Day 20

13:30

Okay, I fucked up. I slept for thirteen goddamn hours. I must have needed it, though.

So this is what I'm thinking: I'm going to try my utmost to write 2,000 words a day, and write for a minimum of 4 hours.

BUT - So long as I write 50,000 words a month, and write for 100 hours every month, I'm not going to beat myself up too badly if my word count drops for a day or two - it will, it's simply inevitable.

I know I wasn't going to make up any more rules - that was one of my rules, in fact - but I think this one is reasonably fair, and also represents the dawning of reality into my crazy screenplay year.

And it reflects the main thing I've learnt so far - how day-in, day-out work requires a different level of alertness and discipline from the occasional batshit-crazy all-nighter that I'm used to. I've realised over the years that there are many things I can do when I'm tired. I've never directed or acted in anything where I wasn't borderline narcoleptic from the lack of sleep tallied up from last-minute pre-production disasters and mindfucks.

But those are fundamentally different pursuits to writing. Yes, they're as tiring, they certainly need the same level of concentration - but they need, in many ways, less concerted and continual self-discipline. You direct and you act with people, in front of people, and there's a huge communal force surrounding you that wills you to do well. You have little breaks - you walk around a lot - you ask other people what they think and what they would do. And they look after you, probably better than you deserve. All this can delude you into thinking you're a lot more capable than you would actually be if you tried to do these same things on your own.

And when you're writing, you are on your own. And when you go beyond a certain level of tiredness, there's almost nothing you can do to continue. I've tried a couple of times after the long days' work last week to sit down and force myself to write - and have stared dopily at the screen and typed virtually nothing. I managed less than 200 words in an hour - a word every twenty seconds. We're talking about a sentence as short as this one taking more than 5 minutes to write down. And that's not a good use of anyone's time.

So, that's how I'm going to try to stop being disappointed in myself for not meeting my word count for 6 days out of 19.

Anyway, I'm going to pull my finger out and start doing something.

19:45

Done three hours of writing - spent it entirely on the 'novelisation', which I'm now kind of enjoying. It's a nice way to revisit the story, try to explain it a little more, and see if it's working. It's also cheating. I mean, I've made my word count already, but I haven't worked on anything actually original yet today.

I have a couple of little business things to do, then I'm going to work on my crusader's story.

02:15

Those other 'little things' took longer than expected. Still, I got a last hour of work in on my crusader story - writing down little things about the characters on their own 5" by 3" cards.

I'm finding it difficult to feel like I'm making much progress with this new story. But I think that, in a lot of ways, it's going to be one of the toughest - there's a lot of research to be done, and I know that a lot of the first draft will turn out to be inaccurate. So I'm holding back from launching into a plot-line just yet - I still feel like the characters are place-holders and my understanding of what they've been through is very limited.

I'm reading an excellent book, 'The Crusades through Arab Eyes', by Amin Maalouf. But every useful nugget of information I get from it reminds me how little I know about the period. I realised this evening, for instance, that I had no idea about the kind of weapons any of these characters would be carrying - which is a pretty big thing, considering they would have used them to spend two years hacking through the middle east.

Anyway, it's late and time to go to bed.

Will try harder tomorrow.

word count: 2816
hours writing: 4