I’m finishing a television script. It’s not a form I’m comfortably familiar with: I’ve only written a couple, and they were a long time ago. I’m at that point where I’m saying to myself in one moment, “hey, page 52, nearly there,” and, in the next, “oh, shit, I’m on page 52 and I still have to write scenes X, Y and Z and they’re kind of long.” A tv script (hour-lomg drama) needs to come in around sixty pages. So you start to do basic woodworking. Shaving off words that are sitting on lines on their own at the end of paragraphs, hunting for more economical ways to say things, all just to buy back space for the lines you haven’t written yet. Carving off the bits that are sticking out. If there’s one thing that makes me want to go back to writing prose, it’s having to do this kind of meatball surgery on bits of myself. Not least because it makes me painfully aware of the bad and lazy writing I’ve committed to this point. It’s a spiral of misery. I used to wonder why all the tv writers I saw in interviews seemed to be either dolorously grim or faintly demented. It’s because they’re sitting there cutting their own fingers off every bloody day.