So what it is about vowing to do something every day that makes it so difficult? I think there’s an answer that has something to do with not realising how complicated our lives really are. An hour a day? Sure I’m sure I can find that somehow. Finding an hour a day is really hard, even though mysteriously, you seem to manage to find two or three hours a day to watch sub-standard criminal procedurals.
Yesterday, completely unexpectedly, I ended up writing about books about writing that I’d read. I didn’t get to the end of the list. Nowhere near. But I think I’m only going to mention one more. That’s “The Fieldstone Method” by Gerald Weinberg. I don’t know how I came across this book, but it really is a gem. What I like about it is that it doesn’t pretend that you need to have an ordered and disciplined approach to writing. Rather it says that all you need is to write, to collect “fieldstones”, like the eclectic mix of stones that you might find in a real field.
Once you’ve found the stones (just to make sure the metaphor is clear, this means once you’ve written down an idea) then all you have to do is trim it (tidy the idea up) and then combine it with other stones to make a more substantial structure.
Weinberg is also big on writing down ideas the minute that they come to you, and on not self-censoring.
I was reading the “Fieldstone Method” book when I went on a trip to Moscow a few months ago. The conference that I was attending had a spiral bound notebook as part of the “Goody Bag” that was slightly wider than a normal reporters pad. This made it extremely comfortable to write in it.
Spiral bound reporters pads aren’t usually comfortable for me, it’s something to with being left-handed. But all the time that I was in Russia I was scribbling in this pad. I remember one day I went for a walk out from the hotel and around Moscow. I was doing this exercise that I like to do in London and other big cities of deciding to take a left and then a right and then a left and then a right (and so on) to kind of deliberately get lost.
I walked and walked and then I found a cafe and I sat down and wrote. I wrote about the other customers in the cafe. I wrote about a sudden pang that I’d had for English humour. I wrote that I’d been reading a series of interviews in the Guardian where various celebrities were asked a set list of questions. Because, being interviews were mostly with English people, they were often funny.
And then, because I’d been reading this Gerald Weinberg book, I realised that I could ask myself the same list of questions. And so I did, and I wrote down the answers in the slightly broader than normal spiral bound notebook. And sitting there in that cafe, writing and writing and writing was a moment of absolute bliss.
While I was in the shower just now before I started writing this I had an idea for a movie. The movis is about an accountant who gets involved with the Mafia and ends up having no choice but to become the head of a Mafia family. “The Accountant: organised crime just got a lot more organised”.
Yeah, it’s not great. But developing that idea that you can write anything down that comes into your head, that’s great.