I’m looking for a new word. Also a new TV show to watch, which is related.

For, okay, there’s this new television drama that I think is shockingly poor. I can’t tell you what it is. It turns out that I used to know the writer and I’m not a fan, but I promise that I didn’t know whose series it was. Before his or her credit came up on screen and told me, though, I had already had a moment’s thinking along the lines of “Christ, it’s not going to be all like this, is it?”

It was.

And so I want a word. The word needs to be something like exposition, but that one doesn’t seem to cover it. Because you know that exposition is when a writer tells the audience something they need to know — I think I’ve just written exposition, sorry — and actually what I need is close to being the opposite. I want a word for when a writer tells the audience something they don’t need to know.

Example. In this show, it is certain, certain without one single pixel of doubt, that Character A is going to do X. There is nothing else they can or would do. It is impossible not to know in every detail what it is they’re about to do. But still we had to have Character B ask — I’m paraphrasing in case you Google the script — what Character A is going to do. And then sodding Character A has to tell Character B while we wait.

I have this distant memory of a film writer talking about being forced to help out what he or she called the Dimwit Element. It was never entirely clear — and I think deliberately — whether they meant the audience or the studio executives giving notes.

Either way, the reasoning was that there will be some people who don’t see the stunningly obvious and will feel bad. Will feel stupid. Who might then decide to go watch something else.

The theory goes that if we just help them out, they’ll stay and nobody who already saw what must happen will even notice our brilliant solution.

But the practice goes a different way. It tells the viewer to prepare for an hour’s worth of being patronised. It tells the viewer that there isn’t much to the show. It tells us, I think, that there is going to be no life or verve or wit in any of the writing.

I can see an argument that this does fall under the term exposition, but after an hour of watching and half a week of thinking, the only word I can come up with is shite.

“Sleep is a fond childhood memory” is a line I somehow remember from the pilot episode of “St Elsewhere” by Mark Tinker, John Masius andJoshua Brand, back in the late 1980s, and it’s said by a doctor warning new interns how much their lives are going to change in their jobs. In both 1977 and 2017, the Doctor said “sleep is for tortoises” in “Doctor Who” and for some reason I remember that too.

I remember dialogue from years and decades ago, but then on Wednesday night, I forgot to set my alarm. I think it’s likely that this was the first time in very many years that I’d not then been woken by beeps or my watch tapping me on the wrist. And it turned out that waking up at 07:30 instead of being woken at 05:00 had absolutely no cataclysmic impact on my day. Maybe I chewed faster over breakfast, but I still shot a video, wrote a tricky book proposal, wrote news and features for something like seven hours, then spent two more producing a podcast, then attended some meetings into the evening.

The difference appears to be right now. As I write this to you, it’s a little after midnight, I am just into Friday and I don’t want to go to bed. I suppose I’m tired, but so much less so than usual. For the past couple of years in particular, I’ve tended to faint onto the bed instead of going to sleep.

Yet tonight I’m not thinking about alarms or the morning. I’m thinking about how I project the day onto the night. That made need explaining, if not to you then certainly to me.

Follow.

You’re not doing anything while you sleep. There are dreams and for a couple of decades I would have nightmares that seem to have mostly wandered away now, although I do want to tell you you of one where I kept dreaming a notification was popping up in the top right corner of my vision. And of when I dreamt a particularly scary nightmare, got up to the loo, came back to bed and immediately dreamt a kind of Making Of documentary about that previous nightmare.

Anyway.

Insomnia and dreams aside, when you go to bed you’re usually lying there, just being there, just being. Sleep doesn’t know or care that you’re happy or sad, glad or worried, you’re just asleep.

Yet I’ve usually seen sleep as the enemy. I’ve gone to bed angry at having wasted another day. Sometimes it’s a friend: I’ve instead gone to bed feeling relieved and that I’ve earned sleep.

And sometimes I’ve really gone to bed at night only in order to hide.

I don’t know where my mind is, maybe I’m more tired than I think. But all of this is in my head now and you just know that I’m going to sleep on it.

That’s it, really: “writing is a weapon.” I could say that to you, possibly nod a bit for emphasis, and then shut up.

But being a man…

About this time last week I was at an international school in Geneva, talking to around 300 students about writing non-fiction, news, and persuasive writing. I’ve realised that I dislike the term persuasive writing just as much as I do the phrase creative writing: all writing is creative, all writing is persuasive.

But definitely, writing is a weapon. Since I was in Europe, I pointed out that you can make a strong case that Brexit leavers won because of 13 words. Specifically, 13 words on the side of a bus: “We send the EU £350 million a week, let’s fund our NHS instead.”

When you write anything down, it is more powerful. And in the case of the Brexit slogan, more immediately deniable the second they won, but that’s another story.

I do want to tell you that I built up to saying this line to the students. I didn’t build up very much, but I did build and the way I did so was to start with how all writing is a tool.

It clearly is. I was in Switzerland, and I’ve been before, and I’ve been to the States, solely because of ideas in my head that I typed out in different places. Writing got me flown around. Writing got me a takeaway last night.

Writing is a weapon and it is a tool. Admittedly, I’m now thinking about that Brexit bus slogan and having to admit to you that some writers are tools, too.

There’s something about disconnected moments suddenly becoming connected. It’s like a memory abruptly becomes taut and won’t ever loosen again. So last week was my mother’s funerals (one in England, one in Ireland) and this week I’ve briefly been moving out her furniture. I’ve a cut on my hand from when wood scraped across it as I took down a decades-old wardrobe, and before then, for a minute my ear held an impression of the handle on my mom’s coffin from when I was carrying that.

Here’s the thing. You cannot carry a coffin by yourself, you really need six people to do it, the whole pallbearer business is not for show or ceremony, it is a practical necessity. And when the coffin is on your shoulder, the weight is shocking, and the thump of wood against your head feels like the only real thing that’s going on.

Yet when you all then lower the coffin to hand height, it’s easier to carry. I did stumble by the grave, we were negotiating such a narrow line toward it, and I did shove my knee onto the corner edge of some stone work, but still carrying it around waist level was substantially easier.

And then when we had wide, cloth-like ropes and were lowering it into the grave itself, it was easy. Okay, not emotionally, but physically, it was fully and simply straightforward.

The same burden is totally different depending on how you carry it.

And if that is a snap-shut obvious perspective, it was new to me and I kept coming back to the thought a lot lately.

Until last Tuesday.

Listen, one of the things I have carried around with me since I was a teenager is guilt over how badly I assembled a wardrobe for my mom. I have this memory of guilt generally circling around everyone at the time because was I was supposed to be studying for some exams or other. I don’t know which ones, I barely paid any more attention to exams then as I do looking back now. Which may be why I did them so badly.

But what I carry is that there’s no excuse for how badly I made up that wardrobe. Two wardrobes, really, with a third centre section of drawers and a mirror.

I swear to you that I have always known the truth that if two people happened to breathe out near it at the same time, the whole thing would shatter. There are few things I have done in my life that are as shoddy and shamefully bad as that, and the fact that my mother pretended to be happy with it always strained credulity.

But on Tuesday I had to take that wardrobe down and, god in heaven, it turned to be so well built. It took hammers and full-swing temper to take it apart, it took judicious kicks, and the whole thing fought back by scraping me wherever it could.

For decades I have felt that wardrobe threatening to crumble and reveal me to be as bad a furniture assembler as it had always told me I was. And for decades it has actually been as solid as if I spent my life standing there, holding it up.

The same burden is totally different depending on when you look at it.

Unless, of course, I’m just substantially weaker at swinging a hammer now than I was as a teenager. I’ve only just thought of that.

I wish I could remember where I saw this. It was on one of those social media sites, you know the thing, places where we used to hang out but inexplicably concluded that it wasn’t worth all the right-wing crap.

Whichever one it was, what I saw was a thread that started with someone saying that some TV show was suspiciously like the idea they’d had. I’m not trying to protect names here, I’m just being useless. But the thing I do firmly remember is how the conversation thread went in two really clearly different directions.

Some people were telling this person things such as how he should tell the production company he wouldn’t sue them, so long as they commissioned him on the show’s second series.

Other people — all of the writers — were saying it’s a shame but it happens, no one has stolen this fella’s idea. I chipped in on this line too, mentioning how the films Tombstone and Wyatt Earp came out at the same time as did A Bug’s Life and Antz, as did Deep Impact and Armageddon. The list does go on. Babylon 5 and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.

Oh! In 2015, television had Timeless, 12 Monkeys, Outlander and Doctor Who, while in films there was Predestination and Hot Tub Time Machine 2. All of them about time.

There are just ideas that are in the air or more likely that are prompted by the same situations and interests and events and ingredients.

Although… I did once have a thing I wrote called the Airwolf Drinking Game go around the internet with my name taken off. (Airwolf is the 1980s US TV drama centred around a helicopter and has a famous theme tune. The game included such things as your having a drink any time any character has any problem whatsoever that does not require a $2 million Bell 222 helicopter to solve it. “I’ve lost my keys!” De diddly de, starts the theme, diddle dee de duh de duh duh, cue Airwolf.)

And there was this one time that I gave a script to a friend for advice and she told me it wasn’t worth it. Something just over a year later, she asked my advice on a script because I knew the situation it was set in. The situation was the same as my script, the plot was the same, the characters were the same, the sole thing different was that this writer was a total idiot to do this. I gave her every scrap of really bad advice I possibly could and as far as I know, her script didn’t go any further than mine had.)

You know that you cannot copyright an idea. It’s the execution of that idea that is a piece of work that can be legally protected.

I hope the person in that thread I read listens to the writers who were trying to cool the conversation down. I mean, that thing about not suing if they give him a job. That’s surely attempted extortion.

I wonder if there’s a story in that.

“A few thrilling moments” is a line I like in “Grosse Pointe Blank” when the hero is asked to summarise his last ten years. I like it enough that I used to use it annually myself, though sometimes I would spare you the details on account of listing what I did all year is clearly a high contender for the most boring thing for anyone else to read.

I’m not sparing you the details this year.

Chiefly because 2024 is still too close and still a bit too raw for me to entirely put into words yet, so instead I am reverting to type and putting it all into numbers. When you are incapable of judging the quality of what you do, you can always fall back on how much of it you did. My feeling is that if I get to do something twice, I can’t have been all that bad at it.

So while I stress that this is really just for me and your time would be vastly better spent scrolling off to anything else, in 2024, I:

Read 608 scripts
Read 37 books
Produced 66 YouTube videos
Produced 103 podcasts
Wrote approximately 55 scripts
Wrote 1,052 articles
Wrote 52 Self Distract blog posts
Wrote 52 Two-Minute Tip posts
Was interviewed on 17 BBC radio shows
Was interviewed on 1 BBC TV show
Was the sole guest on 4 podcasts
Was visiting author at 3 schools
Ran 12 in-person workshops
Ran approximately 45 Zoom writing sprint sessions
Edited 6 magazine issues
Wrote 2 theatre programme articles
Wrote 705,438 words overall
Took 2 weekends off
And the number of long-dead book projects that came back to life was: 2

I grant you that none of this is important to anyone in any way, and that all of it is transitory, except that it’s important to me and I need to hold on to it.

Truly, time passing is forever frightening. My mom died a couple of weeks ago, but now if you ask me, I have to say that she died last year. It’s insane. We get so little time and it goes so fast and I waste so much of it, I need to imagine I’m getting at least some things done.

And you, you have so much to do yet you read to the end. You are lovely. Thanks for indulging me: sometimes it’s just cathartic to write things down.