When the playwright Shelagh Stephenson wrote this diary, she was involved in the casting of Ancient Lights, a new play for the Hampstead Theatre. Another play, Five Kinds of Silence, was running at the Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith, and she was simultaneously working on new plays for the National Theatre and the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, the film of The Memory of Water, and two television projects

5 July 2000

Walk the dog in the rain. Get home and immediately consider going to the gym. Or maybe to buy a toner cartridge for the printer. Anything to get out of the house and away from the script. The daily battle: what displacement activity can I dream up now? Trick myself into starting by the usual method - pretending I'm just going to have a quick flick through. Consequently con myself into restructuring Act I again, following conversation with Hampstead [Theatre] last night. Am forced to admit that Jenny and Ben are right [Jenny Topper, artistic director, and Ben Jancovich, literary manager] about the end of the act. Only delivered the last draft on Friday, and here I am again. Unfortunately, tweaking is like chaos theory: slight restructuring in one area has unexpected consequences elsewhere. This fills me with anxiety and gives me the feeling that the whole play is falling to pieces. It's like trying to catch confetti in a high wind. Bits of the script pasted all over the place, waiting to be slotted back in. Keep coming up with new bits, obsessively removing words, reordering sentences. Wonder if it's possible to keep rewriting a script for ever. Decide that it probably is.

Am now (7.20pm) unsettled by a mild remark Ben made last night about a tiny scene I've rewritten, towards the end of the play. Looking at it today, it looks cod. Something about it doesn't ring true. It didn't quite work before, but it certainly doesn't work now. Or maybe I'm just imagining it. God, I don't know.

Meanwhile, in a parallel mind strand, I'm trying to write a play for the National. A hammock features strongly. Am I going through a Chekhovian phase?

Lie down on the sofa with the dog and a bottle of beer, and fret vaguely about the fact that hardly anyone's going to see my play at the Lyric. Not even me.

Out to dinner, and while having a heated conversation about Cromwell and the English revolution - about which I know next to nothing - have an idea about restructuring the end of the play. The thought of the complexities involved makes me long to sink immediately into a deep and fathomless sleep.

7 July

Last night, I dreamt that my father came to visit me wearing an astrakhan coat with a red bra over his shoulder. I said, "Daddy, I think that bra's mine," and he said he found it comforting. Clueless as to what this might mean, but he did look more like my image of the father in my new National play than my actual father. This is part of the creative process in so far as the characters have started appearing in my dreams. On the other hand, it is a singularly useless phenomenon.

2.45pm. A bike has just come to collect the Hampstead script because, if I don't get it out of the house, I'll keep tinkering with it ad infinitum. I've made some reckless changes, and it's now draft number six, I think. A horrible experience with the printer, which kept saying "can't print". Anyway, the play's now gone and I'm completely at a loss. Feel as if I've just seen someone off on the train, but now have to sit in the waiting room until someone else arrives. And not only have I no timetable, but I don't even know where they're coming from. Or, indeed, who they might be.

Connect my Palm Pilot to the computer to fill the void. The result is spectacular, but I can't see how it will significantly improve my life to have my entire diary and address book on screen. It's not as if I have a complicated date book. I never go anywhere except the study or the sofa.

Had an idea about the National play early this morning, but now can't remember what it was. Decide to go to Hereford next week to see the Mappa Mundi. That being the title of the National play, I ought really to see the original. Don't know what to do with myself. Decide to take the dog for a walk.

12 July

Depressed and in limbo. No idea how to start new play. The fact that it's a year overdue is an added worry. How does one write a play? How did I write the other ones? I can't remember. Shall I start at the beginning and plough on until the end? I think that's how I wrote An Experiment with an Air Pump. I also recall that I was stuck on page six for three months. Spent all of yesterday reading about the history and distribution of woodland in Britain. Fascinating, but not sure what it's got to do with anything. Did discover that the word "forest", in its original meaning, had nothing to do with woods. It was a place where deer were kept. In fact, some forests had no trees at all.

My other preoccupation: can morris dancing be sexy? Eoin (my partner), who's Irish, thinks this is laughable. But I want dancing in Mappa Mundi and I want it to be revelatory. Get rid of the stupid hats and bells round the knees, and have it performed, not by geography teachers with beards, but by a leaping, mixed-race troupe. A joyous, physical manifestation of how our culture can be transformed and reinvigorated by different racial communities. Is this the stupidest idea I've ever had? Maybe I should just write the play, and sort out the practicalities later. Except that writing it is the one thing I can't seem to do at the moment. Look through my research and notes again. Very interesting, but how to make a play out of this? There's a whole section about paper- making, and copper-engraving. And another about aerial photography and lost villages and the Barbudans of Leicestershire. Somewhere in my subconscious I know what all this means, but it's not terribly lucid yet. I've changed the names of the central characters five times now . . .

Try putting the new toner cartridge in the printer, but can't understand the instructions. Should I walk the dog again? She's bored and chewing my chair. Think I might clean the kitchen floor. Or there's a map shop in Notting Hill, maybe I'll go there and look at maps. Or the London Library. Or should I put the duvet over my head and sleep my way out of this?

31 July

Well, something's bubbling up, but I'm not sure what it is. I've taken the plunge and written the first three pages of Mappa Mundi. One of the characters sounds like the actor Roger Allam. Because I know Roger's rhythms and intonations so well, this gives me a straw to clutch on to . . .

Have reached a strange place in the creative process, which may be akin to mental illness. Someone described to me once the manic phase of manic depression: thinking Silk Cut posters were charged with resonance and meaning, and were speaking specifically to you. Everything glitters with relevance, everything is connected and somehow part of a vast and exciting plan, which only you understand. That's sort of where I am. A line in a newspaper, a gesture on television, a paragraph somewhere else, and something triggers, a whole set of connections tumbles into place. Everything is connected to Mappa Mundi. Yes, I think. This character has a profound problem with authenticity. Or whatever. Most of it is useless garbage, and forgotten almost before the thought has coalesced. But some of it strikes gold, and I feel jittery and excited, tired and frightened, all at the same time.

Obviously, I'm fantastic fun to live with during this phase; Eoin wakes up in the morning and taps me on the forehead with the words: "Stop thinking." He says he can hear the cogs grinding in my head.

2 August

Depressed. Have had some negative comments about the Hampstead play, from a man I've never met, and now probably never will. Instead of thinking he's wrong, I just feel deflated, all the confidence punched out of me. Don't know how to do it; when I look at Mappa Mundi, it looks like horseshit. Am filled with anxiety and foreboding, and wake at 5am worrying about directors, the new film, two television projects, the National, the Abbey, the film of The Memory of Water and the casting of Ancient Lights. Like planes stacking up at Heathrow. Will the director's dates work out? What if they don't? Where to next? And so on and so forth. Luckily, the dog doesn't give a damn about any of this as I drag her round the park at 7.30am.

My new plan is to write a minimum of three pages a day of Mappa Mundi, no matter how much rubbish it is. That's 21 pages a week, which means I should finish in, say, five weeks max. This reassures me. Even though I know it's absolute nonsense. Some days I write 17 pages (my record), other days two lines. Sometimes I just lie on the sofa and fret. But I like to make plans; it's soothing. If I look at the play as a series of small parcels, instead of a huge undertaking, it seems less daunting. Reading this through, anyone would think I don't like writing. Maybe it's not a matter of liking. It's more like a nervous tic, or a chronic illness. Also, I'm terribly afraid of failing. A theatre is a very public place to fail . . .

3 August

OK, today I'm feeling more rational. There's no point trying to force the play. It will come in its own time. It will. It will. But what if it won't? It will because it always does. I go out and buy some garden furniture and trust my subconscious to do some quiet, unobserved knitting. This three pages a day business is madness. Actually, I'm not feeling rational at all.

4 August

Didn't buy any garden furniture. Bought a load of books instead. The man in Waterstone's said: "What a weird collection of books." I mumbled that I was writing a play and he gave me a beady look: "You're going to try and make a play out of this?" Well, yes, actually - although admittedly At Home with the Marquis de Sade might seem fairly far removed from a piece about maps and the concept of Englishness. On the way home, had a thought that maybe I'm trying to rewrite King Lear. Not that that's got anything to do with the Marquis de Sade, either. Although, in present altered consciousness, everything's got something to do with everything else. Must stop grinding my teeth.

8 August

Well, I'm still in the waiting room, longing for something tangible to arrive. Wouldn't like to say quite how scary this is. One big idea is all I'm lacking, one big encompassing thing. Something structural that I can get excited about. Think I'll go and bang my head off a wall. Looked through the script so far, and it really is just unutterable balls. Have got a director, Ian Brown, for the Hampstead play, though, so will now have to spend a lot of time looking through Spotlight, that most depressing of books (the directory of all British actors). "Choose me," they all seem to be saying. Have spent all morning rewriting a film treatment, so now it's probably time to stagger round the park again with the dog. Maybe something will strike home, who knows.

20 September

Most of my creative life is now taken up with casting and rejigging the Hampstead play. The only person we've cast so far is Dermot Crowley, who's at least 15 years too old for the part, but he's so brilliant that I'm rewriting it for him.

Am reading some extraordinary books about maps and map-making. And, in the middle of it all, am writing a television adaptation of a novel.

27 September

Someone said to me yesterday, "What's your play for the National about?", and I said, "Map-making". They began to talk about how interesting carpets were, and I realised they thought I'd said "mat-making". Then I began to think that carpets were indeed very interesting - Islamic design principles, that sort of thing - and one could actually write a play about a carpet. Are some carpets indeed a sort of map? Had to stop the train of thought right here, because this way lies madness.

5 October

Hugo Glendinning phones to say he wants to take some photos for this book. I tell him I can't do Monday morning because I'm taking the dog to the hairdresser's - otherwise known as displacement activity 117b. He says he'll do before and after shots of the dog. I like the sound of him.

I wonder if Shakespeare had any trouble writing plays? I doubt it. Or Chekhov? Somewhere in my heart I believe that every other playwright, living or dead, is the real thing, and that I'm actually a fraud. And that writing this diary has revealed the awful truth.

Now I've had to move on from the National play again to write the television thing. I'm still reading and worrying, though, and having unworkable ideas. Also, we've had builders here for the past four weeks and, at one stage, had no bathroom or toilet. This is possibly why I feel like shooting myself.

11 October

Spend the morning reading a book about morris dancing. Was going to read it in a cafe, but felt too embarrassed to be seen with it. It's terribly interesting, but some of the theories behind it are complete balls. Still, who'd have thought Irish dancing could ever have become sexy? In fact, the whole point of it originally was that it wasn't sexy. Mocked in my family as the closest thing to purgatory one could ever experience, and now everyone's at it. Anyway, I'm rambling, because this diary has now become number-one method of avoiding the play. The television doesn't cause so many problems because I've already done a breakdown, so it's more like joining the dots (if only).

14 October

Spend the morning casting the last part in Ancient Lights. I always want to give the job to everyone. However, I think we may be almost there.

Does playwriting breed paranoia? When I talk to someone on the phone who I know has read Ancient Lights (like a producer or someone) and they don't mention it, I spend the rest of the day convinced this is because they hate it and are too embarrassed to mention it. Oh fuck it, you write what you can.

My New York agent hasn't called for ages - maybe he's gone off me as well.

I'm sorting out the television, still grappling with big structural stuff for the National play. How can I get it to be non-linear in a way that satisfies me and the needs of the piece? Have I started in the wrong place?

Too much going out at the moment, too much socialising, it's exhausting. I never want to go out again. I want to lock the front door and turn off the phone.

16 October

New York agent rings for long, comforting chat. Phew. Keep getting sent television ideas which I don't have time to read properly, but even on a cursory reading are just the pits. Also, I have too much on. I can't possibly think about anything else or my brain will explode. Anyway, have cast the play. Relieved and delighted. That's one less thing to worry about.

The producer of the television piece calls up to say that the network now wants five commercial breaks instead of four, which throws everything out of kilter. Somehow have to try and knit a cliffhanger out of nothing . . .

Meanwhile, the National play bubbles along in fits and starts. Have just read a lot of stuff about immigration in the 1950s. Also, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown's Who Do We Think We Are?. It's all feeding into something, although I still can't grasp the shape of it. I'm just looking for one simple thing. And now I realise it will come to me. I can feel it out there, I can almost touch it. I'm beginning to feel optimistic again.

19 October

Think I've got the flu or something. Feel grim. Get on with the television thing, but feel dulled round the edges. Take the dog out to wake myself out of it. In the pouring rain. Completely soaked and covered in mud, both of us. Have to put her in the shower. But come back to the desk feeling a bit more energised. We start rehearsals in just over a week. The television will be delivered soonish. And the National play will continue to stalk my dreams until it's finished. There's no getting away from it. There's no getting away from any of it. I just get rid of one monkey and another one jumps on my back.

This is an edited version of Shelagh Stephenson's diary as published this month in Art, Not Chance: nine artists' diaries edited by Paul Allen, photographs by Hugo Glendinning (Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, London, £8.50)

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