Well so could anyone (21/12/17)

Am I more influenced by film? Well, yeah. If I can write an 'A Matter Of Life and Death', an 'It's a Wonderful Life', a 'Field of Dreams' or a 'Godfather' then I'll be a happy man.

If I can write something with the emotional stillness of Mad Men, if I can write something where nothing happens but it happens beautifully, then I've achieved something.

If I can take the flavour of the novels of Auster, Irving, Chabon, Steinbeck and put them into something new, if I can achieve the resonance of 'Stoner' on stage, then I'm adding something.

But really. honestly, truly, the work I aspire to exists in music, exists in the ability to tell short stories with economy, exists in the tales of the ordinary moment.

For those who saw 'Venus Rising', for those who will see it next June when we revive it; as much as I used the end of that as a chance to pay homage/tip a nod to/blatantly steal from Fitzgerald's Gatsby (I made it really bloody obvious to anybody who's ever read it and I can write you a thousand words on why I did it if you like), what I aspire to is the lyric.

And, for tonight's purposes, I aspire to two very specific lyrics.

(Currently listening to 'A Rainy Night In Soho' - perfection.)

The first lyric I aspire to goes like this:

"'Kathy, I'm lost',  I said, though I knew she was sleeping, "I'm empty and aching and I don't know why." (Simon & Garfunkel's 'America' for those who don't know, and there may be some yet to be introduced to that wonder.)

There's a world in that lyric, there's a man who's falling apart and needs to tell his lover how he feels but can only confess when he knows that she won't be able to hear. There's loneliness and confusion and emptiness and the true moment of existential angst. It's perfect and it's twenty words long. To be able to write something that deep and be that concise? That's a rare beauty.

And the other lyric? The other piece of writing that I aspire to?

"I could have been someone. Well so could anyone."

The delusion that you could have been better, the idea that you were special and set for better things, the puncturing of that idea and the idea that there was always the chance for anybody to have had a better life than they had, that fortune falls where it falls and it really means nothing; you might have made the right choices, might have made the wrong, might have made no choices at all; you might have been someone. But so could anyone. Hope and despair perfectly put in place in nine words.

So, my idea of perfect writing, everything I aspire to, consists of trying to equal the impact of twenty-nine words. So far I have eight plays, a football book, a currently unpublished novel and about 400 of these 'things that I do' trying to equal those twenty-nine words. I'll let you know when I get there.

And that's the kind of thing I think about at midnight.