A quote from Richard Curtis: “When I’m advising people about
writing, I say that the biggest hurdle you have to get over is how bad your own
writing is.” What he’s talking about is
that first draft. So much of the time, after sweating blood over the first few
pages or thousand words, when you read them they seem rubbish.
I still feel nervous when I start something new. I know it’s
going to be clumsy and feeble, overlong, unfunny, lacking in any kind of
elegance. The first draft pain never goes away. It’s even worse with comedy, with
that immediate judgement hovering over you: “It’s not funny!”
The second draft remains hard labour. The idea still seems
flabby, every word wrong. I feel sometimes as if I’m patching up the Titanic.
Often it’s just willpower that keeps me toiling. I bet this is the same for
most writers.
I think the best way to get through this is to stop thinking
of each draft as being discrete, as a distinct stage. The process from the
conception in your head to the finished piece is a continuum. It moves forward
extremely slowly, incrementally, and the improvement in the quality of writing
is imperceptible. I try now to think of the
first few words or images in my head as being the first draft. Typing them up is a chore that has to be
done. The second draft may be started in my sleep, on the train, or through an
altered word on my PC. There are probably hundreds of drafts, all tiny steps
forward.
Thinking of it like this removes a lot of pressure and some
of the pain. If you set yourself a fixed number of stages, say five, and find
that stage three is still no good, you’re going to be stressed.
I often spend about 20 minutes reworking something, move
onto another project and come back later for another half hour. It’s more like
chipping slowly at a piece of stone, revealing the statue bit by bit.
I hadn’t meant to go on so long about me. Back to Richard
Curtis: “After you’ve been writing for a while, you know that when you get a
finished film, that’ll be one-thirtieth of what you wrote on the subject. You
mustn’t torture yourself with the fact that most of every day is spent writing
stuff that’s not great. It’s basically all rewriting. Most of the process is to
do with rewriting rather than writing.”
The quotes are from “Now That’s Funny” by David Bradbury and
Joe McGrath, a fascinating book of interviews with comedy writers.
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