Chronic pain
Books: Wild Blue Yonder, The Writer’s Tale: The Final Chapter
TV: Doctor Who Series 1
Hello, the Internet! This has been a week.
I mentioned last time that my back pain was a bit worse than usual. I was in fact putting it mildly – this was some of the worst pain I’ve had in the last year. BUT. I went to my physiotherapist, who pointed out that this kind of sudden and intense pain likely had nothing to do with sedentary work, and everything to do with water deprivation.
And she was right! Since I got back, I’d been working and going into hyperfocus for long periods of time. I assumed this had caused my pain because I hadn’t been moving enough, but in fact, my water intake had gone down from 3-4 litres a day to 1 litre a day without my realising it.
So after my consultation, I drank a lot (a lot) of water to compensate, and what do you know, the pain immediately receded. Over the last few days, I’m now down to very little pain, and hopefully that’ll go away in the coming week as well.
That got me thinking about pain, though. Specifically, chronic pain. I’ve now been in some kind of physical pain or another for more than three years. It took me two years to recover from my hip injury (which still comes back on rare occasions), only to suffer from shifting back pain for the last year.
I’ve had days of zero pain, but after the first few of those, I realised that those were temporary reprieves rather than actual healing. And each breather reminds you of what life could feel like. That your body can feel light and airy, your brain can feel clear, you can simply do things without having to first check if you can.
Because when you’re in pain, your body is in a state of shock all the time. Your brain is fuzzy, everything is slow. You have to plan small movements before making them just in case they cause pain. You have to think about what you can do today based on what it might do to you tomorrow. And the slowness of healing – that’s incredibly frustrating. Not knowing when you’ll feel better, and if you do, how long it’ll last.
I’m privileged in every aspect of this. I’ve done well enough in life that I could afford to cut down on work when I needed to. There are so many who can’t. I live in a country where high-quality physiotherapy costs $5 per session. I can consult an orthopaedic doctor whenever I like without having to go through a GP first. My recovery has been slow and frustrating, but – here’s the key point – I am very much recovering.
There are so many people for whom none of this is true. People who might never recover, who can’t afford to take the time off from the work that is physically damaging them, who can’t afford treatment or medication.
I always thought I was an empathetic person, and that I would take people at their word when they said they were suffering. But it was only when I began to have chronic pain that I truly felt what it must be like to live with pain all the time, how debilitating it could be, and how frustrating it is to have to adjust your entire life to your pain, and then have people trivialise it.
I have incredibly sympathetic clients, and have been supported in all my professional decisions, but many are not as lucky. Say you’re a freelancer and you can’t work one week – you can have the best clients, but that’s still a week where you didn’t earn anything. People will be understanding if you can’t do something, but you also won’t get paid for it. So you have to compromise on your body to earn, or on your financial status to take care of yourself.
That’s a horrible position for anyone to be in. And so many people have to live like that all the time – constantly compromising on the quality of their lives in order to simply live. We could, of course, make the situation better with universal healthcare and universal basic income, but that can’t be a thing because *checks notes* apparently lazy people don’t deserve to eat food. Or something.
Work-wise, I wrapped up w0rldtr33 #8 and True Weird #10 last week, which also saw the releases of Hellblazer: Dead in America #1 – the continuation of Si Spurrier, Aaron Campbell, Jordie Bellaire and my run on Hellblazer from a couple of years ago.
I’ve only got one link for you this week. Monday the 22nd was a dark day for India – the temple built at the site of the Babri Masjid demolition was consecrated. As saddening as the event itself is the fact that the majority of the country seems to celebrating it and everything it implies for the diminishingly secular, diverse nature of India. I have no idea what this means for the future of my country, but I have some ideas based on history, and it doesn’t look good.
In 1991, a year before the demolition of the mosque, documentarian Anand Patwardhan made a film about the people behind the Ram Janmabhumi movement called Ram Ke Naam (In the Name of God). It was a prophetic work, and it remains as relevant today as it was more than thirty years ago, and it is available to watch for free on YouTube.
Wild Blue Yonder was a largely unremarkable novelisation of the enjoyable second special for Doctor Who’s 60th Anniversary. I did like the choice to title the chapters after the countdown in the episode. One might quibble whether that gives the game away, but I’m not sure there’s anyone reading these novelisations who hasn’t watched the original episode.
I have two novelisations left to read – The Giggle and The Church on Ruby Road. I might skip one or both, though, because I started reading these based on how much I liked Rose and The Day of the Doctor, and these new ones, not having been adapted by the original writer, are not the same thing at all.
I also reread Russell T. Davies and Benjamin Cook’s marvellous The Writer’s Tale: The Final Chapter. This book collects the email correspondence between Davies and Cook during the making of Doctor Who Series 4 and the specials that came after. It’s an updated version of The Writer’s Tale, which I believe only went up to the end of Series 4.1
I first read this while Peter Capaldi was still the Doctor, and coming back to it now, I respect RTD far more for the kind of work he put into the show than I did back then (more on this below).
I feel this would be useful for most budding writers – far more useful than those crappy structure books – because it talks about the actual work that goes into storytelling, with little of the usual glamorising that writing books tend to do. The way you have to love your characters and let them live in your head, the way you have to figure out how the story needs to be told rather than bash it into a foreign shape, the way sometimes it’s just putting words after other words trusting that you’ll come up with something better later, and the way that you always have to let go at some point, despite always striving for perfection.
I’ve mentioned before that people find watching The Bear stressful, and somehow I don’t feel it, though I see what they mean. This, I can tell you, is my Bear. It reminds me what being a full-time writer was like for me – the constant stress of whether what you’re doing is good, the interminable cigarette-smoking that comes with it, the looming deadlines that you hate, but that you need just as much, the superstitious feeling that if you change your process even a little, you might just lose it, the dread of having to come up with something new on demand when your brain is telling you it’s got nothing. I spent so many sleepless night last fretting over stories and then waiting for the cigarette shop to open so I could have a smoke which might just crack it (shit, I should’ve put that in my smoking post).
Reading this book, I see how happy being freed from some of those things has made me. I think if I had remained a full-time writer, I’d be just as alienated from my friends and family as RTD often seems to be, because writing fills up so much of your head there’s very little space left for anyone else. Or perhaps I wouldn’t. Who knows. But having quit and then come back to writing on my own terms has made me approach writing in a much healthier way, and I’m glad about that.
Coming back, though, The Writer’s Tale manages to talk about all those things with a candour you rarely see in books like this. I’m sure some sensitive material was edited out, but even assuming that, we get to see so much about what writing is really like without any desire to make RTD “look good”, whatever that might mean in this context. He comes across as a generally decent person (I’m sure Christopher Eccleston would, very reasonably, disagree), but obsessed with writing to a fault, an occasionally tyrannical boss, and someone who’s happy to lean on people if it makes his work look good.
And if you’re a Doctor Who fan, you get all of that, plus a bunch of lovely drawings from RTD, who used to be a cartoonist in another life, and an inside track on all the ways Doctor Who might have gone in those years, if not for things like actor availability, schedules, budgets, conflicts with other tv shows and so many other such mundane but important things.
This week, I finished rewatching Doctor Who Series 1 – the Christopher Eccleston season.
I was doing this in aid of a writing project, but also because I recently read TARDIS Eruditorum Volume 8, which includes essays on the Eccleston season.
The first time I watched it, in 2007-2008, I found it enjoyable but ramshackle. RTD’s whole thing is emotional storytelling over science fiction logic, and I was not having it. So I enjoyed episodes like “Dalek” and “The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances”, but found a lot of the other plots too hand-wavey.
This time, I knew what RTD was going for, especially since I’d read a ton of his own thoughts on how he wrote Who, and I’ve watched other drama shows he’s written, where you can see his dramedy scripting approach and what matters to him when it comes to character. Plus, now I know that RTD’s approach to structure is far more internal than external, which means the shape of each story will be strong, but details might be off because they’re not put together like a jigsaw.
Given all of that, I nevertheless tried to watch this season imagining myself to be someone who knew nothing about Doctor Who and was watching for the first time. And oh, it’s so, so clever.
First, there’s “Rose”, regarding which you should definitely read El’s Eruditorum essay. “Rose” tells you what this show is about – one tv channel bursting into another and subsuming it. You don’t need to know any of the mythology2 – you’ll be guided on that. What you should know is how to watch tv.
From there, each episode expands on what the show can do – distant future, distant past, back to present day for first contact, then the Daleks and so on, all filtered through television – soap opera, prestige historical drama, American action tv, reality television. Plus, every episode of the season takes place on or near Earth – RTD is keeping some cards up his sleeve for the future.
Simultaneously, the season slowly reveals who the Doctor is, focusing on things that are emotionally important. So no jumping into Time Lords and Gallifrey and this being his ninth incarnation and so on (after all, the regeneration will be this season’s final trick). Instead, we get the fact that he’s the last of his kind, that his planet was destroyed in a Great War, and that he was the one who doomed his own people. I couldn’t even tell you if Gallifrey was mentioned in this season or not.
And all of this post-Buffy genre tv is wrapped up in the soap opera aspects of Rose’s normal, mundane life, while continuing to pay obeisance to the history and importance of Doctor Who itself, as shown by the Autons in “Rose”.
I appreciated this time how methodical RTD was in a way that I wasn’t able to back then, because I didn’t have the context of the cancellation, the Wilderness Years and the return. I thought I was just watching Doctor Who, not realising that RTD had to teach everyone to watch Doctor Who.
Something was lost in the reinvention, though. As much as Doctor Who gained new weapons in its arsenal (Emotional interiority! Seasonal arcs! Romance!), the transition to 45-minute episodes disallowed the luxurious world-building the old show used to do, and being such a major show on modern tv meant that it had to play far more by the rules of tv than the old show, which, at its height, was one of 2-3 options of what one could watch on tv. Further, all these things, particularly the nature of being a post-Buffy tv show, also meant that the Doctor was now ontologically important within the show – NuWho is about the Doctor in a way the old show rarely allowed itself to be. This last one is something I’ve made my peace with over time, but it genuinely riled me up when I first encountered the new series.
But that’s the nature of a reinvention, which Doctor Who will continue to get every once in a while. Whether there was anything wrong or not, Doctor Who ends and then becomes something new. Whether it’s the supporting cast every story, the companion every year or so, or the Doctor himself. Whether it’s the creative forces behind the show, the production company, or the broadcast channel. Not just that, the medium itself – whether it’s a tv show, a series of books, or a bunch of audio dramas. Doctor Who ends, but it regenerates, and it lives on.
Russell T. Davies understands that intimately.
Next week, something other than Doctor Who. Maybe.
- The subtitle originally made me think that this was Part 2 and that I needed to read the first one before reading the followup, so someone messed up there. ↩︎
- The key moment for this is when the Doctor leans out of the TARDIS at the end of the episode and tells Rose that it travels in time as well. That was when I thought, Shit, yes. That’s not a given if you’re watching this for the first time. ↩︎