Forever Delayed
Now I'm 32 (!), the two most joyful words are "Deadline Extension". Because it means I get the weekend to keep working.
Life.
I was meant to hand something in today and I've now got the weekend to finish it. I say finish, it's already finished. But, as every artist knows, it's also never finished. So this raises the question - will it be any better for the extra time? (The answer in this case is unequivocally "yes, thank you Baby Jesus for this gift" but go with me a little down this rabbit hole.)
Parkinson's Law is the concept that work expands to fill the time you have to complete it. When I know I've got little of it, my brain switches into a different mode of writing, it stops interrogating absolutely everything and I fly through scenes. I imagine this is what flow feels like.
When I know I've got ages to get it done, I'll find myself in sinkhole scenes which is where you look up and realising you've been tinkering with the same, not all that vital, moment for hours. I've written great drafts of scripts in two days. I've also taken months and months to type the same and gotten worst results.
This has long been the case with me.
When I was at uni, everything essay I wrote in the utopian hours between 3am and 10am (which seems like infinite time when you're in it) on hand in day got me a high 2:1 or better. Whenever I decided to plan for it and took my time, the marks were noticeabley worse.
More than once I left an essay one paragraph in, went for a night out, came back and got it finished to a decent standard between 3am and 10am. With my dissertation, I played table football in the student bar til midnight and then, when we were thrown out, I forced someone to throw a Lucozade bottle around with me outside the library until the sun started rising and I finally couldn't hide from those last 3,000 words. (I got a 71).
For comparison, yesterday I gave up a night out with lots of people I loved to get more work done. Which of us was the happier beast?
To be clear, I don't say any of this to brag or venture that the younger me was on to something. If anything, there is nothing more frustrating for a writer trying to form good, consistent working habits than getting validated for bad, anarchic ones. I feared this would stop me having any sort of sustainable career as a writer. So I can't tell you how relieved I felt when I read this interview with Ron Moore and Brannon Braga who wrote both the Star Trek: The Next Generation finale and the Generations feature film (stay with me, it's good, honest) at basically the same time. One was fast, one was slow:
"I don't even know why we were necessarily asked to write the finale, given that we were writing the movie at the same time," Braga said. "All I can say is we were much younger. It's hard to imagine doing that again. But we were very much into it, and we loved the show, and ironically, the finale turned out better than the movie, so… but it was hard to do. We were both working around the clock."
At the time they began writing "All Good Things ...," Moore and Braga had already been working on the Generations script for months. The screenplay process was a long one, but the teleplay process had to be short and sweet due to a tight production deadline. Somehow, though, the crunch of that deadline led to a finale that really clicked.
Basically, this probably isn't entirely the mark of a rookie, it's always going to happen and I try to comfort myself with knowing that some of my favourite pieces that I've written (if not - critically - the best ones) are ones that I spent years building."The great irony of it all is, we spent a year on Generations, and 'All Good Things…,' we wrote in a month. We just plowed through it, banged it out. It did not go through radical changes in the drafts. There were production changes, as always, but it was basically what we wrote, pretty close to the first or second drafts. And it turned out beautifully. It was just one of those things where it all flowed and it all came together, and we were astonished by how much people liked it, how much we liked it, how great the final product was. It exceeded your expectations of what it could be," Moore said.
"And Generations was the opposite experience. Generations, we slaved over for a year; we worked it over and over and over again, and in the end it just fell short. And we were like, God… it was just such a depressing feeling of not being able to bring that one home. But we did have this other experience that was very unexpected and just clicked and became a wonderful piece."
Maybe the only thing you can do here is accept that some scripts are born great, some achieve greatness and some get given an extra weekend thank you Baby Jesus.
PS - One key thing to note I guess is that, in all instances, I DID DO THE GROUNDWORK. The reading, a brief outline, whatever. I never did any of those things completely blind.
PPS - I've started organising my ideas in projects by date, rather than area (character, setting etc). It gives a lovely through-line of your thought process. I don't know if it's better, but certainly for the early-mid part of a project its letting me see the progression of ideas much more clearly.
PPPS - I've come to the painful realisation that my cat might be my...best friend? I do things for that little guy I wouldn't do for most my loved ones.
PPPPS - (I've not informed my other cat of this development)