Found this older fragment about process – which I wrote when we were working on the new Forced Entertainment performance earlier this year. It kind of fits with what I wrote about working on the book recently.. so thought it good to include here.

(Makes me think too about the way that I’m proably constantly having and re-having the same or similar thoughts, which can seem just the same amount of work/inspiration/suprise second time around!).
*

Thinking about.. the process, whilst in conversation, or alone, of mentally ‘running’ imaginary or speculative bits of the show to see if they work.
Often this is in relation to transitions or sequences – trying to figure out if a certain way of getting from the ‘gameshow material’ out of the ‘march of time’ is plausible… via an interview between Terry and Bruno. So mentally you’re sat there and in the stage of your head you’re picturing the end of the ‘march of time’ and you’re thinking ‘so he does that and she says that and then that happens and so and so says such and such and then, moving to the transition x says y and then a moves to b and then…’
Constructing these very specific (if hazy on inspection) ‘versions’ and all the time, as well as the detail, trying to see if it ‘feels right’. What’s amazing to me is how knackering a long day of talking is, especially if you’re doing a lot of this (which you could call screening of mental rushes) it reminds me so much of computers faced with the task of rendering complex moving scenes… Your brain is really working. And it puts you in a very weird relation to the world too – because all the time you are somewhere (in a room, in the studio, sat in a café) but you’re also largely somewhere else. In this unfolding head-space which you’re conjuring, making stuff happen with this cast of figures you have to shift and shunt around the stage. Very weird.
(Also – I recognise some of this in the sense that it is *like* writing… The same split beween the here of the context and the elsewhere of the fiction you’re creating. But at least in writing (most of the time) there is an object that you’re working with (language) and a computer or a pen… whereas this part of our process (the imagining and speculating about possible scenes, possible sequences, possible transitions) can be so very virtual – ie no way to actualise without assembling the whole group and heading into the studio…
In between the actual run throughs there’s a lot of this in these days – people sat in conversation but mentally running stuff in their heads, ‘just running that in my head’…