Many people are temporarily unemployed, inactive, downsized or otherwise becalmed at present. I find myself in strangely unchanged times, albeit with more restrictions on my movements outside the house. However, my lack of daily purpose has perhaps become slightly more pronounced – a state of enhanced purposelessness, if you will.
So, following my limited success writing to a deadline recently (here), I thought I’d get a bit of a grip on things, and try writing something else for a competition. This time I had allowed myself a whole week, to come up with 3-4 minutes of monologue. By the morning of the final day, I had about thirty seconds worth – procrastination and self-distraction having engulfed my every waking moment.
Clearly I am motivated by urgent deadlines though. With just five hours to go before submission closing time, I finally knuckled down and completed it very quickly. This allowed me a short break which was followed by a re-read, a ‘performance’ re-read (strictly in private, but definitely performed, so as to confirm the length) and several ‘final’ edits, before I chucked it into pdf format and sent it off with a mildly whimsical email, the character of which may owe some debt to Daisy May Cooper whose script-writing Instagram broadcasts I have loosely been following over the past couple of weeks. This may, of course, be a mistake…
The satisfaction was immense. I had decided to be kind to myself and not care if I couldn’t achieve the deadline – but hell did it feel good to have done it. It (almost) doesn’t matter if it’s rubbish, and it really doesn’t matter if I’m not selected, but I’m just so pleased and surprised at myself for achieving it at all.
And the content was, in itself, something of a self-explorative narrative. So that was liberating too.
My reward was to spend all morning on Easter Sunday sitting in the garden reading the newspaper. With no guilt. Hurrah!