“My inhability to start in time is crippling. Any social event - people’s birthdays, drinks with friends, family dos, anything - gets swept aside and cancelled, because there’s this voice inside my head screaming, “I HAVEN’T STARTED WRITING!” I wake up, shower, have a coffee, watch telly, go to town, buy some food, putter about, buy a magazine, come home, e-mail, make phone calls, watch more telly, and it goes on and on and on until I go to bed again, and a whole day’s gone. It’s just vanished. Every single minute of day, every single sodding minute, is labelled with this depressing, lifeless, dull thought: I’m not writing. I make the time vanish. I don’t know why I do this. I even set myself little targets. At 10am, I think, I’ll start at noon. At noon, I think, I’ll make it 4pm. At 4 pm, I think, too late now, I’ll wait for tonight and work till late. And then I use TV programmes as crutches - ooh, must watch this, must watch that - and then it’s 10pm and I think, well, start at midnight, that’s a good time. A good time?! A nice round number! At midnight, I despair and reckon it’s too late, and stay up despairing. I’ll stay that way till 2 or 3am, and then go to bed in a tight knot of frustration. The next day, the same thing. Weeks can pass like that. I’m wondering if describing it to you might break the cycle. Probably not.”
—Russell T. Davies, The Writer’s Tale
