In my quest to find fringe theatres within half an hour of Lewisham, this was a real find. First a train to Waterloo East, then a walk to the other end of The Cut - a walk full of interest, too, passing The Old and Young Vic, popular pubs and lively pavement life.



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I've blogged about procrastination before in terms of the immediate moment, but what's causing it? Why do we fail to get on with the thing we love doing: writing? We've got a lot of our lives arranged around it, and our hopes and self esteem built on it? And if you earn your living as a writer that book you're trying to write underpins everything that pays the rest of the rent. So why is Write so often, actually, Not Write?

At least commissioned work has disaster looming if you don't do it, and short work is visibly finite. But when it's book-length and not under contract... You've made space and time, you've convinced the world it's a Proper Job, you've been thinking about the new novel all weekend and now it's Monday morning. Time for work. And like riding a horse at a jump, you push yourself on towards it... and somehow the horse always manages to run out, avoid the jump, start-in-a-minute... over and over again. It's possible to spend the whole day Not-Really-Working. You end up feeling thoroughly jaded and fretful: no writing done, but nothing else worth doing done either. Then when you could take the evening/the next day/the weekend off, you don't let yourself: it's "your fault" that you've got so little done, says your Inner Calvinist, so you punish yourself by going on "working". Which most of the time is still Not-Really-Working.

So what's going on? It's obvious what one gets out of writing the next novel: I/you/we are writers heart and soul. The interesting and difficult question is what each of us gets out of Not-Writing.

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When a failing operatic troupe in the American mid-West decide to stage a performance of Verdi's Otello they hire a real Italian tenor, hearthrob Tito Merelli.(Michael Matus)

The skirt-chasing star arrives late, and quarrels with his jealous wife,(Joanna Riding) who leaves him, prompting his apparent suicide. Self-doubting but talented Max,(Damien Humley) a member of the troupe, is persuaded to take his place. Problem solved ....or is it? In the best traditon of farce, things can only become more complicated.



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I nearly didn't get to see this interesting play, which would have been a pity because I gave it four stars when I reviewed it for Remotegoat. The young man at the box office hadn't been notified that I'd be there and seemed to think I was trying out some get-into-theatres-free ruse.



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On a thread about Point of View, in the public bit of WriteWords, I posted a link to this admirable exploration by David Jauss of the whole business of point of view and psychic distance in fiction. Jauss starts by discussing Hemingway's story "Hills Like White Elephants", which is an exemplar of what some call the Dramatic point of view, and some call Third Person Objective. The story is largely built from dialogue, and the rest is plain narrative of physical action and setting: it's dramatic in the proper sense, in other words: it contains nothing that someone in the stalls couldn't hear and see... except for one phrase, right near the end, where we're admitted briefly to the man's own viewpoint, and then another word. As Jauss puts it (my italics):

Hemingway... tells us the man "looked up the tracks but could not see the train" ... reducing the distance between us and him ever so slightly. And two sentences later... He writes that the man "looked at the people. They were all waiting reasonably for the train." Notice that word reasonably... it tells us not just what the man sees - or, in this case, fails to see - but the man's opinion about what he sees.

And that reasonably, Jauss says, is the most important word in the whole story.

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Every year, the Great British Public carry out a strange ritual. For two precious, sunny (hah!) weeks in summer, we secrete ourselves in our living-rooms in front of the box to experience, vicariously, the pleasures and pains of Wimbledon. If we’re really keen, we may even buy strawberries and cream, or wear a silly tartan hat with built-in red hair. Under extreme pressure (atmospheric, usually) we may even stoop to sing-a-long-a-Cliff.



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Earlier in the year, I was asked to review a book about an Italian Jesuit, Guiseppe Castiglione, who was a court artist in eighteenth century China. I was a bit daunted, because my recent reviewing had been restricted to short story collections and plays. However, I really liked the book, so I enjoyed reading and summarising the chapters, until I was interrupted by a hospital investigation that went wrong. It took weeks for me to recover enough to write the review. (I wasn't to know when I signed the consent form, but it wasn't a good idea to be in the middle of anything)


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I saw two films recently that appealed quite independently of any inherent merit; they reminded me that film for me is chiefly an escape into another world, enhanced (ideally) by womb-like warmth, darkness and silence except for what's happening on the screen.



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A writer friend - a short fictioneer turned novelist - cried for help on a forum:

So, I've been through the script of the novel and edited it and made masses of notes. I have reworked plot strands on paper and in my head and done lots of character development on the underwritten men in the book. But now I actually have to sit and put this work into the script and I just don't know how. I feel like I know you're supposed to eat an elephant one spoonful at a time, but there's no spoon, just one massive elephant to get through. Help. I am now procrastinating to the point that even my husband has noticed and commented on it. That takes some doing.

"Bird by bird", I found myself saying, and if you don't get the reference, it's here. Once you've decided what needs doing, as my friend has, the answer is, indeed, spoonful by spoonful. But what kind of spoon?

First, confine your worry to - say - the first page, and don't worry about the following 299. They can wait. Then recognise that the three things you're trying to do in revising a novel are change things, cut/shrink things, and develop things. So:

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Still recovering from a recent operation, I looked at the list of plays for review and picked out two classic plays that didn't involve too much travelling. I was a bit apprehensive all the same about A Midsummer Night's Dream at The Brockley Jack pub. It's a play more suited, I thought, to outdoor venues such as Regents Park Theatre. But the interpretation was superb. Thinking about it, although it's all outdoors the action takes place in a wood at night, so the slightly spooky atmosphere the players and the venue helped create was entirely appropriate. I gave it five stars.

The production made me see the point of a play that I knew well but never really liked or understood, so it deserves the accolade.

The other 'classic' at Greenwich Playhouse was one I hadn't seem before - apparently GB Shaw's play Candida is apparently rarely performed - but the Playhouse seems to specialise in classic revivals - good for me because, as with The Brockley Jack, it only takes me about fifteen minutes to get there.




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