Spontaneous and Unscripted by Nikki Bywater

On a good day...

Well today was one of those lucky days… You know those beautiful, amazing and fantastic days when you write and write and write? Those days when you work through lunch and dinner and lose yourself entirely in your work. That you escape and find yourself deep in the depths of your imagination. Living in the land of make believe and finding answers and solutions to every possibility, to create a masterpiece of grouping the right words and only dropping the occasional typo for artistic affect.

When you find yourself at the crossroad between fact and fiction and think to yourself this is going remarkably well and my editor will be pleased. I am going to hit that deadline after all. You whiz through the cravings for coffee and the need to bathe and dress. Yes last nights washing up needs doing and the washer needs loading, but no, we cannot stop can we? We are addicts just a few thousand more words before bed…

Next thing you know it's 3am and you are still going fast… Now you are thinking of the reviews. How many can we collect? Will they be good? And we have not even thought of the ending and the re-writes. For today my writers nothing will stop us… We are an unstoppable writing machine…

On a bad day…

12pm and we are still not at our desks… Just one more cup of coffee should do it…. Then we are at our desks staring at our screens… When not looking out of the window or getting distracted by day time television and chatting with the neighbours on social media... Playing with our storyboarding and looking busy. Sharpening pencils, that do not need any more attention…. Scribbling on our notepads. Swinging on our chairs… Calling friends… Avoiding taking important writing telephone calls… Fretting about our deadlines… Eating cheese on toast and spaghetti hoops. Banging our heads on our keyboards… Looking holding out for that inspiration and for the words to rain down on us from a great height and fill our heads and move our fingers from tapping our keyboards in frustration, to banging words out with our keys…

Next thing you know it's 3 am and you have fallen asleep in a pool of dribble on your keyboard and all that is on your screen is iwwdhowjdwpjdddddddwdoqdwoiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii fffffffffffksoksororoeoroeokfckckkkkkkkkkkkkko from where your head hit the keys. You pick your self up and dust yourself down… Who knows what tomorrow may bring.