Sunday, July 8, 2007

Looming deadlines and writer's block

Back at university, entire semesters would go past with hardly any work to do, then we'd suddenly find ourselves deluged by multiple coursework projects, all to hand in the same week, leading to a manic final dash to get everything ready.

Other than occasionally strenuous FXhome release deadlines, I haven't had to worry about that kind of thing for years. Just recently, however, I've ended up in a similar situation, what with work busier than ever, my film-related work more active than it has been for yonks and, of course, our Creative Writing course that we're doing up at UEA.

Typically, a whole bunch of deadlines once again converged, the most troublesome of which has been the final piece for the Creative Writing course. My plan had been to take the Detective character from The Detective (see stories on the right!) and spin him out into a slightly longer tale. Easier said than done, especially given that my head has been focused on entirely different characters for the past few weeks.

This has proven to be more of a problem than normal. The whole point of the 1st person narrative in the Detective stories is to try something I don't normally do, and write from the point of view of a rather extreme, unpleasant character, in 1st person, while also playing with all kinds of noirish cliches. All well and good, but leaving Keila and Kamran behind in order to write in the voice of the grouchy, robotist detective was difficult. If only I'd chosen to write in good, old fashioned, easy peasy 3rd person perspective!

Ah well. I've finally got a hook into the story, so will have it finished by this time tomorrow, ready to hand in on Tuesday. Nothing like last minute!

No comments: