Quite a large step actually

Dear Mum,

I’m feeling rather smug, which, rather like the conclusion to last week’s blog, is probably a bad omen.

I’ve spent the last week studying The Writer’s Room website, absorbing as many tips and nuggets of wisdom as my post-student and so slightly out of practice memory will allow me.

I now know radio and TV scripts differ hugely. Consequently, I’ve fiddled with Microsoft Word on my computer to make structuring my script easier (which, combined with the absence of an L key now makes typing up any other document mission impossible).

I have read scripts, listened to radio plays and worked my way through a disgustingly large quantity of cream eggs.

Listening to Pippa talk about writing her dissertation made me nostalgic for this time a year ago. Immersed literally in Oxford World Classics, online journals and photocopied essays, and metaphorically in the industrial worlds of Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins, I was pretty miserable. I loved my topic but, holy Dickens, writing about it was wretched.

It was the constant questions that cavorted about my mind. ‘Am I structuring this  properly?’, ‘Is this reading really what Collins intended?’, ‘Will my lecturer dislike that particular quotation?’

The most challenging question, however, was ‘how do I start this?’, a question Pippa is currently asking.

“The best thing to do, Pips,” I said with patronising hindsight, the graduate lecturing the student with empty insight, “is just make a start. Write something, anything, down and you’ve got something to work with, even if it means you re-write the whole thing later.”

Utter hypocrite. I hadn’t written a sodding word of my own. I’m made endless notes but nada in the concrete scripted dialogue department.

Realising this, I set to.

It was of comfort to know that, tomorrow, you and I are driving to Plymouth. Looking after your own mum after her hip operation, we will be house-bound and without any internet or Sky Plus to distract.

Rather like Mortmain in ‘I Capture the Castle’, when Cassandra and Thomas trick him into the medieval tower, I will be isolated in an undisturbed sanctuary, which I’m hopeful will offer nothing but the opportunity to write.

Inspired by this, I took Cassandra's advice and typed ‘the cat sat on the mat.’ Next thing I know... Ta-daaaaa!! I’ve got six pages of script.

I’ve at least another twenty-six pages to write and, to be honest, the six written pages are pretty rudimentary.

I’ve got one month to go. *Gulp*. If you could imprison me in a tower, Mum, with nothing but writing equipment I’d massively appreciate it.

Oh, and don’t forget the supply of cream eggs.