I’ve almost caught up with the huge backlog of blogs that have plagued me every time I’ve loaded Outlook for the last few months. I subscribe to Feedblitz, which works wonders for neatly taking all of the blogs you regularly read and combining them into one simple daily digest. At this point, I usually leave it in my inbox until I find the time to read the damn things, like a huge pile of mail building up whilst on holiday, I realised last Sunday that they stretched back to August – that was one daily digest per day, for six months… Well I’m pleased to say that after a week of furious speed reading, I’m now caught up to January 10th (2013…) so I’m finally happy, nay proud, to open my nice (almost) clean inbox.
Reading a quote from one of the posts – Jurgen Wolff’s Time to Write blog, from the 10th January, he listed a few quotes by writers. One in particular hit home – “You only fail if you stop writing” Raymond Bradbury. Jurgen went on to say that if you keep being knocked back, maybe a change is as good as a rest. I’ve been wrestling with a large project recently – a comedy drama series that I developed as part of my Screenwriting MA a few years ago. I had to prepare a series bible and a pilot script. I was rather proud of the series I developed and the bible to showcase it, but the script itself was rushed through to meet a deadline right at the end of the course and I never felt it did the series justice.
I pitched the project during the London Screenwriter’s Festival last October and it helped to develop it further – a few of the lectures about the protagonist and their journey turned the project on its head and I think I may have something really quite promising to offer now. I’ve been working on this for the last few weeks, but it’s burnt me out a little – coming back to an old project that you’ve already reworked countless times can be a little depressing.
To counteract this feeling of lethargy, this weekend I began work on a short fifteen-minute play, having recently read Alan Ayckbourn’s Crafty Art of Playmaking. I’ve had a few ideas swirling around in my head for about a year, that I’m now committing to paper, just nice for a change. I’ll post some more about it on here when it’s in a better form…
Adam Brown, Screenwriter 