a block not a blog

I've always said it takes a lot longer NOT to write a play (screenplay) than to write it.  I have put myself in the way of creation, at last, and though I am living with it and hearing it and seeing it, I have not begun to write it.  The other thing I have long noted about breaking into it (breaking a block) is that it takes as much energy as that required to launch a rocket - not literarlly, of course, I'm not a rocket sceintist but oy - 

So this is my last-ditch resistance. I promise myself that I will break through before I sleep tonight, no matter how late. 

Don't just sit there, write something! 

if not now when?

You know i'm writing a screenplay, and it's a terrible time of year to be doing this, with all the other seasonal chores there are to cope with. I was trying to clear my decks (the ones covered with holly) so as to have a clear run at a first draft before all heaven breaks loose.   But then my partner, the historian, on whose book I am basing the film, handed me a huge briefcase full of documents and notes, more research that she had accumulated and almost forgotten. Oy. 

Well, I love research, too, and some of the material she supplied carried real insights into some of the characters I'm dealing with, whose voices I hadn't heard before.  They are minor  characters, to be sure, but they are protagonists, buddies of the main character and they're in it with her and I have to know what they sound like.  Got it.

Research is one of the chief temptations of a writer: you never want to stop. It's a milder, innocuous-looking form of BLOCK, never acknowledged as such.  So - two days gone.  Tomorrow I plunge. So - I thought I had better blog a little before I go.

I might disappear.