This year I took part in NaNoWriMo, a worldwide event where participants spend the month of November writing a short novel (50,000 words, the same length as Brave New World ) in thirty days, at 1,667 words a day.  I’m pleased to say I stayed the course.  In fact as a professional writer I thought I should aim for a total of 60,000 words, and ended up writing 70,000. I don’t know if the finished product is any good or not – it’s too early to say – but the point was not to be brilliant, the point was to have written a novel. 

My friends and family will attest that I have been loudly promising a novel for a very long time.  But something would always come up – a TV episode to write, or a series bible to develop – or I’d decide the novel’s idea wasn’t quite focused in my mind, or there were too many narrative problems that needed to be solved before I could begin. 

What amazed and appalled me when I actually started writing was that none of these problems actually existed.  I mean, yes, all stories have problems and holes in the plot that need to be addressed, and it’s good – though apparently not essential – to have a clear idea of where you are going.  But having to knock out 2,000 words a day forced me to confront the narrative problems and solve them by whatever means came to hand, and it was through the graft of writing the story that I worked out what the central idea was. 

I’ve been writing screenplays for a long time, and I found it intensely annoying to learn something I should have known years ago – that there is no point in putting off the challenge.  That wonderful idea you have is not going to get better rattling around in your head.  Either someone else is going to have the same idea, write it up and sell it, or they won’t, and the idea will simply grow old and stale and end up as an anecdote you tell in a pub.  That might get you a pint if you’re lucky, but it won’t win you an Oscar or an Emmy, or even a TV Quick People’s Choice Award nomination.* 

If you have an idea, sit down and write it.  Don’t procrastinate in the hope the story will somehow find its way to the page with no effort on your part.  Get stuck in and tell it, and resign yourself to the fact it will always look rougher on the page than it did in your head.  Sure, there are rules to screenwriting – keep the story moving, avoid holes, don’t resolve conflict with coincidence – but if you can’t see a way round them, ignore them or break them.  Just get the story written and worry about that shit later.  

And finish it. Work your way through the middle and get to the end.  Even a pathetic ending where everyone dies from food poisoning is better than no ending at all.  A rubbish script with an ending is a script, but a cracking script with no ending is still merely an idea. A bad first draft can be revised and reworked and polished into something better; a brilliant idea is worth less than the paper it isn’t written down on. 

I know, I know, I’m stating the bleeding obvious.  But I’m not the only writer who puts projects off in the hope that… what? Our wonderful stories will somehow tell themselves?  

National Novel Writing Month is finished for this year, but in April 2012 the equivalent event for screenwriters will take place: 100 pages of screenplay in 30 days. 

See you at Script Frenzy.

*Wire In The Blood 2007.  We didn’t win, but I got a decent dinner out of it.

 

The tens – nay, dozens – of readers who follow this blog may have been wondering about my recent resounding silence.  The fact is that for all of November 2011 I have been taking part in NaNoWriMo, a world-wide organised hysteria where the aim is to write a 50,000 word novel in a month and share the inevitable fear, exhilaration and frustration at the same time as one hundred thousand other people doing the same thing.  Even at its most challenging it is so addictive and engrossing that I feel guilty just writing this note instead of getting back to my text.  But I am learning, and relearning, an awful lot, and some day when it is over I will come back and post some of those lessons here.

For weblinks and word counts, check out the Miscellany pages.

 

My agent, the lovely Valerie Hoskins, recently launched the website www.vhassociates.co.uk to show off her stable of writers (I’m the niffy old mule at the back… be careful, I bite) and very generously asked me along.  Of course, wherever there shall be more than one writer present, there shall be also bitching and moaning (see war stories below) and I found myself recounting one particular incident that usually I manage to blank out of my mind.   

A few years back I was hired to do a rewrite on an episode of new TV series, very close to shooting.  The director – an old film-school friend – had recommended me to the producers as someone who could write quickly to order.  And so I was asked to do Episode Four, I think it was, of a six-episode series.  The producers showed me the existing script and it certainly needed help; the story made no sense and the dialogue was idiotic. Oddly, the first three episodes of the series were very good – well researched and superbly written.  I found myself wondering what had happened to the writer on Episode Four, but in these circumstances you rarely ask questions – you don’t have time, as much as anything else, if the show is filming very soon. 

Anyhow Episode Four I wrote, as requested, and the producers seem pleased.  So pleased in fact they offered me Episode Six of the series as well.  I happily got stuck into that, but very quickly hit a large obstruction.  My suggestions for a big series finale – and we had some scope for epic themes – were ignored.  I was told a treatment was already in existence for this episode, and I was required to adhere to it.  The producers sent me a copy and I sat down to study it. 

It soon became apparent that whoever had written this treatment had also written Episode Four.  When I say ‘write’, in this context, I mean ‘typed a lot of words in no particular order.’ The story was dreary, clichéd and nonsensical, the characterisation non-existent, the dialogue solid mahogany.   All the same I was getting definite signals that if I wanted to make any radical changes to the episode, it would call for a certain amount of tact and delicate diplomacy.    

Anyway, I did something I had never done before: I used the ‘notes’ function of Microsoft Word to scribble down my observations of this amateur treatment onto the treatment itself.  These were mostly along the lines of ‘O for God’s sake’ and ‘this makes no sense at all’, though I do remember writing ‘at this point the audience will be switching off in droves’.  I carefully saved that annotated document, closed it, and fired off an email to the producers saying ‘Thank you for the treatment – I have some observations, but with a few tweaks I think I can make it work.’

Their reply was a little slow in arriving, but when it did, it went ‘Thank you for your email, with its attachment, which we read with interest.’  

I had somehow managed, in my reply to the producers, to attach the treatment I had liberally studded with snotty remarks.  So much for tact, subtlety and the delicate art of persuasion.  They accepted my completed Episode Four, and politely told me they’d find someone else to do Episode Six.

They never did, as far as I know, because the series was cancelled after three episodes – which hardly ever happens on British TV, even when the lead actor drops off his perch.  Before they cancelled the show the network shunted it all round the late night schedules, so to this day I have only ever met one person who ever saw it – coincidentally a nephew of mine, who happened to be channel-hopping late on a Tuesday night in August.

I did ask the director who got me the gig how the filming of my Episode Four had gone, and he said with a weary sigh that he honestly could not tell me.  Apparently every morning new pages of dialogue would be handed out on set, and no-one ever had the faintest idea where they came from or how the new material fitted into the episode that was being filmed.  If this ‘new material’ was anything like stuff I had been shown, I am amazed the series ever got aired at all.  

A few years later I bumped into the producer that had hired me, and he told me what had been going on behind the scenes.  The Executive Producer – a TV veteran with his name on some very famous shows – had decided that the script would be improved if he gave it a bit of a polish, by which he meant inserting his own dialogue.  The original writer had walked off in disgust and the executive had let him go, apparently under the impression he himself could fill in.  It was that man – the boss of all these junior producers – who had written the embarrassingly limp Episode Four and the incomprehensible treatment for Episode Six that I had sent back scrawled with notes reading ‘O God this is awful’ and ‘WTF?’.  No wonder I had lost the gig.  And no wonder the show had got cancelled, too, because this big successful TV executive could not write a scene, a story or a line of dialogue to save his life, but no-one on his staff had had the nerve to tell him.

The moral to this story, quite simply, is if you are asked to work on a script that makes you want to laugh or throw up for all the wrong reasons, and you are asked for your opinion, smile knowingly and say ‘I see what the author was getting at, and I think I can make it work’.  Do not put your honest opinion in writing, and if you do, do not email that opinion straight back to the guy who wrote it…  

I’ve been absent from this blog awhile for the best of reasons, i.e. I’ve been working. At the time of writing I am in that limbo state Waiting For Notes, a gap in the schedule which all dedicated professional screenwriters use to polish old projects, develop new ones, network with influential executives, or simply kick back and War and Peace in the original Russian. Although admittedly some have been known to spend that time tidying their tip of an office, reading the paper researching current affairs, or simply writing blog entries.

War Stories is the title of one of my favourite episodes of the TV Scifi epic-that-never-was, Firefly by Joss Whedon.  It is also the industry term for the tales told in the pub about megalomanic producers, clueless executives, egotistical actors, outrageous misfortune and all the thousand ills that a filmmaker’s flesh is heir to. 

Personally, until recently I didn’t know they were called ‘war stories’. But a few years ago a famous writer/producer approaching retirement had a go at TV drama commissioners for, as he saw it, preferring new TV drama to conform to cosy and established formulae instead of encouraging writers to produce original, challenging and therefore riskier material.  His remarks seemed to vindicate all the moans of us toiling away at the coalface.  Usually you hear that sort of talk from young, idealistic and struggling writers before they learn to shut up and toe the line; certainly not from distinguished programme makers who can barely get into their offices for TV awards.

Of course this distinguished writer/producer had nothing to lose; he was at the end of his career.  When invited to comment, his younger counterparts muttered something like, ‘We all love hearing war stories, but TV has always been a collaborative medium.’   Which roughly translated as ‘We have a lot of stuff in development with these commissioning editors and we can’t afford to piss them off.’  All the same it was a subtle and effective way to defuse this bomb the senior TV statesman had dropped – dismissing his remarks as the sort of world-weary anecdote pissed-off filmmakers tell over a pint.  We all do that.

Why do writers and film-makers tell war stories, and constantly moan about the industry they are in?  Because they – alright, we – can.  We aspire to be storytellers.  Many of us have worked on shoots with perfect weather where the actors turned up sober and on time, remembered their lines and giving thrilling interpretations of the text from which the director did not cut a word.   But who wants to tell stories like that, and who the hell wants to hear them?

There’s a joke in Ireland about the weather – if it’s not raining, that means it’s going to rain.  At any given point most writers are either unemployed or about to be unemployed (self-employed is something of a euphemism.)  While I try not to take pleasure in other writers’ struggles, I have to work hard to enjoy hearing about rivals, or worse still friends, doing Really Well.  We’d all rather hear tales of doom and gloom, of betrayal and treachery, of epic, moving ideas mangled and ineptly shot because it turns out the director wanted to write the script and play all the parts himself. We want to hear about senior commissioning editors solemnly giving notes from which everyone present can instantly tell that they haven’t read the script.  Stories like those reassure us that even the most successful writers and producers still have to put up with infuriating crap and tiptoe around the egos of idiots.  

Face it, we’re in showbusiness.  None of us got into TV and movies in order to have an easy and predictable life.  We chose this career because a proper job would very likely have driven us mad.   And sometimes it goes well and the scripts you write come out better than you ever expected, thanks to the talent and hard work and imagination of the producers and the crew and the cast.  And sometimes it all goes tits-up.  But then at least you get some wonderful war-stories to tell down the pub.   

 

I have this thing about how-to-write-a-screenplay manuals.  I’m always skimming them to check I haven’t missed something, and that no-one’s discovered a way to make the creative process easy… No luck so far.  There’s a book in my bathroom at the minute called ‘How Not to Write A Novel’ which has great fun mimicking the mistakes of up-and-coming authors – getting bogged down in irrelevant detail, copping out of the climactic confrontation, using words the writer doesn’t understand – but it’s a snide sort of pleasure reading it, because taking the piss out of other people’s efforts is a relatively easy way to get laughs.  Famous comedians have filled whole TV series with spoofs of other shows; ultimately it’s derivative and even lazy.  Coming up with something original is much harder to do, and those who try – even if they don’t entirely succeed – deserve credit.  (Even if we’re all too busy snickering to give it.)

Anyway, reading one particular guide to writing screenplays, a sentence caught my eye that went something like ‘When the audience knows something the characters don’t, you have irony.’  I thought, ‘That can’t be right.  It can’t be that simple.’ 

I looked up the definition of ‘irony’ on the Net, and apparently it is that simple – officially, anyway.  The term comes from the Latin term ‘ironia’ meaning feigned ignorance.  Almost every work of drama you care to name contains classic examples of irony: the first one that comes to mind, oddly, is the 1986 adaptation of Marcel Pagnol’s Manon Des Sources.  [Spoiler alert! Skip the next paragraph if you haven’t seen it.] 

A mean old farmer, jealous of the hunchback about to take possession of the neighbouring farm, secretly blocks up the hunchback’s well.  The hunchback, his crops failing, comes to the mean old farmer for help. We see the irony: he’s asking for help from the man who wants to destroy him.  In time the hunchback dies and the sour old farmer learns that the hunchback was the illegitimate son he never knew he had.  Big bitter payoff, full of irony.  It had me in buckets, I have to admit.  

Except of course that according the classical definition the last bit shouldn’t count as irony, because the audience didn’t have that vital piece of information until the final reel. (Apart from those who’d read the book, that is.) (And sorry to anyone reading this who hadn’t seen the movie – I did warn you.)  That’s what bugs me about the accepted definition of irony: there is far more to it than ‘little does he know’.  An ending can be rich with irony and still come as a surprise to the viewer.

In drama, information does not always pass to the audience and stay there. The good storyteller rations it, sometimes withholding it to create tension and surprise.  At different stages of the story, the writer will give the initiative – the knowledge of the bigger picture, the secret plan – to one or more of three different parties: the protagonist, the antagonist, and the audience. 

Take the first Die Hard movie.  New York cop Bruce Willis comes to LA at Christmas to visit his estranged wife, played by Bonnie Bedelia. While Willis is barefoot in the bathroom the office building is taken over by gunmen, led by villain Alan Rickman, claiming to be terrorists.  They know everyone in the building except Bruce Willis, and they don’t know that his wife is among their hostages.     

At first the villains have the initiative.  We the audience quickly learn that they are thieves masquerading as terrorists, but it takes Willis a while to find that out, and longer still to convince the outside world.  Rickman is planning some spectacular diversion, but we the audience don’t know what it is, and Willis has to find out.  He learns Rickman plans to blow up the roof of the building so that the cops will think the villains are dead.  Though Willis fails to stop the explosion he saves the hostages.  Finally Rickman identifies Willis’ wife and threatens to shoot her until Willis reveals himself.  We know Willis has only two bullets left. Willis gives himself up, apparently unarmed, but we see at the last minute he has a gun strapped to his back with festive parcel tape.  He shoots the last two baddies.  As Rickman falls out the window he grabs the wristband of the Rolex watch Bonnie Bedelia received as a gift from her work colleagues.  Willis undoes the wristband and Rickman falls to his death. 

From this summary we can see how information vital to each stage of the narrative is passed around.  Sometimes the audience shares knowledge with the villain – the flawed rescue plans of the FBI, for example; sometimes Willis knows something neither the audience nor the baddies know – the gun taped to his back; and a lot of the time Rickman knows something neither we nor the hero do – that he is relying on the FBI to cut the power that is keeping the building’s vault locked shut.  This frantic game of pass-the-parcel, played with information, generates tremendous narrative tension and pace. 

This, in my humble opinion, shows how the accepted definition of irony is inadequate.  Yes, in tragedies like Manon Des Sources or Othello we the audience know more throughout than the hero, and their continuing ignorance is a vital part of the tragedy.  But real irony is deeper and more complex: it occurs when a character’s actions rebound on them in a way they never intended and never anticipated.

In Die Hard, when Bruce Willis first arrives at the office, his wife shows him the expensive Rolex watch she has received as a Christmas gift.  No-one says it out loud, but we know that as a cop he could never have afforded to buy her such a watch.  When Alan Rickman falls out the window, it’s that Rolex he grabs, and the watch that symbolised her independence and success nearly costs Bonnie Bedelia her life.  That’s what most of us understand as irony. 

In Romeo and Juliet, Romeo finds Juliet in a drugged sleep, thinks her dead, and kills himself.  We know she isn’t, and that’s classic irony.  Then Juliet wakes and sees Romeo dead, and kills herself.  That’s a richer dramatic irony, not because of what we the audience know, but because the actions Juliet took to save their love have doomed their love.* 

I wrote a thriller once – yet to be produced (sigh) – where the villain, an arms dealer, spends a fortune developing a landmine to penetrate the latest generation of armour.  In the climactic fight our hero gets hold of a sample, and the villain tries to flee in his armoured car… okay, when I tell it like that you can see it coming, but it works in the script, honest.  And that’s dramatic irony – the villain is brought down by his own greed and cruelty.  Irony increases the audience’s satisfaction when witnessing the villain’s sticky end; if our heroes earn a reward that neither they nor we expected, it adds to the happiness of the ending.

The accepted definition of irony is so vague it’s practically impossible to write a piece that does not have some.  Try to portray the deeper, richer irony, when characters face the unexpected consequences of their own actions.  It’s a great way to create a snappy ending, if you need one… like I do at the moment.  Come back next time to see if I’ve thought of one.

*See? I don’t just watch Hollywood movies…though I did like Baz Luhrmann’s version.

Shortly after it came out I read a review of Ridley Scott’s Kingdom of Heaven, in which Orlando Bloom plays a young medieval blacksmith who joins one of the Crusades in The Holy Land.  The reviewer concluded that the movie was flawed because ‘Bloom cannot carry an action picture’.  Well, the movie was flawed, yes, but it wasn’t Bloom’s fault.  No actor could have made the part of the hero work, because of the way it was written.

It’s a truism – or cliché perhaps – of movie drama that ‘action is character’.  In other words, the audience judges a character by what they do, not what they say.  Yes, sometimes saying is doing, but not very often; while dialogue is a good way to convey information in small quantities, it’s nothing like as effective as action when portraying character.   

Kingdom of Heaven opens with a body being buried at a crossroads.  We learn that the body is that of the blacksmith’s wife; she committed suicide and therefore cannot be buried in sanctified ground.  We follow a traveller to the nearest village where we meet the blacksmith at work – Orlando Bloom.  He is very upset about his wife topping herself, we gather.  He has a bit of a tiff with the local priest about it.

Except… surely he didn’t give a damn about his wife?  If he did, he would have gone to her funeral.  His action in this case was to stay at home: i.e. to take no action at all. Which means the first impression we get of our hero is (a) either he didn’t like or even respect his wife, or (b) he does not have the strength or self-confidence to defy his community and insist that she be buried in hallowed ground (or at least that someone – preferably himself – leave some flowers on her grave) or indeed (c) both. And though we are curious to know why his wife killed herself, that’s never clearly explained either.  We can only suppose she got fed up of being married to a wuss. 

It goes on.  The blacksmith meets a knight returning from the Crusades (Liam Neeson), by reputation a famous and brilliant warrior, who it transpires is our hero’s father.  The great knight has barely introduced himself to his son before he and all his men are ambushed in their forest encampment and wiped out.  Hmm, the audience thinks: what sort of famous military genius gets himself and all his faithful hardened veteran followers bumped off by a few local bandits with bows and arrows?  (I don’t think we ever find out why that happened, either.) 

The skills this knight had – though by now they don’t seem that impressive – have apparently been passed down to his son the blacksmith by the magic of genetics, because before long Orlando Bloom heads out to the Holy Land to take his father’s place, where he turns out to have an amazing aptitude for strategy, invention, ballistics, etc., and sees off the Saracens (who, much like today’s Middle Easterners, don’t seem to appreciate the difference between being liberated and being massacred.)  We can only infer that our hero acquired these skills genetically, because we never saw him learn or demonstrate any of them back in England.  There he was merely a bloke too busy hammering horseshoes to go to his wife’s funeral. 

I think the hero got the (exotic local) girl eventually; but by then, like most of the audience, I’d stopped caring. 

Action is character.  A character who never becomes aware of the challenge he or she faces, and/or does not act to address the challenge, and/or makes poor decisions at vital moments, will lose the respect of the audience.  We will start feeling indifferent towards him or her, then start to despise them.  We certainly won’t root for your hero, which is the one thing you want from your audience.  We the audience don’t have to approve of what a character does, we just have to care about what they do, and what comes of that, and what they do next.  And if your hero fumbles about for too long, ignorant of what’s going on, or is indecisive, or suddenly demonstrates skills they cannot feasibly have, then we the audience give up trying to care and trying to believe and will start looking at our watches.   

‘What if I am not writing a Hollywood movie?’ you might ask.  ‘What if I want to portray people who are authentic, in situations that are true-to-life, not some square-jawed beefcake taking down helicopters with a slingshot?’  In that case, the same rules apply.  If you want your character to be weak, and put upon, and be a victim of their own bad decisions – as most of us are in real life, at one time or another – then by all means do.  Simply dilute the ‘qualities’ of the conventional action hero accordingly. 

Joss Whedon in his sci-fi TV series Firefly* depicted a band of space-vagabonds scratching a living from one planet to the next by trading in salvage and stolen goods.  For most of the pilot episode they are insulted, ripped-off, bullied and ambushed, and take it all with a smile and a wisecrack.  In the final reel, one rip-off merchant pushes them too far, and our heroes kick ass.  The episode works brilliantly to establish our heroes in the pecking order; in this universe they are a few rungs up from rock bottom, sticking together to stay alive. 

My point: understand what makes a character strong and what makes them weak, and use those techniques knowingly.  And if you do create a weak hero whom we have no reason or inclination to follow, and everyone hates your movie, be sure to blame the lead actor.  That way you’ll be able to find backers to let you do it all over again.  (See Ridley Scott’s Robin Hood – or rather, don’t…)

*Cancelled by network hacks before it even got going properly. If it can happen to a storyteller of Joss Whedon’s calibre, nobody’s safe.

I was going to try and write a blog entry on How to Construct a Scene, but when I thought about it I realised I don’t really know How to Construct a Scene – I let my imagination do it.  Within the parameters of the story, that is.  TV episodes are usually carefully structured; you can’t just make stuff up as you go along. (I can’t, anyway – for me it’s like driving blindfolded and hoping you’ll end up at your destination.)  Before I start I know what the scene needs to do: what bit of story information I want to reveal, and how the characters react to it.  That’s dictated by the characters’ personalities and attitude and what they want to achieve.  I figure out who is there already when the scene starts, who enters, if anyone, and who initiates the important part of the conversation that we the viewers witness.  (That’s presuming there is conversation; often scenes are more dramatic and cinematic when nothing is said. But you’ll rarely see many scenes like that, on TV anyhow – I think producers get nervous.) 

I give the characters something to do, preferably business that is relevant to the storyline and affects its direction, rather than activity for its own sake.  It helps if you reflect the business and the environment (whether it’s raining or cold or dirty) in the dialogue, so the conversation seems natural and spontaneous, and not just dry information exchanged for the sake of moving the story on.

I also try to bear in mind the audience – what they have just seen, what they know about the show and what they expect to happen, so I can hopefully subvert their assumptions and surprise them.   I worked on a one-off crime story that I knew would be going out in a certain slot ending at ten o’clock.  I knew that in this sort of show the villain was almost always unmasked ten minutes before the end, followed by a few scenes of ‘retrospective exposition.’ (You know, the ones where characters ask each other questions like: ‘One thing I don’t understand – how did he get rid of the weapon?’*)

Since the audience were expecting the reveal at that moment, I decided to drop in a fake revelation, where another character appeared to confess.  Then I did all the ‘one thing I don’t understand is’ scenes and tied up the loose ends. In the very last one of those, we revealed the real baddie. 

It made quite an effective twist.  If you know your structure you can mess around with it and play tricks on the viewer.  Audiences enjoy that stuff, provided you don’t take the piss.

Recently I watched the broadcast of a show I had written, and noticed during one pivotal scene that the actors were standing still with their hands hanging by their sides.  It irritated me; either the crew ran out of time, or the director was merely lazy and lacked imagination.  Actors are trained not to be self-conscious, but in real life almost everyone is self-conscious, to an extent.  We touch our faces (that’s how colds get transmitted… sorry, trivia), twiddle our hair, fiddle with our sleeves…  We limit the amount of eye contact we make, especially with strangers.   Our bodies reflect our attitude – boredom, irritation, impatience.  We put hands on hips, cross our arms, tidy up crockery… it’s actually incredibly rare for any of us to stand talking with our hands by our sides.  Good actors know this, and given time and space will explore the scene and find a way of expressing feelings in their body language.  Sadly however, you rarely have enough time or space on the average shoot, and it helps if the director can suggest something.

I’m not saying that characters never stay still and do nothing.  I just think that since doing nothing is so unnatural, stillness should be reserved for scenes where characters are too shocked or upset to fidget.    Or where they’re dead, of course. 

It’s not on my Credits page, but I directed ten episodes of the Bill over several years.  I even got fan mail, from a child of nine who seemed to think I directed every episode.  (At least, I presume it was a child of nine…) It was an excellent training ground for any film-maker.  In one scene I directed the detectives had just made an arrest, and we opened on them as the suspects were being led away to a police van.  The actor playing one of the detectives suddenly barked at me, ‘And what am I doing while this is going on?’

 I had no idea. It hadn’t occurred to me he needed to do anything.  I said the first thing that came into my head: ‘You’re blowing your nose.’  I was being slightly facetious, but he didn’t notice, and when we went for a rehearsal, I said ‘Action’ and the actor blew his nose while the other went into the dialogue.  And of course the moment and the scene worked very well, because the gesture was so natural – busy without being contrived.  That exchange taught me a lot.

However, when I’m writing a script I rarely put in detailed directions.  A good director will have ideas of his or her own that expand on what the writer is trying to say.  A mediocre director will resent the writer’s presumption and ignore suggestions in the script, then fail to replace them with anything at all.  You can usually spot their work: the actors will be standing there declaiming the lines with their hands hanging by their sides.  

* NB:  I try to avoid actually writing lines this hoary and stale.  If something predictable has to be said, there’s usually a way of saying it that isn’t predictable.

I was invited onto a seminar in Dublin a while back to talk to Irish writers who wanted to break into British TV.  I was puzzled to be asked, because that’s how I usually think of myself, and when people point out that I already have written quite a bit for UK TV it always takes me by surprise. 

So there I was on the podium beside TJ, a distinguished screenwriter who worked his way up from the writers’ stable to become showrunner on a major TV soap.  He was – is, rather – the best sort of producer, for whom only the story and the writing matters.  He feels if you get that right everything else will follow, and he’s right, of course. Anyway someone in the audience asked TJ what they should do to get work in UK TV drama, and he replied, ‘Watch everything’.  There was a sort of gasp from the audience.

How could you possibly watch every drama on TV – every cop show, soap, and Dickens adaptation – and still have a life?  And write as well?  Even for such an energetic, driven character as TJ it would be a tall order.  Maybe he didn’t mean it literally. 

I piped up and said that I usually made time to watch the shows that amazed me and left me thinking, ‘Wish I could write like that’ – the shows I aspire to work on, even if I never will.  The Wire for example.  But if I wanted to go for a job on a specific TV show, I would watch previous episodes and read old scripts, get to know the characters and the setup, and figure out the way the stories worked.  In other words, I’d do my homework.  (I was relieved at this point to see TJ nodding vigorously.) 

TV producers rarely take risks with new screenwriters.  There are usually lots of old hands available, and bringing in less experienced writers can involve extra work and extra risk.   That’s what gives rise to the ‘closed shop syndrome’ where you won’t get hired unless someone else has previously hired you. When you are trying to get your first break that’s incredibly frustrating, especially when you know you could a better job than some ‘established’ writers.

You just have to keep plugging away.  Do everything you can to show producers that you’re already up to speed with their show, that you can do it just as well as the regulars.  There’s a form of mimicry involved: you have to assume the voice of the show, to find dramas that not only involve its established characters but also engage you as a writer.  You have to get excited about what you can offer, if you want the producers to share that excitement.  You can even push the boundaries of what’s been established – if you’ve done your homework properly, you should have a good idea of what you can get away with.

Admittedly this advice is less relevant than it used to be. The current fashion in UK TV is for ‘authored’ pieces, where an entire series will be created by one screenwriter.  It’s part of a growing appreciation for the craft of writing and for the distinctive individual voice that started in the US, when writers like Aaron Sorkin and David Chase were allowed to write quirky, demanding shows such as The West Wing and The Sopranos that had previously been rejected by networks locked into established formulae. (Sorkin had been told at one point ’you can’t have a leading man with a beard.’)

 New networks like HBO wanted intelligent, adult dramas and were prepared to take risks – Sorkin is a mercurial character who would sometimes still be writing the script when the crew had started shooting, but the finished product was worth it.    

Nowadays UK broadcasters too are more willing to take risks, and let one writer devise and script an entire series. While this is good news for the art of screenwriting, it makes life harder for jobbing scriptwriters who make ends meet doing an episode here and an episode there, and harder still for unknown writers hoping to get a break on a long-running TV show.  It makes it more important than ever to keep developing new projects of your own.   

There are a handful of UK TV productions that make it their business to find and develop new talent – low-budget daytime soaps, for example.  They use new writers because they’re cheap and will (usually) do what they’re told.  It’s not very glamorous or boast-worthy, but it’s a great way to learn the ropes and add weight to your CV.  Just try to make sure you never work for less than the Writer’s Guild minimum (Google it). I know of some up-and-coming writers so eager for a break they worked for months for a pittance, effectively subsidising the indie that hired them.  No respectable TV producer should ask you to work for less than the WG/PACT minimum rate on a show that’s intended for broadcast.   

There is one thing I should have said at that Dublin seminar and didn’t: I should have asked the audience why they were so eager to work on UK TV anyhow. I mean I know the answer – that for Irish writers it’s close to home, and we know all the shows – but it’s not very ambitious. British TV is a small pond, after all, with an awful lot of big fish in it. If I were starting out from scratch, trying to flog a screenplay, I’d try to do it in Hollywood. The US market is enormous, and even if it takes a while to get a break I’d rather be a skint struggling writer on Venice Beach than a skint struggling writer in Shepherd’s Bush. The bullshit is the same over there, but the rewards for surviving it are vastly greater. If you’ve got the talent, go for it, aim high.  The British TV market will still be here if you decide to come back.

And the more bright young talent heads west, the more work there’ll be in the UK for old farts like me. Off you go, aim high, send us a postcard.

When I was a film student the perennial problem was getting hold of good actors who would appear in your amateur productions for expenses only.  We were afraid at first to ask the people we really wanted, because we thought they might take it as an insult.  In time you grow a thicker skin and realise that it costs nothing to ask and having someone tell you to eff off is not actually fatal.  In fact, begging, pestering and cajoling people to lend you equipment or props or locations for little or no money – ‘blagging’ as it’s called – is a vital skill for a film maker, because even in major professional productions sometimes all that’s between you and disaster is the ability to persuade panicking producers that everything’s going to turn out fine.

In fact getting experienced professional actors to appear in student movies was often easier than you’d imagine, because most actors know it’s better to be working than sitting at home twiddling your thumbs.  On a student shoot at least you’re practising your craft and getting seen. At the very least you’ll get fed.  If the shoot’s a fiasco you’ll have some wonderful disaster stories to tell your friends in the pub, but it’s also possible you’ll be working with a genuinely talented young filmmaker.  Then your performance will be seen at festivals around the world.  More to the point, producers will be looking at it, because it’s their job to spot new talent.  If it leads to a job even that awful shoot where you sat for twelve hours in a derelict hospital ward full of dead pigeons, waiting for the director of photography to figure out the lighting, will have been worthwhile.

My graduation film Over the Wild Frontier no longer exists as a print, to the best of my knowledge.  That’s probably a good thing because although I was very proud of it at the time, and it made people laugh, it was pretty bloody rough.  But now it’s gone I can describe it as a lost masterpiece.  Part of it, coincidentally, was shot in a derelict hospital full of dead pigeons.

I had never heard of the Irish actor who played the lead role before I cast him, and few other people had either.  Immensely tall and immensely handsome, Patrick Bergin has roguish charm by the bucketful, and he made every woman on the set come over all unnecessary.  He worked with me for eight weeks or so over one glorious summer, and such was his dedication he even did his own stunts.  He fell off a motorbike in the middle of a grassy field for a shot that wasn’t in the script and which in the end I never used.  I remember at the end of the shoot handing him a wad of notes as his expenses, and feeling embarrassed it was so little for all the work he had put in.  Especially as he was still limping.

But what Patrick really got out of it was a thirty-minute comedy film where he was onscreen nearly all the time.  He sent a copy to an Irish director, Pat O’Connor, who was doing very well in Hollywood that year.  And one day in LA O’Connor got a phone call from the veteran director Bob Rafaelson, who was casting a movie called Mountains Of The Moon about the Victorian explorer Richard Burton (yes, the Welsh actor named himself after him.)  Burton was from Dublin, and Rafaelson was looking for a tall handsome Irish actor, and could O’Connor suggest anybody?  And O’Connor told him about a guy he’d just seen in this wonderful student movie Over the Wild Frontier.  (OK, he may not have used the term ‘wonderful’.  But this is my anecdote.)  

So Patrick got to play Richard Burton opposite Fiona Shaw, because he had spent those weeks in South Armagh falling off a motorbike. That job in turn led to a role as the abusive husband of Julia Roberts in Sleeping With The Enemy, a movie that became a huge hit, coming out very soon after Pretty Woman.

Anyway this is all ages ago now, but the principle still applies – that dumb luck and coincidence can only help if you’re already making the effort to help yourself.  Keep plugging away, producing work and getting stuff out there, because you really don’t know when it will pay off, where it will end up or where it might take you. 

But if a student director asks you to ride a motorbike across a wet grassy field in South Armagh, tell him to find a stunt double or forget it. 

Shortly after we both graduated from Film School a good friend of mine spent a year developing a movie script.  We both knew that if you are unknown and unproven as a writer/director, writing a great script is a good way to get noticed.  Even today, when it’s possible to shoot high-definition video on a shoestring, a script still offers far more scope to engage the imagination of the reader.  There are no budget restrictions on paper, no duff performances you can’t re-shoot, no music royalties to fret about. 

After twelve months or so my friend showed me his first draft.  Like me, he was fond of conventional narrative (‘Hollywood’ movies if you like), so when I pointed out that the hero of his script never took the initiative in the story, never made a difference to the course of events, and did not know what was going on most of the time, my friend got quite upset.  

He had spent a year working on a script that was deeply flawed.  He shouldn’t have put all his eggs in one basket, I told him – a writer/director starting out should have a dozen ideas and treatments on the go, all pitched at different markets, to maximise the chances of one being picked up and produced.  One big-budget idea, one or two low-to-no budget ideas, a proposal for a TV series, a one-off real-life drama…

But his approach was right, and mine was wrong.  Yes, he had been wasting his time, but that’s because his script was structurally flawed in ways that could have been avoided from the start.  But it’s vital for writers starting out to have a finished original script to show commissioners and producers, a script that reflects the writer’s unique individual voice.  A folder full of ideas and pitches is shows energy and enthusiasm, but that’s not enough. Ideas and pitches are ten a penny – it’s easy to make an idea sound brilliant in a pitch, where you can skate around all the difficult bits.  The real achievement, the value you add, is turning that idea into a solid, engaging script. 

Many up-and-coming writers aspire to write episodes of TV series.  These can be great fun to work on, but the characters, the setting and the tone have all previously been established.  (Sometimes even the ending, if it’s that sort of show.)  You’re just filling in the blanks.  You’ll get paid of course, which is wonderful, but never confuse a TV episode with proper writing.  If you are lucky enough to get one, use it to subsidise the creation of your own original material. 

Starting, structuring, writing, finishing and revising a script, on spec, is immensely hard work, but nothing teaches you about scripts like writing one.  And when you have finished that one, start another.  Someday you’ll be in a meeting where a producer who’s read your script will ask you what else you have – and that’s when you realise why you spent all that time slogging over the other scripts, because now you have a solid, distinctive portfolio.

And although it’s important to revise and polish your scripts, don’t get obsessive – try to know when to put it down and move on to the next.  Twenty years ago I met a young screenwriter who had just won a major prize for his first script.  I was consumed with envy, of course.  Twenty years later – neither of us exactly young any more – we met again, and I asked what he was working on.  ‘The script’ he replied.  ‘Which script?’  I asked.  He looked at me as if I was being thick. 

He had been rewriting the same screenplay for twenty years – draft after draft after draft – without ever coming any closer to getting it made.  In fact, as far as I know, he still is. 

Be careful what you wish for.