Hashtag I am writing Hashtag WIP

I've been attempting to write. On my stupid computer with the sensitive "n" key, that produces multiple n's in any word with an n, unless that n is a capital N, in which it doesn't produce an   at all. 

That's annoying, but it's not half as annoying as being unable to write. After chatting to my producer on Friday, I'm sketching out an alternative ending for a screenplay, something designed to "flip the script" and leave the cinema audience reeling. Unfortunately, I've completely forgotten how to write convincing dialogue. It's like the end sequence of an Agatha Christie, where Poirot has gathered the oddly available and obliging murder suspects into the drawing room. But I don't have a Poirot: my heroine has to do all her own exposition. She's telling the baddie - in a role reversal - exactly how she did it. I'm having to excise "aha"s and "You little fool"s all over the shop. There may be haughty laughter. It's abysmal. 

I'm trying for what I call "The Devil's Haircut", named for the video of that Beck song which, if you recall, featured an end sequence where a rostrum camera focused on background details in the frame, exposing an alternative narrative that had been there all along. Father Ted did something similar in the Chris the Sheep episode. These are my reference points - what century is this again? That's the plan at any rate. I'm trying to do it it subtly, without the need for flashbacks, but so far the dialogue is anything but subtle. I don't want to lose all the sympathy the audience has built for the character for the previous hour and a half either - it's quite the switcheroo. 

Earlier, on my way to the shop to buy a cake for Susan,  I had an idea for a short story. Called Pornokrates, its about a man who lives in a world entirely governed by the logic of pornography. And it's a living hell. Nothing works - every time you call a plumber round he just gets felated and the toilet remains blocked. Secretaries never complete dictation, and it's not worth ordering a pizza at all. Society is in total disarray as no maintenance is done, there is no food in the shops, and local government is a literal bureaucratic daisy chain. There would be rioting in the streets if people could pull themselves out of endless priapic tailspin. I have no idea where I'm going with this. I had in my mind a spoof of 1984, with the protagonist shouting "Do it to Julia", at the moment of crisis. 

But really? Is there anything there? I reverse engineer stories out of puns and material that would be thin as a Saturday Night Live sketch. I don't think this is how other writers go about writing. My process is to take something ostensibly terrible and dress it up as something good. I open it up, stretch the idea in multiple directions, see what the story means to the characters and what they want from it. I try to add light and shade, humour and melancholy. It will hopefully have a point. It's a process of gilding the Christmas cracker joke. I doubt very much whether this is how other writers do it. I have no idea how it's supposed to be done. I'm not even sure there is a proscribed way - though there are books, seminars, and courses that will teach you how to do it properly. Imagine doing it properly though...what would that be like? 

I waded into writing thinking I was brilliant. I'm a funny guy, I have cool ideas. My Facebook updates are pretty sharp. How hard can a novel be? It's just 6,000 longish status updates. I'm fairly certain someone wrote a novel comprised of pretend status updates. That's the sort of thing that would happen. But the process of writing is the process of wanting to get better at it, just as the process of learning is an acceptance of ignorance. I cringe at some of my earliest stories. They're technically horrible. I couldn't really construct a sentence. I couldn't punctuate. The writing was flabbily passive, and the similes I was so proud of, tortuous.  Equally, I really liked the stories. "The Rum Barbers" is archetypal Higgins: a bad pun, a south London setting, comedy back 'n' forth, sympathetic magic and a violent death. I think it's good, but I wouldn't write it now, and I worry why I wouldn't. Have the silly ideas stopped coming? 

I did an experiment. I submitted two stories to two publications. One story was very old - I had to rewrite it to winnow out a plague of semi-colons, plus myriad other tics and coughs, but it was structurally the same and most of the language was the same as when I'd written it. I also submitted the last story I had written. Both were published. And reading them back to back it's hard to see much distance between them. They're both palpably by the same hand. It's as if the five years of progress between them is non-existent. I haven't lost my mojo. And I haven't significantly improved or refined that mojo either. 

But at least they were published. Yay.