Early to Rise

On mornings when I’m filming, early starts are almost de rigeur. You wait in the previous night to receive a text message from the second assistant director as to what time your car, or as is increasingly likely these days your shared transport, will be arriving. You take a moment or two to marvel at whose decision it is that it will take over 75 minutes to get from where you live in south-east London to Wimbledon at 6 AM and you set your alarm for an early start.

On other days, I don’t see those hours in the morning. Yet often they are hours when I might have woken and be lying in bed trying to snatch an additional sixty minutes of shuteye.

Given the change in my domestic arrangements of late, I have at least three mornings each week when I wake at home alone. There is no reason then for me to go back to bed should I stir during these early hours.

In fact one morning a couple of weeks ago I did go straight into the kitchen and make myself a cup of tea at 6:30 AM and without turning on the radio or the TV, I sat straight down at my desk and started to write. I was amazed as to what I managed to achieve by 9 o’clock.

On the truly excellent creative writing course that I did at Chez Castillon in April, our tutor, Jane Wenham Jones, emphasised the importance of writing every day. It was great on the course to have to come up with a piece of creative writing eveachry morning, whether we felt like it or not. I have always admired my friends who are writers who do write every day, day in day out as their job.

Having written two books of the non-fiction variety, I’m now attempting something in the field of fiction. It’s plotted out, it’s in my head, and hopefully all the twists and turns add up, but now I just have to get it down on paper.

As is so often the case, our acting skills that we use without thinking, are of great benefit to us in other walks of life. In the rehearsal room, I wouldn’t think about heading towards the first run through with worries that I was in no way ready for performance. That first run of just putting it together and walking through all the actions with the half formed character is incredibly empowering. It’s a valid part of the rehearsal process, and I love it.

So it came as a revelation to me to be told that the best thing to do in writing terms was to get it all down on paper and produce what might be referred to as the SFT or shifty first draft. Then just as in the rehearsal process, you would go back to scenes and add in the detail, tighten up the technique, and polish the execution, so it’s easier to go back to a first draft and to edit and polish it up, than it is to keep trying to create a fully finished product each and every day.

As readers of my blog and my books will know, I’m a great one for setting objectives, if only because I’m not a good manager of my own time. To-do lists are my life, so using a wonderful piece of software which I was introduced to by a writer on the course called Scrivener, I've set my daily targets and I’m aiming to stick to them.

If I’m honest, there hasn’t been a lot to get in the way of late. Work has been a little bit on the quiet front, and my inbox has hardly been inundated with offers following Paul Clayton Night on BBC1 a few weeks ago.

So there is no excuse not to sit down and write each day. And just to make sure that nothing gets in the way, I’ve set my target to do it as early in the day as possible. Whether that’s following my natural alarm clock at 6:30 AM or whether I have to be probed into wakefulness by a throbbing Fitbit nearer 8.30am, my aim is to get in front of the keyboard as quickly as possible and write

It’s rather refreshing. It has no consequences. As long as it moves the story forward, I’m not really bothered whether it’s finished, polished, just that it’s done. This week I’ve crashed a car, murdered somebody, concocted an explosion in a public building and written a love scene.

I haven’t had that much excitement for weeks