the stage but think can get overlooked in amongst jazz hands and music.
Genuine excitement fizzed away under my skin, making my finger tips itch.
Somewhat inevitably, this is where the curse begins. Now I have an idea I love, with pretty well formed characters sitting in my head, begging to be written about. I also have a two thousand word essay and three assignments to finish. Still, ideas don't come along every day so I see it through. I write and write and annoy people for opinions and I manage to get the framework down in a week and a half.
This was at least two months ago and I am now stuck at page 26, I have been on page 26 every time I open the file since what feels like the dawn of time. I've written the start, I've written the middle and I've written the end, but bits in-between are missing, and I don't know what needs to happen in them and I don't know if my entire second act is actually just the second half of the first act. In short, I am stuck.
This I could cope with if I was simply stuck, but my characters won't leave me alone, their emotions sit heavy on my chest just asking to be smeared on the page. They want it done, and so do I, but how? How does one move past the treacle to play again in the great sand pit of the English language without any more clear ideas?
So I sit in my bed in the middle of the night and curse the day I ever picked up my pen. The light from the screen lights up the headboard as my husband snores on beside me and I ask my characters what they would like me to do with them next. All I get in reply is a slow, monotonous blink from the curser, and I wonder just how long I will be forced to blink blankly in return.
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