In the country (part two)

So the first draft of The Spare Room is complete. I sent it last night to my director, Lu Kemp, and she will give me notes today.

The reason for the swift turn around is that this is a rapid response play. I was commissioned to write this a week before Christmas and we record it on February 2. That's roughly 6 weeks to research, write and redraft. It's the same length as an ordinary Afternoon Play (45m) for Radio 4 but its written in response to a current event.

As I've said before I love writing quickly. It feels the most honest and fun way to write. The tricky bit is to get it right.

I have two days left in the beautiful countryside of Dumfries and Galloway. I will have to make the most of it.

In the country

Retreat (noun) 5. A place of privacy; a place affording peace and quiet.

I have gone into the countryside to finish a play. I’ve had a manic few first weeks of the year (plus Christmas was pretty darn busy) so I decided to take myself off to a cottage on the Dumfries and Galloway coast. It’s quite an intense piece and I felt like I needed to immerse myself in it.

(I would add a picture here but it’s been raining all day so just imagine some wet, bare trees and fields and the sea. It’s pretty gloomy too).

I usually like writing in a noisy place. I write on my sofa in my living room, with a bustling Glasgow street beyond the thin, single-glazed window. I write in cafes. I write in libraries (yes libraries are noisy now. I don’t know when that changed but it has. My local library is insane). I have an office but that is shared so there are always lots of folk to talk to. Plays are about the world and people living in the world. So I like to be surrounded by it when I’m writing.

But sometimes the noise gets too much. I have something like four or five projects on the go at the moment and a very limited time in which to complete them. Above all else I need to think.

In 2006 – before I moved to Glasgow – I lived in a cottage on the Kent-Sussex border, close to where I was born. It was a converted stable that was rented out as holiday cottages. It had a tiny bedroom, a tiny living room, a kitchen and a shower. It was on a small farm and I could hear cows snoring and cocks crowing. Once I woke to find a large deer, looking in through my bedroom window. I loved it.

That was also the year when I became a ‘proper’ playwright. I had my first commission for both theatre and radio. But it wasn’t the commissions that made me ‘proper’.

What I had never realised, what no-one had ever really explained to me, was that being a writer you had to be alone. Nobody could do it for you. There wasn’t someone to sit with you and motivate you or do your research or type. Before I had always written in my spare time. After school or uni, late at night at home, while I was working in KFC or in the Futon Shop. In the cottage – all by myself – I was suddenly confronted by a blank page and nothing else.

The country is a brilliant place to think. The quiet and the landscape and the big skies allow me to actually hear your own thoughts. In the city there is so much to distract your attention – wonderful and brilliant things often but still things – that you never get to hear what you brain is telling you.

I love living in the city. I can’t imagine living anywhere else. But I feel like I learnt to be a playwright in the country. In my tiny cottage, I had nowhere else to go except my desk. The silence forced me to think and to put those thoughts down on paper. And, best of all, I learned to enjoy it.

I’m in the country for a week. I'll let you know how it goes.