Gorracula: Stage 4 (Doctor Who Carries Me Through)

List of assests September 2011:
1. Gorracula A Tale of Science 1st full scene.
2. Broad narrative outline and stacks of character notes.
3. Access at local library to four seasons of recent Doctor Who
4. Time

I sat alternating between writing bursts and Doctor Who breaks for the space of a month or so. At first it went slowly. The watch breaks were long and the writing bursts brief. I was not watching it all in order. The library had the seasons split into two-disc packs and very rarely would a full season be checked in at the same time.

So I watched Doctor Who completely out of order. A batch from season one, followed by a few from season three. Then a swing around to four and then back to one. That's how it unfolded for the most of September and it worked as an invigorating diversion that seemed to keep the creative side of my brain energised.

I think the first episodes I saw during that time were the Daleks in Manhattan story arc. I had a rudimentary understanding of the series having seen episodes like Blink and The Lodger and being dropped into stories without complete comprehension is a good way to make the universe of the story seem incredibly vast. You see what's happening and don't know why but look forward to finding the answers. Perhaps as an outgrowth of having to watch things in this way I have come to enjoy the feeling of discovery as all the things you've already seen begin to make more and more sense in the course of watching.

Then finally I got my hands on a complete season. I still had yet to see any of them fully through. I Had most of series one under my belt and then got all of series two in hand having not yet seen any of it.  This may all seem like a digression away from the main narrative of the writing of Gorracula but, at least in its screenplay form, Gorracula is elemtally tied to my experience of watching Doctor Who.

Over the course of watching series two, in the accustomed "Write-watch-write-watch-write" pattern, I banged out two-thirds of the screenplay in about two and a half weeks. I felt like I was writing at a run, ideas formed and materialized on the page alarmingly fast and the time I spent at writing without getting fatigued greatly increased. The energy of creativity and the depth of chemistry and emotion I experienced from that span of episodes was completely inspiring.

This story would mean a lot more if anything had ever come of that screenplay, you know the sort of reminiscence that plays well on the DVD extras, but the fact remains that Doctor Who Series 2, the Rose and 10th doctor arc, powered me like an outboard motor through the process of writing.

I haven't watched it since, waiting for the memory of it to grow dim enough to maybe work like that again.

Read PT 5.