How not to suffer like Charlie Brooker

As many of us already have already noticed, the universe is a very strange place and, when it is in a capricious mood, it does some very strange things. No sooner am I invited, by the almost intimidatingly lovely Storm Books, to present an eight-week series of classes in journalism as creative writing under the rubric of The Hothouse Project, than one of my own very favourite columnists enters print to sob – in an extremely manly manner, of course – on his readers’ collective shoulder on the subject of the agonies he suffers in the face of that remorselessly rolling steamroller known in the trade as The Dreaded Deadline Doom.

I speak, of course, of The Guardian’s more than estimable Charlie Brooker, a man who will probably take grave exception to being described as a bright light in a dim world in case it detracts from the cultivated grouchiosity of his persona, but he is one such nonetheless. Over the past few years, I have derived intense pleasure, amusement and sometimes even genuine enlightenment from his acrid musings on all things shoddy and wetbrained in the telesphere, and it causes me much sorrow and concern to learn that even a front-rank member of the commentariat such as the Divine Mr B undergoes such pain and angst as part of the practice of his craft.

Needless to say, I sympathise. Like, to the max, dude. Part of the journalising craft is the creation and maintenance of the illusion that the stuff just slips trippingly off the fingertips whilst the author louchely sips a perfect vodka martini, smokes an immaculately-rolled jazz cigar or casually strokes the velvety shoulder of a beautiful member of whichever gender her or she happen to find most personally appealing.

Would ‘t’were so … unfortunately, it isn’t. However, there are a few methods (other than nail-chewing, reading magazines and going down the pub to ‘think’) of dealing with those nasty moments when the mots justes insist on remaining juste out of sight while the clock, as clocks will, insist on continuing to tick and, in another part of the forest, editors’ fingertips drum impatiently on real (as opposed to virtual) desktops whilst they scan pitches and submissions from eager young wannabe’s who, having just completed a stimulating and creative writing course such as The Hothouse Project, are attempting to usurp your position and, metaphorically as well as literally, upend you from your comfy chair.

Charlie’s proposed solution was to get someone big and nasty to threaten you with physical violence and permanent bodily damage if you don’t file on time, but risking life and limb in this manner shouldn’t be necessary in a world which is already, quite frankly, dangerous enough. And, needless to say, all that stuff about ‘Forget those creative writing workshops’ is, in this particular instance, severely counter-productive. (Says the man launching a creative writing workshop in which I most certainly won’t be kneecapping students — well, not until Week 3, anyway.)

Don’t suffer like Charlie. Follow the links, sign up for The Hothouse Project and learn to laugh at the Dreaded Deadline Doom!