The First Day

11.45am

I wake up 15 minutes before midday. What a fantastically productive way to start the year.

Christ, I better be refreshed and rearing to go. I think about the task ahead with apprehension and a little self-disgust. Another quixotic adventure. Another bite bigger than I can chew.

I load up an old story I started writing a step outline to. Stare at it.

12.00pm

Christ, what a mess. This is meant to be a step-outline. It's only half-way through, and its eight pages of plot points. At this rate, the film would turn out to have a duration of seven hours. I petered out at the first real confrontation between the protagonist and antagonist, a trap in which our hero realises he cannot escape the violent world around him.

I stopped at this point for a number of reasons. The first is that I couldn't work out a realistic way of the characters interacting at this junction: how the protagonist could escape, where he would go, and why this wouldn't devolve, like so many good-starting films, into a collection of tedious chase sequences. The second reason for stopping was that, from the start of the project, I imagined the first scene as the introduction of a shadowy character with a bandaged face. This ghostly figure starts the story off, and was more or less integral to the working of the plot, but I'd never been able to work out who he could be revealed as towards the end.

This was going to be my first job of the year. Save my main character from the clutches of a corrupt policeman, and work out who this bandaged idiot could be.

20:00

Eight hours later. I've written 1,435 words. I'm as out of sorts and restless as an unwalked dog. It was midday when I sat down, I don't know if I've spent as much four hours writing: I know for every moment I've written, an equal amount of time has been spent staring into space.

It's a curiously frustrating feeling: looking at the pages I've written, I suppose I've worked out who the bandaged man is, and how our hero gets out of that first situation. That was the plan. But now I've worked them out, they both seem so damn obvious, and there's still so much more to do before we reach the story's end. I suppose, however unrealistic, that's really what I set out to do today.

My step system sits in front of me - future events that I have to extrapolate on are written in GIANT CAPITALS below, the actual meat and bones that I've done so far lie above.

I decide I'll try to write for one final hour. See if I can write another 500 words. Jesus, I suck.

23:55

I finish for the day. Final word count: 2,055. That was a pretty difficult first day, but I suppose I did it. I suppose I wrote for about six hours out of twelve, maybe only five. Today I also spent time having a lovely walk in the frosty wilds of Wales with my girlfriend, and stopped for a delicious lunch and dinner. I also spent a way too long fucking around on the internet, and walking in angry circles thinking about a business acquaintance who ripped me off .

Still, six hours is virtually half the time I spent writing in December. So it's a success, in a somewhat pitiful way.

So what have I learned from this first day? That there will probably not be a single moment sitting down and trying to write that feels easy. And as soon as you achieve the goal you've set out for the day, you generally assume it can't have been a difficult enough task, and as much frustration can ensue as when you don't achieve that goal at all. Maybe this is something I'll deal with over time.

Secondly, I'm excellent at finding ways around rules, even if those rules are a single day old, and set by myself. I've already had to quell the urge to avoid cutting redundant words in the surreptitious effort to boost my word count.

Thirdly, although it's been hard, simultaneously it hasn't really felt like work. It's felt a more like pretending, actually: the same fantastic feeling I got as a five year-old, running around in my Spiderman pyjamas. There's almost a guilty pleasure to the pretense of writing. I spent the day doing what real writers did. What the best authors did. They sat down at a table like this and actually wrote stuff. Of course, scholars could note a couple of minor differences between their work and mine. But then, when I was five, I knew I wasn't really Spiderman when I put those pyjamas on. It was still a great way to spend the day - fuck what anybody else thinks.

So on reflection, all the time I spent 'researching', 'thinking', 'plotting' and 'gearing myself up' to writing over the past few years made the process feel like a lot more work, and a lot less interesting kind of work, than it felt today.

Maybe writing is just about making shit up.

Let's see if I can do more of that tomorrow.

word count: 2,055
hours writing: 5.5