Posts

Stuck Writing a Novel? A Practical Guide to Getting the Thing Moving Again

At some point, almost every novelist finds themselves stuck writing a novel they were absolutely convinced they had figured out. The initial excitement has evaporated. The opening chapters, which came so easily, are now a distant memory. The ending — which seemed so clear in your head three months ago — might as well be in another country. And between you and it sits a vast, featureless expanse of story that refuses to cooperate. This is called the murky middle, and it is completely, thoroughly, miserably normal.

The murky middle has derailed more novels than bad ideas, busy lives, and imposter syndrome combined. It is the place where most unfinished manuscripts live. The good news is that being stuck writing a novel is a solvable problem. The less good news is that the solution usually involves actually writing. That is precisely the thing you’ve stopped doing. However, here’s how to get back on track.




Step One: Diagnose Before You Medicate

There is no single reason for being stuck, which means there is no single fix. Before you try anything else, spend ten minutes working out which of the following most accurately describes your situation.

You have run out of plot. You know your beginning and you know your ending, but the middle — the long, complicated, consequential middle — has turned out to be much harder to fill than anticipated. This is a planning problem with a planning solution.

You have lost faith in the story. The idea that seemed so brilliant in October now seems embarrassing and derivative and probably not worth anyone’s time. This is not a plot problem. This is a confidence problem, and it lies to you constantly.

You have written yourself into a corner. A character has done something that made perfect sense at the time, and now you have no idea how to continue from where you’ve left them. Additionally, going back feels like admitting defeat. This is a fixable craft problem.

You have not actually been writing. Life happened. Work got busy. A box set appeared. You stopped writing for two weeks and then three and then somehow it’s been two months and the document feels like something from a previous life. This is a habit problem.

Each of these needs a different response. Therefore, picking the right one matters.

If You’ve Run Out of Plot: Outline the Next Five Chapters Only

When you’re stuck writing a novel because the middle has collapsed, the instinct is often to outline the entire remaining book from where you are to the end. Resist this. It’s exhausting, it usually produces an outline you don’t follow, and it delays actually writing by another fortnight.

Instead, outline the next five chapters only. Just five. What needs to happen to move things forward? What does your protagonist need, what’s stopping them getting it, and who or what is going to complicate that in the next five scenes? Write rough notes for each chapter — a paragraph is plenty — and then write the first of them.

Five chapters is achievable. It’s also enough to generate momentum, which will tell you what comes next better than any amount of staring at a planning document.

If You’ve Lost Faith: Put the Manuscript Away for a Week

This sounds like permission to procrastinate. It isn’t. The distinction matters enormously when you’re stuck writing a novel.

When you’re too close to a piece of writing, you lose the ability to read what’s actually on the page. Instead, you read what you remember writing, which is invariably worse than the reality. A week away from the manuscript — a genuine week, in which you do not open the document, think about the document, or tell anyone about the document — restores the necessary distance to read it as something approaching a reader would.

After the week, re-read from the beginning. Don’t edit. Don’t make notes. Just read it through as if someone else wrote it. For most writers, this produces one of two results: either it’s considerably better than they remembered, or they find exactly where the problem actually is, which is usually not where they thought it was.

Either outcome is progress. Furthermore, knowing where the real problem is beats endlessly reworking the wrong chapter.

Write the Next Scene Terribly on Purpose

This is one of the more counterintuitive solutions when you’re stuck writing a novel, but it works surprisingly often.

Set a timer for twenty minutes. Open the document. Write the next scene as badly as you possibly can. Don’t think about whether it’s good. Don’t edit as you go. Don’t stop when it feels wrong. Write placeholder dialogue like “THEY HAVE AN ARGUMENT ABOUT SOMETHING, FIGURE OUT LATER” if necessary. Write “[INSERT DESCRIPTION OF LOCATION HERE]” if the words won’t come. The goal is not a good scene. The goal is a scene that exists, because a scene that exists can be fixed, and a blank page cannot.

Moreover, what happens with this approach more often than not is that somewhere in the middle of writing badly on purpose, you accidentally start writing well. The permission to be terrible removes the pressure that was blocking you in the first place. Don’t tell anyone. It’s embarrassing. It works.

Jump Ahead and Write the Scene You’re Excited About

There is, very likely, a scene somewhere later in your novel that you have been looking forward to writing since you started. You can see it clearly. You know what happens in it. You might even have some of the dialogue already written in your notes.

Go write that scene now.

Non-linear drafting is not cheating. It is a legitimate way of maintaining creative momentum when the sequential approach has stalled. Write the scene you can write. The hole it leaves in the middle can be filled in later, and often the act of writing ahead clarifies what needs to happen to get there. Additionally, finishing something — even a scene that’s technically out of sequence — reminds your brain that forward motion is possible, which is useful information when you’ve been stuck for weeks.

Interview Your Characters

This sounds like the sort of advice you’d find in a creative writing workshop run by someone who uses the word “journey” too freely. Nevertheless, it is genuinely useful, so bear with it.

When you’re stuck writing a novel, particularly when you’ve written yourself into a corner, the problem is frequently that a character is being made to do something they wouldn’t actually do. The plot requires them to go left. However, the person they’ve become over the previous ten chapters would emphatically go right. You’ve been staring at this scene for two weeks because somewhere below the level of conscious thought, you know something is wrong with it.

Open a blank document. Ask your protagonist, in writing, what they want. Then ask what they’re afraid of. Ask what they would do next if you — the author with your plot requirements — weren’t in the way. Write their answers in their voice. You are not losing your mind. You are debugging a character, and the answer to why you’re stuck is often in there somewhere.

Stuck Writing a Novel? Try Changing Something Dramatic

Sometimes a story needs to be broken before it can be fixed.

If you’ve been stuck for a long time and none of the gentler approaches have worked, consider doing something drastic to the plot. Kill a secondary character who wasn’t supposed to die. Add a new character who shouldn’t be there yet. Move the story to a different location. Have your protagonist make a catastrophic decision and then work out the consequences. Change the timeline.

This is not vandalism. It is diagnosis by experimentation. Many of the changes you make won’t survive into the final draft. However, they might unlock a direction you hadn’t considered, and even the ones that don’t work tell you something useful about why the story is stuck. As a result, you end up knowing your own book better, which is never wasted.

Set Micro-Targets: The Two-Hundred-Word Rule

When you’ve been stuck writing a novel for a while, the target word count at the top of your document becomes the enemy. Fifty thousand words remaining feels like a geological timeframe. Therefore, stop looking at the total. Focus on today’s target only, and make that target absurdly small.

Two hundred words. That is approximately the length of two decent paragraphs. It takes most writers less than fifteen minutes. It is so achievable that refusing to do it starts to feel faintly ridiculous, which is precisely the psychological leverage you need.

Two hundred words a day is 73,000 words in a year. That is a complete first novel. The trick is not the number. The trick is re-establishing the habit of showing up, because writing is significantly easier to continue than it is to restart from cold.

Once the habit is re-established, the targets can grow. For now, small and consistent beats ambitious and occasional every time.

The Trusted Reader: Handle With Extreme Care

Showing your unfinished manuscript to someone else is a double-edged sword of the sharpest possible kind.

On one hand, a trusted reader — specifically, someone who reads widely in your genre and can give useful critical feedback — can often see exactly where the story has gone wrong. Fresh eyes are valuable. They haven’t been staring at the same document for four months.

On the other hand, the wrong reader at the wrong moment can destroy the confidence of a first-time novelist in a single conversation. Consequently, be exceptionally selective about who you show an unfinished draft to. Not your mum. Not your most enthusiastic friend. Ideally, someone who can separate what they personally like from what’s working or not working in the story.

Also, share only the chapters you feel represent the work fairly. Sharing the section you’re stuck on specifically — the rough, placeholder-heavy disaster zone — and asking someone to assess the plot from it is not a useful exercise for either of you.

The Proper Break vs the Procrastination in Disguise

There is a difference between taking a deliberate break from your novel and simply not writing it for an increasingly long time while feeling bad about not writing it. One of these is a creative tool. The other is a comfortable waiting room with no exit.

A deliberate break has a fixed end date. You decide in advance that you will not work on the novel for one week, and that on a specific day you will return to it. In the meantime, you do things that feed your creativity: read in your genre, watch films, go for walks, notice things. You are not avoiding the novel. You are letting it rest while you fill the tank.

Indefinite not-writing, by contrast, involves a lot of time thinking about writing while doing other things, and a low-level guilt that follows you around but doesn’t actually produce any pages. If this describes your current situation, set a date to return and put it in your calendar. Then keep it.

What Not to Do When You’re Stuck Writing a Novel

This section exists because some of the most popular advice for getting unstuck is, with the greatest respect to whoever came up with it, completely counterproductive. Knowing what to avoid saves time.

Don’t tell everyone you’re stuck. Talking about being stuck writing a novel is not the same as solving the problem. In fact, it often releases just enough creative pressure to delay actually doing anything about it. Pick one person who can help and talk to them. Don’t post about it online, where well-meaning but useless advice will arrive in large quantities.

Don’t delete anything. The temptation when you’re stuck is to conclude that everything you’ve written is the problem, and that starting fresh would fix it. It almost never fixes it. Cut the chapters you no longer want into a separate document called something like “Outtakes” or “Not Sure About This Bit.” Keep them. You may need them later, and you will certainly feel better knowing they still exist.

Don’t start researching. Research is the comfort food of the writer who is stuck writing a novel. It feels productive. It fills hours. It produces the satisfying sensation of doing something useful without actually moving the story forward by a single word. If you need specific research to write a specific scene, do the minimum required and write the scene. The deep-dive can happen in revision.

Don’t compare your draft to published books. When you’re stuck writing a novel and feeling low about the whole enterprise, the worst possible thing you can do is pick up a book you admire and compare it to your unfinished draft. You are comparing a rough, incomplete, unedited document to a finished, professionally edited, sometimes-decades-in-the-making piece of work. They are not comparable things, and measuring yourself against them will tell you nothing useful.

Don’t wait for inspiration. Inspiration is real. It also arrives reliably for people who are already sitting at the keyboard, and much less reliably for people who are waiting until they feel like writing. The feeling of wanting to write and the act of writing are two different things. One follows the other, but not necessarily in the order you’d expect.

Remember Why You Started

This is the last resort, not the first, because it requires a degree of honesty that’s easier to access when everything else has been tried.

Go back to whatever you had before the first word of the novel — your original notes, the email you sent yourself at midnight when the idea arrived, the scrap of paper with a half-formed premise on it. Read it. Find the emotional reason you wanted to write this particular story. Not the practical reason — “it seemed like a good idea” or “I’ve always wanted to write a novel” — but the specific, personal reason this story needed to exist.

That reason is still there. The murky middle has buried it under self-doubt and plot problems and the accumulated weight of every chapter that didn’t go as planned. However, it hasn’t gone anywhere. Getting back to it, and reminding yourself that the story is worth the difficulty, is sometimes the only thing that matters.

If you’re just getting started and haven’t hit the murky middle yet — lucky you — my guide on how to start writing a novel covers the first-chapter fundamentals that make the middle less likely to collapse in the first place. And if it’s creative projects of the non-novel variety giving you grief, the same stubborn principle applies: the only way out is through, and through is always worth it.

/0 Comments/by

How to Start Writing a Novel: A Practical Guide for Complete Beginners

If you’ve ever wanted to know how to start writing a novel, you’ve probably already done what most aspiring writers do: opened a blank document, stared at it for twenty minutes, typed the word “Chapter” and then gone to make a cup of tea. This is, for the record, a completely normal part of the process. What’s less normal is everything that should happen before you open the document, and that’s what this guide is about.

I’ll be upfront: I have two novels currently in progress, which technically makes me a person who knows how to start writing a novel and considerably less certain about how to finish one. But starting — really starting, with a solid foundation rather than a vague sense of enthusiasm and a half-remembered dream — is something I’ve now done enough times to have opinions about. Here’s what actually works.




Find an Idea Worth Committing To

The most common advice you’ll hear is “write what you know,” which is simultaneously true and completely unhelpful. A more useful framing is: write what you can’t stop thinking about. The idea that keeps coming back to you on the commute, in the shower, in the middle of other people’s conversations. That persistent, slightly annoying creative itch is usually the one worth scratching for 80,000 words.

Ideas don’t have to arrive fully formed. They almost never do. What you’re looking for at the start is a collision: two or three things that don’t obviously go together but produce something interesting when they do. A familiar setting with an unfamiliar problem. A well-worn genre with an unexpected character at its centre. My own comedy-horror novel started as nothing more than a location and a mood — the story came later, one piece at a time.

Once you think you have an idea, test it with a single sentence. Not a marketing blurb or a pitch — just the core of the thing. “A disgraced [X] must [do Y] before [Z happens]” is a good enough template to start with. If you can fill it in, you probably have an idea. If you can’t, you might just have a vibe, and vibes alone won’t carry you to chapter twelve.

Know Your Genre (Even If You Plan to Bend It)

Genre isn’t a cage, it’s a set of reader expectations — and knowing what those expectations are is what gives you the power to meet them, subvert them, or do something interesting somewhere in between. A reader picking up a thriller expects momentum and a ticking clock. A reader picking up literary fiction expects interiority and precise language. Neither is right or wrong, but if you’re writing a thriller and you don’t know that yet, you might spend three chapters on backstory that your readers are silently screaming past.

Spend some time reading in your genre before you start writing in it. Not to copy what’s there, but to understand the shape of it. Stephen King, in his indispensable book On Writing, argues that reading widely is as important as writing regularly — and he’s produced enough novels to have earned the right to say so.

Plotter, Pantser, or Something in Between

This is the great ideological divide of the writing world, and it generates a disproportionate amount of heated debate for what is, ultimately, a question about your personal working style.

A plotter plans extensively before writing. Chapter breakdowns, character sheets, scene-by-scene outlines, the lot. There’s a story structure before a single page of prose exists. The advantage is that you’re much less likely to write yourself into a corner at chapter fifteen with no idea how to get out. The disadvantage is that some writers find the detailed outline kills the creative excitement before they’ve started.

A pantser (from the phrase “writing by the seat of your pants”) starts with an idea, possibly a character, maybe an opening scene, and simply writes to find out what happens. The advantage is that the story feels genuinely discovered rather than executed. The disadvantage is that the middle of the novel can become a swamp of scenes that don’t quite connect, and the dreaded first draft can require substantial structural surgery.

Most working novelists end up somewhere in the middle: a rough outline or some anchor points (beginning, a few key turns, a sense of the ending), but enough flexibility to let the story surprise you along the way. That’s the approach I’d recommend for a first novel. Enough structure to keep you from losing the thread, enough freedom to not feel like you’re colouring inside someone else’s lines.

Build Characters You Actually Understand

Plot is what happens. Character is why it matters. Readers will forgive a lot of structural wobble in a novel if they’re sufficiently invested in the people inside it — and they’ll put down a technically accomplished book in a heartbeat if the characters feel like furniture.

Before you start writing, know your protagonist well enough to predict how they’d react to things that aren’t in the novel. What do they want, and what do they need, and are those two things the same? (They rarely are, and the gap between them is often where the most interesting story lives.) What’s the thing they most want to avoid, and how quickly can you arrange for exactly that to happen? What are they wrong about at the start of the story, and will they know they were wrong by the end?

Secondary characters deserve the same treatment, even if they won’t get as much page time. A character who exists only to deliver information, create obstacles, or be impressed by the protagonist is a character the reader won’t believe in. Give everyone a reason for being in the room that has nothing to do with the protagonist, and the whole thing starts to feel populated rather than staged.

You don’t need a forty-page character bible. A page of notes per major character, honestly answered, is usually enough to get started. The rest you’ll discover as you write them.

One quick test that saves a lot of time later: read a page of your protagonist’s dialogue aloud and cover the dialogue tags. If you can’t tell who’s speaking, your character doesn’t have a distinct voice yet. Every significant character should sound like themselves rather than like the author — and finding that voice is one of the most enjoyable parts of a first draft, because it usually surprises you.

Structure: The Architecture Before the Bricks

Whatever genre you’re writing in, your novel has a shape — and understanding that shape before you start is the difference between knowing where you’re going and hoping you’ll figure it out when you get there.

The three-act structure is the standard starting point for a reason: it’s a description of how most satisfying stories actually work rather than a rigid formula imposed from outside. Act one establishes your world, your character, and the problem. Act two is the long middle — complications, reversals, rising stakes, your character being tested. Act three is the resolution. Roughly speaking, that’s about 25% setup, 50% middle, 25% ending, though these are guidelines rather than measurements.

For a first novel, I’d suggest knowing three things before you write chapter one: where your story begins (not just logistically, but emotionally — what is the status quo that’s about to be disrupted?), at least one major turning point in the middle, and roughly where it ends. You don’t need every beat mapped. You need enough that if you get lost, you have somewhere to navigate back to.

Choose Your Point of View Before You Start

Point of view is one of the most consequential decisions you’ll make about your novel, and it’s one that first-time writers often don’t consciously make at all — they just start writing from wherever feels natural and then wonder why the thing feels slightly off in places.

First person (“I walked into the room”) puts the reader directly inside one character’s head. It’s immediate, intimate, and great for voice-driven stories, but it limits you strictly to what that character knows, sees, and experiences. If something important happens when your narrator isn’t present, you have a logistical problem.

Third person limited (“She walked into the room”) gives you a little more flexibility — you’re narrating from close to one character at a time, following their perspective, but with slightly more narrative distance. This is the most common choice for contemporary commercial fiction, and for good reason: it gives you intimacy and flexibility without the strict constraints of first person.

Third person omniscient (“They walked into the room, unaware of what was waiting”) gives the narrator god-like knowledge of events, characters, and consequences. It can feel old-fashioned in contemporary literary fiction but works very well in certain genres. The danger is “head-hopping” — jumping between different characters’ inner thoughts so rapidly that the reader loses their footing.

Second person (“You walk into the room”) is a choice you should probably not make for your first novel unless you have a very specific and deliberate reason. It’s the kind of thing that works brilliantly in the right hands and reads as a gimmick in everyone else’s.

Pick your point of view intentionally, test it against the first few scenes in your head, and then commit to it. Changing POV halfway through a draft is one of the most time-consuming structural rewrites there is.

Set Up a Writing Routine That Works for Your Actual Life

This is the part where most writing guides suggest waking up at five in the morning to write three thousand words before breakfast. I’ll be honest: I find that advice intensely irritating, because it assumes a lifestyle that the majority of working people with jobs and families and commitments simply don’t have. The trick isn’t to write more than is humanly sustainable. It’s to write consistently with whatever time you actually have.

Five hundred words a day is 182,500 words in a year. That’s two novels, or one very chunky one. Even two hundred and fifty words — less than this section — written daily adds up to a completed first draft in a year if you don’t stop. The goal is not the session count. It’s not stopping.

Set a target you’ll actually hit on a tired Tuesday evening after work. Not the target you’d hit on an ideal Saturday with nothing else to do. Protect that time as much as you can, but don’t punish yourself for missing it — just write the next day instead. Guilt is not a useful creative tool.

How to Start Writing a Novel: Actually Writing Chapter One

Start as late in the story as you can. This is the single most useful tactical piece of advice I can give about the opening chapter of a novel, and it’s the one that new writers most consistently ignore (understandably, because instinct pulls in the opposite direction).

Most first chapters begin too early: the protagonist waking up, the weather, the backstory, the scene-setting that feels necessary but isn’t. Readers don’t need to know everything before something happens. They need something to happen, and they’ll accept the context as it becomes relevant. Start in the middle of something: a conversation, a decision, a moment of change. Give your reader a reason to read sentence two before you’ve finished sentence one.

Your first chapter needs to do several things at once: establish voice, introduce character, set the tone, raise a question the reader wants answered, and hint at the world without turning into a guided tour of it. That’s a lot to ask of a few thousand words. The good news is that you don’t have to get it right the first time. First drafts exist to be fixed, and the opening chapter of most published novels looks almost nothing like its first draft. Write it, move on, and come back to it when you know what the book actually is.

Common Mistakes to Avoid from the Start

A few patterns trip up most first-time novelists, and knowing them in advance is worth more than stumbling into them at chapter six:

  • Waiting until the idea is perfect. It won’t be. Start with the best version of the idea you have now, and let the writing improve it. The perfect idea that never gets written is worth precisely nothing.
  • Editing as you go. A chapter rewritten seventeen times while chapters two through ten don’t exist yet is not progress. Get the draft done first. Fix it second. They’re different jobs, and doing them simultaneously is a good way to finish neither.
  • Telling people about it instead of writing it. This is one I’ve learned the hard way. Talking about a novel releases some of the same creative satisfaction as writing it, with none of the word count. Be very selective about who you discuss it with until you have something on the page worth discussing.
  • Comparing your first draft to other people’s finished books. You are reading their final, edited, professionally polished work. You are writing your first attempt at a chapter you might not keep. They are not comparable things.
  • Stopping when it gets hard. It will get hard. Usually around a third of the way in, when the initial excitement has worn off and the end is still nowhere in sight. This is called the murky middle, and every novelist goes through it. Some days you’ll write scenes you know are wrong just to get through them. That’s fine. Wrong scenes that exist can be fixed. Blank pages can’t. The only way out is through.

One Last Thing

The gap between wanting to write a novel and having written one is, in its entirety, the act of sitting down and doing it on enough consecutive days. There’s no technique that substitutes for that, and no preparation that’s a replacement for the first draft. Read widely, plan enough to get started, and then write — imperfectly, inconsistently some weeks, occasionally brilliantly, more often adequately. The draft you finish is infinitely more useful than the one you’re still perfecting in your head.

If you’re at the funding and legal side of a creative project, I’ve also covered the indie film funding side of things separately — different medium, same fundamental principle: get started, and sort the rest out as you go.

/0 Comments/by

Why I Write About Grimsby (and Apparently Wales) When I Live in Kent

I live in Dover. Have done for a few years now, after nine years in Folkestone before that. Sadie’s here, Reggie the three-legged cat is here, work’s here, half of my adult life is built on this particular stretch of coastline. And yet if you read enough of what I write — the screenplays, the novels — you’d be forgiven for thinking I’d never actually left Grimsby. Or possibly that I’d quietly relocated to Pontypridd without telling anyone, including myself.

Neither is true. I’ve lived in Kent for thirteen years. I’ve spent a grand total of two weeks in Wales, ever. And yet my imagination appears to have filed a permanent change-of-address form with both places without consulting me first.

I find this mildly ridiculous, so naturally I’m writing a blog post about it.




Grimsby: Explainable, At Least

Let’s deal with the sensible one first. A novel called Small Fish, set in a fictionalised version of the town I called Grimhaven, twenty-four chapters deep, seven of them actually written, which for a writer is basically a personal best. A chunk of my zombie novel, End of the Line, is set in Grimsby too, because apparently even the apocalypse has to start somewhere familiar. Ideas that keep wandering back up the A180 whether I’ve invited them to or not.

This one I can explain. I grew up there. The better part of thirty years, give or take, versus just over a decade in Kent — so when my hands go back to Grimsby on the page, that’s not nostalgia, that’s just basic arithmetic. Kent is where I live. Grimsby is apparently where my subconscious still has a season ticket.

Small Fish became Grimhaven rather than literal Grimsby, mostly because I wasn’t trying to write a documentary about a real place that’s continued existing without my permission since I left it. I wanted the feeling of the place — the grit, the football, the very specific grey of a sky over the docks — without having to be accurate about, say, whether a particular chip shop is still open. (It’s probably not. They never are.) End of the Line, on the other hand, just goes ahead and uses the real place, possibly on the basis that if the dead are going to rise anywhere, it might as well be somewhere I know the geography of well enough to write a decent chase scene.

So: Grimsby makes sense. Moving on.

Wales: Does Not Make Sense, At All

Here’s the bit where I lose the plot slightly, so bear with me.

I’ve been to Wales twice in my entire life. A week each time — once in 1992, when I was a child and had approximately zero say in the itinerary, and again in 2025, as a fully grown adult who really should know better by now. Of that second trip, exactly one hour was spent in Pontypridd, the town where my grandmother was born. One hour. I’ve spent longer than that queuing for a gig.

And somehow, that one hour appears to have rewired something. Not the two weeks of general, perfectly pleasant Welsh holidaying. Not the scenery, not the castles, or the Blaenau Festiniog Light Railway, not whatever I had for lunch on either trip, which I genuinely cannot recall. Just the hour. In Pontypridd. Specifically.

I have no rational explanation for this, and I want to be clear that I’ve tried. My grandmother was from there, which is the only actual evidence I’ve got, and on paper it’s not much to build an entire emotional attachment on. People meet their actual living relatives for longer than an hour and feel less moved by it. I’m half convinced my own ancestors are mildly embarrassed on my behalf — “he was here for sixty minutes and now he wants to retire here, bless him.”

Because that’s the other thing. Sadie has mentioned, more than once, that when we eventually retire, Wales might be the answer. And the genuinely baffling part is that I don’t immediately laugh this off. Some small, currently unsupervised part of my brain goes “yeah, alright then,” based entirely on an hour I spent there once, in a town I couldn’t confidently find again without a satnav.

I have, if I’m honest, more feeling toward Wales as a concept than I have toward England, despite having lived in England my entire life and visited Wales for a combined total of roughly two weeks. This is not a sensible ratio. I am aware it is not a sensible ratio. I have made my peace with the fact that my sense of belonging apparently does not consult a spreadsheet before making decisions.

So What’s Actually Going On Here

I think — and this is very much a working theory, subject to change without notice — that creative work, and maybe identity generally, doesn’t care all that much about how long you’ve spent somewhere. It cares about whatever’s load-bearing. Kent is where my actual life happens: the bills, the cat, the theatre, the back pain, the whole functioning-adult operation. Grimsby is the thirty-year foundation underneath it, fully explicable, no mystery required. And Wales is just… in there. Uninvited. Unexplained. Possibly ancestral, possibly just a really good hour, possibly both.

I’ve stopped trying to force a tidy answer out of the Wales thing, mostly because I don’t think there is one, and partly because demanding logic from your own feelings is a famously losing battle. Some places just get under your skin regardless of how much actual time you’ve clocked there, like a song you’ve heard once and now can’t stop humming, except the song is a Welsh valley town and the humming is a vague but persistent desire to live there one day.

So if you ever read something of mine set in a windswept fictional fishing town, you’ll know where that’s from. And if, decades from now, you hear I’ve retired to a small house somewhere near Pontypridd having visited the place for a cumulative total of sixty minutes, please don’t act surprised. Some of us were always going to end up exactly where we couldn’t logically explain.

Does anyone else feel inexplicably tied to somewhere they’ve barely been? Or is it just me, romanticising a single hour like it owes me a mortgage? Let me know in the comments — I could use the company.

If you enjoy what I do, consider supporting me! Every little bit means the world!

Gary grew up in Grimsby, lives in Dover, Kent, and has a worrying amount of feelings about a Welsh town he’s visited once, for sixty minutes.

/0 Comments/by

When the Dream Job Stops Feeling Like a Dream

EDIT: I’ve had a few messages and a phone call from family and friends asking how I am as a result of this blog post. Let me say that I’m talking about filmmaking, not my day job which I thoroughly enjoy.

There was a time when I couldn’t switch my brain off from filmmaking. A shot would catch my eye on a walk and I’d be reverse-engineering the lighting before I’d finished crossing the road. A line of dialogue would land wrong in something I was watching and I’d be rewriting it in my head, half paying attention to whatever I was actually meant to be doing. It wasn’t a job I was working towards. It was just how my brain worked, all the time, whether I wanted it to or not.

I’m not sure exactly when that stopped. That’s part of what makes this hard to write about. There’s no single morning I can point to and say “that’s the day it left.” It was more of a slow leak than a puncture. One day I looked up and the tank was just… lower than I remembered, and I genuinely couldn’t tell you which mile it happened on.

I want to be honest about this, because I think a lot of people carry some version of it quietly, and the quiet is the worst part.




It’s Not One Thing. That’s What Makes It Hard.

If I could point to a single cause, this would almost be an easier post to write. A bad experience, a project that fell apart, a person who knocked the wind out of me. Something with an edge to it, a villain, a clean narrative.

It’s not that. It’s everything, a little bit, all at once.

It’s the back injury and the bone spurs that mean a full day on set, on my feet, lugging kit, isn’t the straightforward thing it used to be. It’s the fatigue that comes with managing a chronic illness I’ll be carrying for the rest of my life, even in remission, even on a “good” day. It’s running front of house at the Tower Theatre, which I genuinely love, but which also takes a great deal of the same creative and organisational energy that filmmaking demands — there’s only so much of that particular fuel in the tank on any given week, and theatre has, fairly, been getting most of it. It’s the writing projects, the wiki work, the music, Sadie’s care, the general business of staying upright. Filmmaking didn’t get pushed out by one thing. It got quietly outcompeted by a dozen things, none of which were its fault, and none of which I particularly regret choosing in the moment.

And then there’s the industry itself, which I won’t pretend hasn’t played its part. The gap between the dream version of filmmaking — the one I had in my head as a younger man, scripts and sets and a clear path forward — and the actual mechanics of trying to make anything happen as an independent creator with limited time and limited budget, is a genuinely difficult gap to keep staring across. I’ve written things I’m proud of. Story bibles, scripts formatted properly, projects with real bones to them. And then they sit there, because the next step requires a kind of relentless self-promotion and networking energy that I simply don’t have spare most weeks. That’s not the industry’s fault either, particularly. It’s just true.

So: a mixture. Health, time, energy, the industry, life. All of it, a little bit, pulling in the same direction.

The Guilt Bit (You Knew There’d Be a Guilt Bit)

Here’s the part I find hardest to admit. There’s a specific kind of guilt that comes with losing interest in the thing you always said was your dream. Other people remember you talking about it. They ask how the latest script is going, with genuine warmth, and you have to decide in that moment whether to give the easy answer or the true one.

The easy answer is “yeah, ticking along.” The true answer is closer to “I haven’t opened that file in three months and I’m not entirely sure why, and when I think about opening it I feel something closer to tired than excited, and I don’t know what to do with that feeling.”

I don’t think losing passion for something makes it less real that you once loved it, or that you might love it again. But it took me a long time to separate “I’m not currently excited about this” from “I’ve failed at the thing that mattered most to me,” and I’m still not sure I’ve fully managed it. Those two sentences feel identical at 11pm. They are not, in fact, the same sentence.

What I’m Not Going to Do

I’m not going to wrap this up with a neat resolution, because I don’t have one. This isn’t the part of the post where I tell you I rediscovered my spark on a long walk and everything’s back to how it was. That would be a nicer ending. It would also not be true, and I promised myself a while ago that this blog is the place I tell the truth rather than the highlight reel.

What I will say is that I don’t think the passion is gone. I think it’s buried under quite a lot of other, currently louder things — pain, fatigue, caring responsibilities, a job I love that takes more than it gives back some weeks, and an industry that asks for energy I don’t reliably have. I don’t think that’s the same as it being dead. Dead feels permanent. This feels more like a fire that’s gone quiet under the ash, still warm somewhere underneath, waiting for slightly better conditions than the ones I’m currently in.

I don’t know when those conditions arrive. Maybe when the back settles into something more manageable. Maybe when there’s a stretch of life that isn’t quite so determined to throw things at me, on the evidence of my last blog post, which — if you’ve read it — you’ll know is a fairly long list. Maybe it just happens gradually, the way it left, and I won’t notice the exact day it comes back either.

For now, I’m trying to let that be okay. Trying not to force a passion that isn’t currently there, because forcing it has never once worked and has only ever made me feel worse about both the not-wanting-to and the guilt about the not-wanting-to. Trying to trust that the bit of me that used to rewrite dialogue on the walk home is still in there somewhere, just resting.

If You’re In This Too

If any of this sounds familiar — if there’s a version of you that used to light up about something and currently just feels tired when you think about it — I don’t have a fix for you. I’m not sure there is one, or at least not a fast one. But I don’t think you’ve failed, and I don’t think it’s gone for good. I think you’re just carrying a lot, and the thing that needs the most energy is, unfairly, often the first thing that gets quietly put down when the energy runs low.

I’d genuinely like to know if this resonates. Has your relationship with a dream changed shape over the years? Did it come back? What did that look like? Drop it in the comments — I think there’s more comfort in knowing this is common than there is in pretending it isn’t happening at all.

Gary is a designer, developer, theatre manager, songwriter, and — somewhere under the ash — a filmmaker, based in Kent.

/0 Comments/by