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Love and Hate (Of Writing)
Do I really enjoy writing?
I hate writing. I really do. If ever there was a dumb way to try and earn a living, it’s this. Writing. Sitting at a desk for hours, days, months, years, knocking out stuff like this. Writing about how I hate writing. I must be nuts!
Of course, I could stop. I could walk out of this freezing cold barn in Normandy I use as an office and burn the place to the ground. It would certainly warm me up, and at a stroke destroy everything I’ve ever written. All my half-finished novels, short stories, plays, film scripts, comedy sketch shows, sitcoms, and children’s books. All up in ash.
But how would I feel? A lifetime’s work destroyed. Then what? Save the world?
In 1994, I was going to do just that. Then I got distracted.
I’d been writing a sitcom about a rock band from Nottingham, and I felt like I needed to finish it before I did anything else.
Sound familiar? Where for some unknown reason you have to finish a project before you can move on (or do) anything else. Even breathe.
I finished the sitcom, all six episodes, and sent it off to the BBC and waited. This is when I should have gone off and done something else for a while. But I didn’t, I started writing a second series, just in case.
