Writing innovation...

In a shock move for me I adopted a different approach to writing last night. I wrote with a pen. On paper. Yes, I know. You've been doing that for years. But, well, I avoid writing with a pen on paper as much as I can. I have developed a serious psychological hang up about this very process. This could be borne out of the fact that my handwriting is rubbish and, actually, I no longer 'do' handwriting ever - I've developed some childlike unjoined up writing style. Yes, laugh if you must. I have also convinced myself that I type as fast as I think - which, thinking about it as I write this, is true - and that my efforts with a pen on paper leave me unable to keep up with my thoughts. But last night, yes, I adopted what is, for me, a different approach. Writing with a pen. On paper. And this morning, I took that writing, and typed it up, and made some amends along the way, although not enough to constitute a redraft, and rather enjoyed the old-fashioned process. Which I will use again.

How did it come to this? Well. I've been writing at a 'keyboard' since around the age of eight, I think. I stole my sister's military-green Imperial typewriter and quickly learned to type using the few-fingered approach that I still adopt. Karma perhaps dictated that when I had ceased copying the work of others and started composing original material, said Imperial typewriter was stolen from me by a drunken uncle, who never returned it. I was sans typewriter for a long time, until some sub-standard Petite arrived after much nagging at the parents (I nagged for a typewriter and a drum kit. The typewriter was obviously the lesser of the two noisy, irritating evils) and got me going again. It was upon this typewriter that I wrote and carbon copied frankly ridiculous single-fold comedic publications that I would distribute around school to a select band of friends, who no doubt quickly assumed that I was having some kind of qwertyuiop-fuelled mental breakdown as they accepted, with a forced smile, their copies.

And then came computers. Little goes on Spectrum ZX80s, ZX81s and the school's Apple and BBC Acorn nicely prepared me for the delivery of my first 'personal computer'. I took delivery of my Commodore 64 on a sunny... (ok, enough boring tech talk already .- Geek Ed)

These are crazy nights...

To see The Crazies last night with son Sam. I especially enjoyed the moment when Sam jumped out of his seat, turned to me and said, "That frightened me." Which I'm sure is the intended effect (The Crazies is rammed full of moments designed to make the audience jump, although they don't always work) throughout this epidemic thriller. The film was ok. I'm not familiar with George Romero's 1973 film of the same name so can't compare and contrast with Bruce Eisner's effort that was 'inspired' by its predecessor. What truly horrified me, given that we've been frequenting Vue and Reel of late, was the extortionate price of seats at the Odeon. "It is expensive, isn't it?" said the 60-year-old bloke behind the counter, who must have been considering tendering his resignation at the moment he sold us the tickets.

All that stuff...

Working. Writing. Re-drafting. All that stuff, I suppose, that writers are supposed to do. Yes, I'm at the chalkface, the coalface, the shitface of creativity. Big play to re-draft, Humber Mouth 2010 play to belt into shape, Larkin25 gubbins to sort, assorted short pieces to deliver to some mad bloke that's interested in what I do, two short films to edit. Then there are all these writing workshops. Which are fun. But eat into time I'd otherwise spend, well, doing the above. Why, there's barely time to blog.

There's a helicopter overhead, as I write this. A police chopper. Whenever a helicopter's overhead I always think of Goodfellas and I pretend I'm Henry Hill. Then I remember I was never a mobster, never a wiseguy and never trafficked narcotics. I'm just a writer, the lowest of the low, trying to redraft some stuff and make some other stuff.

Got Spotify? Listen to Harry Nilsson's Jump Into The Fire - from the Goodfellas soundtrack - here

Retail weirdos...

Leeds. Picking up daughter. Stopped off at PC World/Currys at Birstall Shopping Park on the way back, where the staff outnumbered customers by a ratio of around 15:1. Most annoying. Was asked if I needed any help at least six times, and how I was today on about 10 occasions. The activity of browsing around the shop was soiled by being followed at close quarters by keen sales staff who pounced whenever my gaze remained on an object for more than three seconds. Thus, we gave up looking in the end and bade a retreat. This is not the way to sell anything, retail weirdos! We followed that experience with the much more pleasurable task of eating meatballs over at Ikea.

Friends over...

Friends over from Japan and in Hull briefly today. So we met them for a drink in Larkin's old Friday night haunt - the Royal Station Hotel - followed by another in the new Hull Truck, where we demonstrated to the visitors our complete and utter lack of import at the city's newest theatrical venue. There was an exchange of gifts and we were given some lovely snacks and sweets that won't be hanging around uneaten for too long. Finn was the lucky recipient of a rather dashing Super Mario long-sleeved t-shirt (see below). Yippee. And always great to see Mike and Yuka and hear their exciting news (another baby on the way!!!).

It's a dog's afterlife...

Observed a gent walking his dog through a graveyard. The pooch was intent on trampling over the graves and, well, at least this is how it looked, the dog appeared to be offloading its bowels atop a few of them. I don't think that's what they would have wanted. And the dog owner made no attempt to stop this foul-smelling desecration. Most irresponsible. So, should I make it into that particular graveyard, I would like my epitaph to read Don't Let Your Dog Shit Here. Or similar.

The beautiful part of it...

"The great thing for me, now, is that writing has become more and more interesting. Not just as a craft but as a way into things that are not described. It's a thing of discovering. That's when writing is really working. You're on the trail of something and you don't quite know what it is ... the one thing about being an author as opposed to being in one's life is that you have the illusion that you can bring some form to it. Which is the beautiful part of it. You don't feel that you are so much in chaos. I don't know what it would be like if I didn't have some form, short stories or plays or whatever ... it fulfils something in me that I don't know how I'd serve otherwise."

Sam Shepard

Full interview in The Observer.

Organic packaging...

"Christ! Or Jee-zus! - 'grow out of each other organically' - the sort of horticultural vocabulary I used when I lectured on English Literature at Queen Mary College, University of London, 'organically' was a particular favourite, long before it marked all those packages of everything from pork pies to yoghurt on the supermarket shelves, everything in Hamlet, for instance, was organically related to everything else, plot to character, character to theme, theme to structure, structure to symbol, symbol to image, image to plot, plot to character..."

Simon Gray

Smoking on the bench...

Having puffed away on the last few pages of The Smoking Diaries, I immediately jumped, or, rather, jounced, into Simon Gray's next instalment, The Year of the Jouncer (as a baby, Gray used to 'self perambulate' up the garden path in his pram by bouncing it about, much to the bewilderment of his parents who had left their infant outside on his own and returned to find the boy relocated). I closed the cover on that book in the bath last night. The postman will be bringing more Simon Gray to me this week - Enter A Fox and Fat Chance are en route, while the bookseller I've turned to is awaiting stock of the posthumously-published Coda (it has just dawned on me that I have failed to get my hands on a copy of the third volume in The Smoking Diaries - The Last Cigarette. I've just been on that internet thing and ordered it). I was telling another writer that I was reading Gray's memoirs the other day and I was somewhat taken aback that this fellow scribe had never heard of the man. He flicked through and found a pic, at the end of the book, of Gray sitting on a bench outside his home. "Looks like he's just a bloke sitting on a bench." A lot of writers are blokes too, of course, and very often do sit on benches. I've been promising myself for around three years that I'd buy these books but never got round to it. When I picked up the first one I thought it would be a nice treat in the downtime that I'd enjoy after delivering a draft of a script. Only there is no downtime, as I'm straight on to the next draft. So the rest might have to sit on the pile for a while. Or I might just go and sit on a bench and read them.

Find out more about The Smoking Diaries here.

The boat comes in on Thursday...

Afternoon taking in the spring rays around and about Hull's Marina. The trip included a pint outside the Holiday Inn, where we drank and pretended we were lovely and warm as a cold breeze breezed through. Finn, 2yrs and 4 months, enjoyed looking at the various seafaring vessels. So much so that he demanded that his Nana purchase one. "That one, that one. Blue!" he went on. Time is of the essence for Finn, who wants the vessel by "Thursday! Thursday!" Either that or he was eyeing up my Becks Vier and telling me he was thirsty. No, it must have been Thursday.

The new paranoia...

If this were a hard copy diary rather than an electronic vanity exercise (sorry, personal brand enhancer) for, if anyone were ever to swing by, public consumption, things would be very different. I could write down everything. But, as I have pointed out previously, this, this thing, is not the sum whole of my life (although, I admit, huge aspects of my existence are aired here). Ah, how I would like to tell you about them. But I can't. Although it would all be true, I wouldn't like to get caught up in a messy defamation action. Occasionally, out of necessity, the odd moment(s) is (are) captured on paper. You have to get these things out of your system, I feel, otherwise they nag and gnaw at you and the whole situation can become quite, well, as I am reading Simon Gray, cancerous. Or I might just be saying all this on the offchance that they might be reading. Does my hard copy version of events actually exist? And, if it does, do I adopt the bitchy Kenneth Williams stance or that of everyone's pal Michael Palin?

In the digital age, paranoia is rife. Why? Well, a huge conversation is taking place. And lots of people who are out of that conversation and can't quite work out how to get in to it have started to think that, well, they must be talking about me. Apparently, another tweeter suggested, my tweets are being monitored by my enemies. And, for that matter, my entire web presence is being logged and filed away for a future appearance in the High Court. Although perhaps I am suffering from the new paranoia and they're not doing that at all?

Buggering chickens in Morrisons...

Encountered some fantastically loud, profanity-riddled shoutiness in a very busy street en route to a meeting at the theatre this morning. Dozens of elderly people were stopped in their tracks and possibly died upright there and then when a young man exiting a shopping centre started shouting at someone he knew across the road. "Hey, you f***ing c*nt what the f*ck are you f***ing doing round here you f***ing c*nt?" Not to be outdone, the someone he knew across the road replied, "F*ck off you c*nt your mum's a slag." It was very entertaining and went on in this vein for quite some time. At no point were they accused of having a poor vocabulary by any passers-by. Which was probably for the best. The final salvo was the most intriguing "I heard you got caught buggering chickens in Morrisons." Which does have a certain ring of truth about it, don't you think? For all I know it's a sport in east Hull. I do hope I bump into these chaps again one day.

Mates...

I quite like the late Simon Gray's Smoking Diaries habit of picking up on words he jotted down several hours before for a subsequent diary entry. So, mates. Or, more specifically, my dad's mates. Who he left me on the barrier at Boothferry Park for during a few seasons of Hull City AFC games starting in 1969/70. The mates mentioned briefly in Sunday's entry. Mates is probably not the right word. Certainly not mates in the beery, blokey, cor blimey, eff and jeff, nudge nudge, wink wink, look at her, 21st century sense.

Dad wore a shirt and tie most of the time and I seem to remember that, even though he stood with the more leisurely attired massed ranks in the North Stand when we first went to matches together, his formal dress remained intact. And his 'mates' or, rather, his work colleagues, dressed similarly. They weren't mates. They were gents; gents that happened to work together. And go to the football together. They were all signwriters. All employed in the publicity department of Jacksons, then Hull's main supermarket chain. All adept at creating fluorescent posters for shop windows and avoiding making a mess of it all with their deft use of a stick with a ball on the end (it's called a mahl stick - art editor).

At some point, when I'd abandonded Saturday afternoons down at the place that would become Fer Ark in favour of Sundays watching rugby league, Jacksons became sponsors of something-or-other (probably pre-match, half-time and post-match bread) and dad and his shirt and tie moved to more appropriate surroundings - the so-called Best Stand (best only if you liked watching your football bending your neck around the steel that held the roof in situ). In his later years he headed back North, not to stand but to sit. Next to one of his mates, a man who had been his boss for around 30 years. Occasionally, I'd kop for dad's mate's season ticket and sit in the North Stand. Still wearing his shirt and tie, dad would never swear no matter how bad things got on the pitch. He would, however, hurl gentlemanly and polite abuse at the referee. Bizarrely, this sometimes took the form of merely shouting the word referee in a slightly psychotic manner and, very occasionally, jumping up, in silence, and wagging a finger in a sinister, pointed way. He'd often have to spit his Needler's Fruit Sensation into a handkerchief to facilitate this activity.

After a few years absence and at some point in the late 1970s and possibly, to be more accurate if not quite certain, season 1979/80, I became a regular, for a few heady seasons of pretend football hooliganism and smoking Players No 6, in the Kempton stand at Bothferry. Often, after dubious decisions, I would look over at the North Stand to see if I could see my dad jumping and pointing in his idiosyncratic manner. I could never look for too long though because I always feared that dad would spot me, cig in hand. I wonder what his mate made of it all. If anything.

From page to stage...

"...much basic carpentry is needed to move any book from page to stage.

"Playwrights use set-ups and pay-offs as meaning-bearing devices much more than novelists because they can guarantee that something planted at 7.45 will pay off at 9.30, night after night. With a novel, you don't know if the pay-off will be read in the same sitting as the set-up, or days (or even weeks) later.

"Theatre loves open endings because they can be completed by the audience. It hates multiple endings because - whether they appear to or not - the leave the audience with nothing to do."

David Edgar

Read the full article with David Edgar on adapting Julian Barnes' Arthur & George

Oh Arse...

The last time I saw Hull City in the flesh, so to speak, was the rather drab and lacklustre affair against Blackburn back in December 2009. I'd go more often if I could get my mitts on tickets. And, as much as I'd like to reveal that expert planning, foresight and membership to various ticket purchasing schemes had gone into me gaining access to yesterday's game against Arsenal, I have a mate's illness, which rendered him stuck in Sheffield, to thank for being able to park my derriere in the North Stand at the KC. I still owe him the 28 sheets he forked out. Must remember to pay him when I see him which, of course, I would have conveniently forgotten about had the game been the proverbial one-sided trousers it promised to be.

This is not a match review. But the effort on show from the Tigers once they'd gone down to 10 men - after Arshavin put Arsenal in front on 14 mins and Bullard had equalised from a pen around the half-hour mark - made this a most memorable and gripping encounter. It was a tense affair. Hull City fully deserved a draw. As it was, they conceded a Bendtner goal in the 94th minute, with the oft-lauded Myhill gaining an horrific assist on the play (he pushed a Denilson shot out to the goalscorer's feet). Felt gutted. Which is, no doubt, connected to the well-hidden, supressed tribal belonging that I can trace back to Boothferry Park, 1969, when father made me invest in his club by sitting me on the two foot tall perimeter fence, passing me some sweets that slightly resembled, in shape, taste and texture, Love Hearts but contained the names of Football League clubs and telling me to "watch" before walking off and standing with his mates.

I don't want to feel anything towards the Tigers, other than a dislike for the way that they are ruining a perfectly good rugby pitch every time they take to the field of play. But I do. I really do. Mostly, I want them to get what is rightly theirs (which is to play against the best and get the results they deserve) and to make up for the five decades of mostly wilderness that the old man willingly, against all common sense and my attempts to lure him to the Boulevard, had to endure. They was robbed. Deepest sympathy, with full understanding, to the loyal supporters that stick with The Tigers every year, every week, every day, every game. One day, it will be ok.

Update: Phil Brown was relieved of his managerial duties on Monday, March 15 2010.

In search of Cheshire...

Fancied melted cheese on toast. For me, the cheese to melt has to be Cheshire, which takes on a whole new, exciting and extremely tasty life when popped under the grill. So we went to the shop around the corner where, unsurprisingly because this is Hull, there was no Cheshire cheese in the cheese section. Instead, there was mild cheddar, strong cheddar, extra strong cheddar, red Leicester, double Gloucester, a few bits of Brie, soft cheese in tubes and tubs and triangles, the usual small sacks of Babybell, those inexplicable cheese strings and some stuff that was described on the label only as 'coloured cheese'. So I asked if they had any Cheshire in stock. "No. I don't like it. So we don't sell it." "What, you only stock the food you personally like?" "Yes. What's wrong with that? My mother hated Cheshire cheese and we were never allowed it and now I feel the same." We were going to buy some other things, but because my mother hates shops that don't stock Cheshire cheese and now I feel the same we put the other things back. We visited two other shops around the corner. There is definitely an anti-Cheshire sentiment in the neighbourhood because they didn't stock any Cheshire either. I can only think that the woman from the first shop holds some strange sway over other shopkeepers.

My therapy...

It is so much easier tweeting 140 characters several times a day than writing a blog entry. But that's no excuse for all the writing-related quotes I've posted of late. No excuse is necessary. They're all helping me. And, after all, this blog is for me, not for you. This is my therapy.

So, I'm in a pub, with several hacks. And, once again, I find myself defending the biggest conversation going on in the world right now; twitter. It amazes me that professional communicators don't get it. "Why do you have to tell us everything you're doing?" Well, for starters, I don't. I do much, much more than I ever tell the virtual world. "I don't want to know when you...(lists lots of things I've tweeted recently)." "Erm, you've been reading my tweets then?" Come on, y'all, join the conversation.

In other news, my mother pronounces the word poet 'poyt'. Which is a very strange thing to hear indeed.

Find out about the must-have twitter tools for business

Old golden words...

"Most playwrights at rehearsals are of as much use as a father, all masked-up and sterilized, at the delivery of a child. 'All you want to do is sit there fretting over your fucking old golden words,' Tony [Richardson] would say to me. It was an unjust accusation, but many writers do it in the stalls drooling over their precious syllables, inhibiting and even antagonizing the faltering actors with their proprietorial scrutiny...My own view has always been that a play that is susceptible to crucial rewriting in rehearsal should never have reached that stage."

John Osborne in Almost A Gentleman 1955-1966

Writing is a deep-sea dive...

"I need eight hours to get maybe 20 minutes of work done. I had one of those yesterday: seven hours of self-loathing. I used to write in the middle of the night. I suppose I was surprised by the sedentary nature of writing: like, wow, most of this is sitting down and typing! So I used to add a bit of adventure by starting at midnight and working until five. That was excitement! But now I have two kids. So it's bankers hours for me.

"Writing is a deep-sea dive. You need hours just to get into it: down, down, down. If you're called back to the surface every couple of minutes by an email, you can't ever get back down. I have a great friend who became a Twitterer and he says he hasn't written anything for a year."

Dave Eggers

Read the full interview from The Observer here

Come with me...

Something has bugged me about that Sky+HD Supertelly advert since I first saw it. At first I just thought it was because it's had me doing a Gene Wilder impersonation and singing Pure Imagination at the most inappropriate times. It's a sad song, mainly because, in Willy Wonka's colourful, hallucinogenic environment, if you want to view paradise all you have to do is simply look around and view it. "Anything you want to," sings Willy, "do it. Want to change the world? There's nothing to it." If only, eh?

Things came into some kind of focus last night, when I went to see Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland in 3D, and the Sky ad came on while I was trying to concentrate on eating all the food and drinking all the drinks I'd bought before the film started*. I turned to eldest son Scott and suggested to him that there's nothing imaginative about subscribing to a Sky package. Indeed, you don't really need an imagination at all to watch the tellybox, do you, it is a passive medium. And imagination is even less of a requirement in the high definition world, where, as I seem to remember a salesman telling me when I was having a slow day once, every blade of grass can be picked out individually. Why, it's more realistic than life itself (at which point I thought I better shut up, as the "put on your 3D glasses NOW!" notice had appeared on screen).

The advert is set amid a Huxleyan Fordesque assembly line - a factory - which, I imagine, is very much the environment that Murdoch has created within his many Sky-related call centres. As such, the ad itself is a post-modern, unimaginative parody of all of those car adverts featuring robots and also Monsters Inc. The problem being that, for the most part, Sky are at the most unimaginative end of the TV business - they buy their imaginative products and creativity from elsewhere. "Your TV, with a Sky+ box, is Supertelly," we're told. But pure imagination? I don't think. Unless, when you're watching Pineapple Dance Studios or endless repeats of American Gladiators, what is going through your mind is...

There is no
Life I know
To compare with
Pure imagination
Living there
You'll be free
If you truly
Wish to be

I dunno. Maybe listen to the radio once in a while? Read a book? Experience a live event by actually going to it?

If you must, you can view the Sky+HD Supertelly advert on youtube here

*Slightly hampered by two latecomers knocking son Sam's skateboard flying in the air, which propelled a drink into the row in front.

Cauliflowers of romance...

Still plagued with strange behaviour from the takeaways we keep turning to for deliveries of copious quantities of food. Last night, 30 minutes after our excessive, stomach-bursting order was placed, the phone rings. "We have a problem with the Cauliflower Bhaji you have ordered." "Really?" "Yes. We don't have any cauliflower." "Ok, I'll order something else. What are the options?" "The options? (pause) We have found the cauliflower now." 30 seconds pass, at most, then there is a knock at the door. It is our food. The takeaway in question is at least a five minute drive away. "That was quick. They just phoned me about the cauliflower," I mumble as I hand over the cash. The driver looked at me as if I was insane. Which I'm beginning to think I am.

Dropkick Murphy...

"There is a rage in me which I think is a natural thing. It was in me when I was 24 or 25, scribbling with my stub of a pencil. And it's still there in everything I do. Rage not against the unfairness of life – life is of course unfair – but against the inequalities, the arrogance of power."

Tom Murphy

Full interview in The Observer

Grappling with the questions...

"I'm at a place in my life where I am very focused; I've pared a lot of the noise out of my life. I don't have a lot of time to write, but I feel an urgency to write, and I feel an urgency about where the writing lands. The stakes are higher now. I want the work to be sustaining and surprising and mysterious. Am I grappling with the questions I need to be grappling with? I bring the best of myself now."

Naomi Iizuka

Interview and preview of Concerning Strange Devices From the Distant West

Being political has changed a lot...

"Well. I'm really interested in what 'political' is," said award-winning screenwriter and playwright Jack Thorne in last Sunday's Observer (yes, you're right, I should have blogged this earlier). "I think there's something generational in the type of political playwright we have," Jack goes on. "My mum and dad went on marches, my mum went to jail for the CND, they were very active political people."

Jack's touted as a political playwright. His mum and dad went on marches. Did he ever go on marches? Does he intend to go on marches? Be very active, politically? I don't know. But it seems unlikely; this feature lends you to believe he's happy that his mum went to jail because it's saved him the bother. "But the boundaries," says Jack, excusing himself from marching duties and getting him thinking about food, "of what political is have changed a lot: you can now be political as a consumer, for example – changing what you eat. Younger playwrights tend to pose questions more. I want to write stuff – and I haven't yet – that goes, 'This is the problem, I don't necessarily know the answer.'"

Don't expect to see Jack down the front of the next demo that you're on, then. I don't have this trouble, writing flippant comedy, of course. I just have to laugh a lot. Much easier.

Enter the new wave of political playwrights at The Observer

Cut out and keep guide to life as writer #793...

"I remember saying once, I can't understand these chaps who go round American universities explaining how they write poems: it's like going round explaining how you sleep with your wife. Whoever I was talking to said, They'd do that, too, if their agents could fix it."

Philip Larkin, An Interview with Paris Review, 1982

Reveal yourself...

Dear blog, I might have a bit of time to update you now. I promise to not leave you to rot like those other bloggers that come and, once they've had a bit of press coverage, go. How dare they, the ephemeral buggers? Besides, I've just sorted out the blogroll, so I owe you a couple of entries to make that hour worth the effort.

Having written something sizeable, I'm back on the reading. Yukio Mishima's Forbidden Colours has been hanging about on the shelf screaming 'read me' for a few months. So, no longer able to ignore its white Penguin Classics spine, I took the plunge this morning. Two chapters in and I'm having a surprising amount of fun with Mr seppuku and look forward to slurping on all 429 of its pages. I've also already found a quote to throw in for discussion at writing workshops:

"The process in which a writer is compelled to counterfeit his true feelings is exactly the opposite of that in which the man of society is compelled to counterfeit his. The artist disguises in order to reveal; the man of society disguises in order to conceal."

Yukio Mishima, Forbidden Colours (1951)