Waiting In Line

I suppose it might have helped if I had watched Breakfast News this morning before going in to Central London. Then again, the only real inconvenience was the bloody tourists standing around and gawping and generally getting in the way. And they do that anyway.

If I had stayed here it meant having to deal with finding space in the filing cabinets for all the notes and liberally defaced earlier drafts of the script.

The week before last, sorting through that stack of material to check if there were any notes I’d missed, I came across the list of the dozen-plus story ideas we’ve had kicking around. Each obviously had its own brief description. Not all of them had a title yet. An hour after, with the pages pushed to the edge of the desk, a title for one came to me. It was short and sweet. It had a beautiful ambiguity to it that worked just perfectly.

Walking down into the Underground station ticket hall this afternoon, the perfect opening line for one of the other scripts popped in my head. The inconvenience I could have done without. I had to roll it around and around, through the ticket barriers, down the escalators until I was on the platform. Just before a train screamed in from the tunnel, I managed to dig out a pen and hurriedly scribbled it down across the back page of my newspaper.

It was a winner. One line of dialogue that will resonate throughout the entire story. It encapsulates everything the drama is about. Of course there’s no time to work on them because there’s other stuff on my plate, but they’re there, waiting. That’s the thing, they’re always waiting.