Why I Write: So I'll be able to write my other ideas

I'm working on three scripts: The Gap, Run, and Utopia. I've been working on these ideas for over a year now (going on two years in one case), and still haven't got a proper first draft of any of them.

But I absolutely need to start finishing them! Because bubbling under and starting to sing to me are:

• Two seasons of a TV series I've been tentatively calling The Kingdoms
• An uncompleted Katherine Mansfield script
• A teenage horror movie called The Devil You Know
• An untitled horror project about the great advantage of being able to die.
• An abandoned fictional future documentary called Only Human, which is now re-surfacing after seeing the wonderful Guy Maddin 'documentary' My Winnipeg.

Arggh! Too much!

Why I Write: To find out why I'm driven to write this script

I'm currently working on two scripts - The Gap and Utopia, while I let a third script, Run, settle for a while after having written a very rough draft.

All three scripts are in approximately the same place - the process of finding out why I feel driven to write them.

There is something in all three of them that I cannot let go of. I'm going to call this something the nugget.

In the process of finding out what the nugget is, I will let go of vast amounts of extraneous ideas which surround the nugget. And I don't know what this extraneous dirt is and what the nugget is until I go through this process.

Should the protagonist in Run be a man? Turns out she's definitely a woman. Old or young? Young, but not too young. Is her love interest a man then? No, turns out she's gay.

Through feeling my way through all these choices, I somehow get closer and closer to the nugget that is driving me to write the script. Maybe the nugget is a question. Maybe it's an emotion. Maybe the nugget doesn't sit still. Can I trust it's worthwhile? I don't know, but it keeps on gleaming. And it promises answers.

On reflection that doesn't sound very trustworthy.