Previously, if you ever told me that you plan writing out in detail before you do it, I mean if you say you do an outline first, I’ve magnanimously said that whatever works for you, works for you.

And when I’ve casually mentioned how I’m happy to write something and then throw it away if it doesn’t work, I’ve doubtlessly also thrown in how I did exactly that to a 100,000-word novel I wrote over lockdown.

Them’s the breaks when you write without prissy little guidelines, that’s what you have to deal with when you’re a real writer.

I seem to remember you saying “bollocks”.

Look, I do really mean that whatever it takes to get you to the finish line is a good thing. Outline, paint storyboards, do whatever you need. But for the longest time I have just started writing and then genuinely been quite fine about throwing everything away to start over again.

To be clear, I have always provided an outline when the commission requires it. But I have been the sort that if I possibly could, I would rather write the whole script or the whole book and then make up an outline afterwards.

Except a producer once pointed out that you can’t have a blank screen on BBC1 on Tuesday night at 21:00. It has to be filled and there is no scope to just write a script and throw it away if you don’t happen to like it. Outlines, argued this producer, get you to the finishing line on time. Maybe you’d write better if this weren’t true, but you might not write better on time and that’s the killer point.

I hadn’t thought of it like that, but the instant it was said to me, I couldn’t disagree.

I just didn’t do it.

Only, last week it looked like I was going to get a commission for a thing and this week I got it. There isn’t a massive amount to it, it’s more that the work is spread out over the next year, and in fact it’s not replacing anything, it is just going to be something extra I do.

But because it’s new, because it’s a producing job as much as anything, and especially because it is over a set period of time, I still didn’t outline.

I project managed instead.

Just before you and I started talking, I sent the people a Gantt chart for the whole year with something like forty points in it. That’s just for them, I know as I work through that project I will be creating many more tasks and the giant majority will be solely for me. But for now, this is where we are, I said, and this is when it looks like we need to do this, this and the other that.

It’s a Gantt chart. This bit of work has dependencies, for instance, so it can’t be started before this other work is done, and I have to finish it before I can start this next thing. And that next thing has to be done by this date, so this other task must be started by another date.

And finally I get it.

All this planning, all this assessing of sequences and balancing of resources, it all does exactly what outlines do.

It lets you feel busy while you put off the actual writing.