Playwright's rollercoaster...

Back on the playwright's rollercoaster with a deadline looming. Something of an uphill struggle right now but I should be over the psychological hump by this time next week. Just churning stuff out, little bits at a time, and doing a fine job of ignoring the outline I penned a few months ago. The play is for 2010. I am pretty confident that I'll have a draft by then!

Writer's quote in Saturday's Grauniad to cut out and keep, pin on the wall and refer to when 1)things aren't going according to plan and 2)theatre is asking what the hell the play's about, from Tom Stoppard:

"After 40 years, the problem remains, each time. You can't start writing until you know what you're doing, and you don't know what you're doing until you start writing. I still have to resist the false intuition that I need to know as much as possible in advance. The essential thing is to know as little as possible. Ideally, when things fall out well, you shouldn't feel clever, you should feel lucky. "

Last week I was in Morpeth so I watched the floods coverage yesterday with a fair bit of interest, as I'd been wandering the town's now-soggy streets as recently as Thursday. It had been raining all week. Maybe the floods were unleashed to make me feel more at home (M reckons my presence probably brought the tough weather conditions). I am back there a week tomorrow - hopefully the place and its castles will have dried out by then.