This blog post is part of a series where the ±«Óãtv Writersroom approached selected writers to offer them a platform to discuss what they feel are the most relevant topics affecting the broadcast industry today.
Matthew Mc Devitt is a Derry writer who was selected for Drama Room 2020. Previously he came through the Belfast Voices 2018 scheme. He's recently been commissioned for a radio comedy pilot about a pest controller with delusions of being a private eye, called Softboiled. He's also writing his first feature, A Clannish Breed, a coming of age comedy about a Father and Daughter duo, faking a satanic panic in 1980's Northern Ireland.
What’s your favourite montage of a writer at their desk overcoming writer’s block and turning out pages? (as ) in thoughtfully debating the pros/cons of coffee and a muffin as instigator for writing or reward for writing. Barton Fink slowly losing his mind in, well . gleefully typing away, remorselessly turning her hometown’s most recent murder into her next bestseller. Part of you is saying No Jessica, the body is still warm - it’s not right! Another part of you grudgingly admires, she’ll have a chapter done by lunch at that rate.
It’s a trope and not even a good one. The writer rubs their face, mutters different opening lines to themselves, paper is rolled up and thrown into an already overflowing bin. What these scenes generally have in common is that they are set in large well lit rooms, with a mahogany desk, bookshelves everywhere. Autumnal light spills in the bay window. These writers also have a sickeningly endless amount of time to complete their magnum opus. The demands of rent, social obligations and time lost to their own inherent vices do not enter the story logic. Mahogany desk, autumnal light…this is not what my writing space looks like. I doubt yours does either.
I’m a glutton for writer interviews. Process, regime, technique. Apparently commits to writing a novel with the intensity of an ultra marathon runner. Life is reduced to a cycle of writing/exercise/sleep until the work is done. It’s genuinely impressive. However my own regime is more akin to a malfunctioning couch to 5k app, where life is reduced to an endless cycle of writing/job 1/family commitments/job 2/relationship maintenance/dog walking/gentle weeping and not enough sleep.
Some writers set internet restriction apps, to prevent them from doom scrolling the news when they should be following their muse. Maybe I was lucky that the first desk where I ever took my own writing seriously was where the only thing that could distract me was the Rorschach test nature of the rising damp in the wall. Hmm, that mould looks a bit like - maybe this script needs a car chase?
My problems were never about distractions when I got to the desk (in reality a breakfast bar in a shared house) but getting to the desk at all. Good news - I now have a desk where I don’t have to scrape my housemates' encrusted cornflakes off before I start. Plot twist - that alone has not improved my writing.
My first ever submission to a ±«Óãtv Writersroom open call was a TV pilot that I wrote in 6 woozy nights after I clocked off from my bar job. To call it a first draft would likely see first drafts everywhere, unionise and counterclaim. It was gibberish. I was so tired/elated when I finished it, I decided at the last minute to change the title to size 45 IMPACT FONT so it would really land home with its first reader what a seminal work they held in their hands. Unsurprisingly I did not make any form of long, short or middling list. More surprising was that I did not end up on any government watch lists (that I know of). Whatever it was (it shall remain nameless) it was closer to Outsider art than Spec script. But I had finished something.
And then I started thinking about how it might be much less demented to think ahead with realistic specific goals, rather than put in for each approaching deadline, like a stray dog running after every passing car, barking wildly at the tail lights. And so work life/writerly aspirational life imbalance properly began, as I know it has for many others. My partner is likewise blessed/cursed with the compulsion to write. Like me, works in the hours and minutes that can be poached from doing all the things you do to keep the wolf from the door. Or at least not fully inside the house. We daydream about having enough time to really write. These musings tend to inevitably (and unimaginatively) drift towards reveries about rural cottages, near a flowing river. Well-lit rooms, mahogany desks and bookshelves tend to feature heavily ... alas our reality is much closer to a poorly furnished Escape Room during the cleaner’s week off.
But yet we both still (strive to) write for TV. Not always when we want. Rarely where we want to. Sometimes even (oh the inhumanity! oh the irony!) at the cost of actually watching TV. I now find myself unable to watch . Not because it terrifies me. It doesn’t anymore. Now I can only feel anger at not using his boundless freedom to write a bit more efficiently (and ideally less murderously). No talking to the ghosts until you hit your word count, Jack, I’m thinking. I’ll let you into room 237 Mr Torrance, my brain reasons, when I see chapter two!
I try not to let the fantasy of endless writing time become my own Overlook Hotel. I accept the reality that I have to write when and where I can. And try not to find myself reading listicles at 4am about which famous writers only wrote standing up/sitting down/after a long walk/or in a bath eating apples. Would having a writing space torn from the pages of a broadsheet’s Sunday supplement lifestyle section be nice? I’m going to guess yes. Would having what felt like enough time to write, help? Almost certainly. Is breaking into professional writing a level playing field? Not even close.
But most open calls worth entering (like ±«Óãtv Writersroom) are read blind. Your submission’s first reader won’t know (or care) if you wrote it in a townhouse or a treehouse. Under the warm hue of autumnal light or the dull flickering of a broken streetlight. The only thing they’ll care about, is the only thing you’ll have any control over - do they want to keep reading? ±«Óãtv Writersroom schemes helped me stop seeing writing as a montage where inspiration strikes.
My first ever script editor Hamish taught me to fight for every percent your script can improve. It’s not very cinematic but it works. Recently, for the first time in my life I now have both a desk of my own and enough time to focus solely on writing (for a month or two anyway). I suppose it’s time to find out if I’m Jack Torrance or Jessica Fletcher.
I really hope it’s the latter.