Lee Kemp

Writing’s hard. I guess everyone knows that but it always surprises me just how hard it can be sometimes.

David Eddings, whose books I adored as a teenager, once told me that to be a writer you need to write a million words. Then crumple them up, throw them away and start writing properly. (When I say he once told me, I mean I read it in a book, I just always assume famous people are talking directly to me, otherwise why are they talking??)

Unfortunately I don’t have time to write a million words of shit because I’m pretty busy so i’ve decided not to bother with that and crack on with the good stuff (if there’s an global shortage of arrogance you know where to come looking). My plan to make four films this year has fallen by the wayside somewhat because i’m unfocused, ill-disciplined and a bit whingey sometimes. But i’m back on the boil. Here’s where it went wrong and how it relates to my experience of writing.

I have three good short scripts in my head. One of them complete to a standard i’m happy to share with others. None of these would make a good first short film. Each is 20-30 pages long and somewhat complex. So I needed something smaller to get my teeth into. Something that I could keep the whole thing in my head. If some kind person finagled into giving up their weekend to help me make a short film were to approach me with a question on set I could fire off a decent, well thought out and well reasoned answer built on a foundation of intimate familiarity with the concept and script.

I wanted something small. Lars Von Trier says “love your boundaries”. He doesn’t really make films I like but he makes films so he’s worth listening to. So I had something small, two people, one room, a topic of interest, a neat little twist and boobs. I could make it in a weekend with very little money. I’ll call it Socks because that’s one of the names it had during its troubled upbringing and i’m referring to it again later. Can I make the thing work? Can I bollocks. I’ve been arsing around for six entire menstrual cycles. Half a dozen full moons have gone by without success. Every time I try and write I write that. Whenever I’m laid in bed at night and i’m not thinking about the Battlestar Galactica finale I’m thinking about Socks. It’s subtly niggling away at my conscious and subconscious minds like an axe in the face. I took it to my writer’s group recently and everyone recognised the obvious problems. Then they started making suggestions; try this, done it, try that, done it, have you considered, yes, you could try this but its the most ridiculous contrived and cliche’d technique imaginable, yeah, tried that too. Then last time I pitched it to another writer who responded with “hmmm, not sure, sounds a bit shit”.

So when do you stop? Does the idea not work or am I simply not good enough to make it work? Has it been worth taking six months on a ten page short that probably doesn’t work? Have I learned from the experience?

Don’t know. Don’t know. No. No.

Then there’s the one i’ve written that I really like. I wrote it during a period of particular annoyance with Socks, the five good pages mocking me from a corner of my hard drive, insinuating it shouldn’t be hard to fix but also the obvious gaps taunting me. The new one was twenty two pages long and it flowed out of me most of it coming in a single weekend. I’ve reached another peak of annoyance with Socks and started writing something else. It’s not coming as fast but its coming out well. Really well in fact. Thanks to Matt Lund who said “why don’t you write about that?”

He was probably right. But its not the kind of thing I can make in a weekend. So it’s true, writing is hard. Except when it’s easy.