An Honest Day In The Life Of A Writer #37

Dan Rebellato

I will say this with every writer I post - what follows is unedited. Try to read without prejudice. Everyone’s circumstances are different and even behind these honest answers will be other factors they may not wish to disclose. But mainly - read in solidarity and hope that we all get a good writing day soon…

Name: Dan Rebellato

Pronouns (If you wish to disclose): He/him

Age (If you wish to disclose): oh my god I’m in my fifties

What sort of writing do you do?: I write for theatre and a lot for radio, written book and lyrics for musicals, occasionally I blog, I’ve written reports on British theatre, done a bit of journalism. I’m also an academic so I write academic essays, chapters, books.

What happens on a ‘good writing day’: So, for me, this depends on what stage in the process I am. I’ve been doing this a while now and I’m no longer intimidated by other people’s routines; I used to see writers saying they religiously do ‘300 words a day’ or something like that and I’d feel a fraud because I don’t do that. But the truth is when I get a commission I often write nothing for a year. I just ponder on it. Occasionally I write a note, though I’ve increasingly noticed that these are either incomprehensible (‘three lizards!’) or banal (‘really stick the ending’) or both (‘Maybe she could be wearing a hat?’) so I’ve come to realise that it’s what’s going on in the back of my mind that’s more useful; the feel of the play, the shape of it, some of the key moments, the emotional weight of it, what it might do with the audience, these all become much more solid and real over that year. So for quite a long time I’m writing in the abstract, like my unconscious is doing some planning and organizing and is testing things out. And because it’s largely unconscious, I wouldn’t know whether it’s a good day or a bad day.

Then in the last months, I will do research, make much more concrete and specific notes and I’m now really focused on the play; because I kind of know the kind of play I want it to be, this is quite focused. Those days are never bad because you’re just reading interesting writing about interesting things and letting your creative brain respond in the moment.

Then there’s a lovely bit where I dump everything I know about the play onto index cards and I put them all down, move them around, try putting cards next to each other (this character with this dialogue fragment with this event; no, this character with that image and that event) and construct the whole play. I used to hate structuring a play; I thought it would somehow take the fun out of it, that it would kill it. Now I think structuring is almost the most creative bit of the process, I love it. And because it’s a problem-solving process, the day can’t really be bad. Even if it teaches me that I’ve not got enough ideas for the third quarter of the play, that’s just good to know and it gives me some focused planning work to do. Structuring is a chunky bit of the process, and I actively look forward to it. That said, I’ve also got pretty good at understanding what I need to know before I start writing and what I absolutely must not know, how to keep the space for discovery and improvisation.

Then comes writing. Actually, that’s not true. Then, even though I am technically ready to start writing, there are always a couple of days when I don’t write. I procrastinate, I waste time. I do everything except writing (tidy my desk, reorganise some books, decide the glasses in the kitchen all need to be washed up again, that sort of thing). I think that what’s probably going on is that the structure, the cards, it’s all just settling in my head and I’m warming up to write, limbering up to that mad dash.

And then I write. And it pretty much always flows because I’ve generally sorted out any leaves on the line that could derail the writing. I’m freed to just follow the characters, discover the language, be in the moment, improvise. And then it’s remarkably quick. I’m almost embarrassed to say how quick. In that phase I’m surprised if I don’t write 15 minutes of the play in a day, sometimes more. But structuring is the key, because completely opposite to what I once thought, it frees me to be intense and spontaneous and creative. I love that phase too.

I used to write from late afternoon to the early morning, but when we had a kid my schedule adjusted. I used to think I wasn’t a morning person and was surprised to discover I am. I like how plastic human beings are, how changeable, how we can choose to make ourselves different. I often get up at 6am, get some emails out the way for an hour or so, shower, then get our boy up, make him breakfast, read him Asterix, chat with him, take him to school. That’s the most gorgeous way to start a day. And then I faff about for a bit, but get started around 10 and write all day, giving myself breaks and treats, sometimes go for a walk, go to Tesco, just stuff to break up the day, get a bit of perspective.

What happens on a ‘bad writing day’: It’s rare that there’s a bad writing day. No, that’s silly, of course there are, but I’ve persuaded myself – and I think I stand by it – that a bad writing day is still a writing day and that if I’m finding the writing difficult it’s because there’s a problem and I need to sort that out, which is a discovery in a way.

But okay there are some days when I find it very hard to get started, where other things are competing for my attention, where I’m just lazy or unfocused. Having done this for 30+ years, though, I tell myself that this is also useful information; I’m not quite ready to write. What makes that a properly bad writing day is if the deadline is looming (or loomed a couple of days ago) because it’s easy to get into what is for me the single most unproductive frame of mind: panic.

What are the things that can get in the way of you writing?: Panic is extraordinarily unhelpful and usually only happens if I suddenly realise I don’t have enough time to do what I need. Panic is a spiral because as a frame of mind it shuts down my ability to be creative and so I need even more unavailable time which increases the panic and so on. That’s probably also why I spend so much time structuring, so I don’t suddenly hit a road block that unravels everything.

I guess something that can get in the way of writing is thinking too far ahead to how people might react to the play, where it might get on, who might be in it, whether I will be universally acclaimed as having written The Great Play of the Twenty-First Century^TM. All that is distracting and irrelevant to writing. I have a maybe slightly pretentious phrase I use to describe the writing process, but it kind of does express how it feels, at least to me. In the centre of the idea is a thin seam of silver chaos and you have to mine that seam. I was thinking the other day about a monologue in which a character starts as a woman and slowly becomes a man but without saying so explicitly. Immediately I knew there’s a creative seam in there – and it’s got an incredible energy to it, and it feels silvery, shimmering – and I just need to pursue that silver seam, who this person is, what that might feel like, how that might do interesting things with language, how it changes the room, feeling out the emotion of it, grabbing what is creative in the idea. But what people might say about it – even what it means – that’s none of my business.

Otherwise, I’m probably unusual in that I have a day job that I am just as committed to as I am to the writing. Teaching in a University is so rewarding and students are just such amazing people to work with, to talk to, to support, spend time with, that I never think that this sort of work gets in the way of writing, any more than I think writing gets in the way of my teaching. There’s relentless admin, but I guess there is in all our lives. I have sometimes used the ‘Freedom’ that blocks your internet connection, but it doesn’t quite work for me, because I feel slightly more horrified after the hour is over to see all the emails cascading in than if I notice them trickle in one by one.

When we had our son, that was a shock, but only because it forced a change of routine. I’ve never believed in that ‘pram in the hall’ being the enemy of art bullshit. Our son is the most radiantly wonderful thing in my life and I get unbelievable joy from being with him which incidentally can power my writing too.

In a way I’d say nothing gets in the way of writing because it all feeds it. It’s all writing.

Oh wait, no, the cold. When it’s too cold in our flat, I can’t write.

What are the things that help you write?: I need a deadline. Partly that’s about being busy and having lots of competing obligations. I like the idea of writing something entirely on spec but it’s hard to prioritise that enough to make it happen. For the last 25 years I’ve pretty much only worked to commission or at least with the certain knowledge someone is waiting for what I come up with.

I have to type; I couldn’t imagine hand-writing a play. My thinking and typing happen at complementary speeds, but writing by hand would ruin the rhythm, so I need a keyboard and screen.

If my desk is clear my mind feels clear. My desk is rarely clear though and I still muddle through. Actually, I used to have all the usual writer’s superstitions about the time of day that I thought I wrote best, some rituals before writing, stuff like that. I’ve gradually discovered that none of those things are important; I prefer to write at home but I can write happily on trains, in coffee shops, at work, and it doesn’t matter what time of day. Five minutes snatched writing is still five minutes writing.

I can’t have music on because that seems aggressively to occupy a bit of my brain I need for writing, but I don’t need silence, in fact don’t really like silence. I’ve sometimes written in the back of a rehearsal and that’s great. Sometimes when I write at homeI can hear our nine-year-old in the front room laughing his head off at some show he’s watching on tv and that’s a blissful soundtrack for writing.

A cup of tea is heaven’s own writer-fuel.

What do you do when you’re stuck and struggling to write?: I write anyway. What’s the worst that can happen? I once had an experience of a kind of writer’s block: I was writing but everything seemed like it was coming out badly – crude, banal, clumsy. But I was on a deadline and the scene had to be in my producer’s inbox the next morning. So I carried on anyway, hating it but I wrote a scene and went miserably to bed. Next morning I checked it and it was... fine. Sometimes it’s the cop in the head that’s the problem, not your fingers. And anyway, if you’ve got something you can always improve it; if you’ve got nothing, there’s nothing to improve. Get it out, then get it good.

If you could go and tell a younger you one thing what would it be?: Look for the thin seam of silver chaos and ignore everything else.

Which writer’s day in the life would you love to read about?: Caryl Churchill, Anton Chekhov.

Dan’s new play about PG Wodehouse’s wartime broadcasts is called Plum in Prison and is on BBC Radio 4, 23 December 2025, 2.15pm. Listen here

Dan’s how-to guide to writing a play is called Playwriting: A Backstage Guide. You can purchase it here