Author: William Gallagher

To cut a short story…

Posted by

I was approached by someone earlier this week about short stories and whether I’d be up for contributing to a thing. Then yesterday a new anthology of short stories called What Haunts the Heart was published – and I have a piece in it.

So, it’s official: I’m a short story writer.

This isn’t actually a new thing, and of course it certainly isn’t an important thing outside my own head. This anthology is the second I’ve had a story in and I’ve performed three short stories at various events. Then this year I joined Alex Townley’s Prompted Tales project which is specifically about short stories and pointedly about making us write the bloody things.

Each month, she sets a prompt and around ten of us toddle off to write something. I recognise the benefit of the deadline and the commitment, I also just find it absorbing to see how one thought spins off and out into ten such radically, enormously, preposterously different stories.

But it is the deadline that’s the thing so she sets this at the start of the month, we write and deliver by the end. This should mean that I’ve now written two short Prompted Tales, one for January and one for February. I have – but I’ve also written my March one. For I am a show-off.

Nobody comes to my door asking for a show-off, though. Instead now I get approached about short stories and while I’ve got to underline how rare the approaches are, the reason I’m blathering at you is that there are now some people who see me as a short story writer. They see me as that before they see everything else and there is no reason they should know about anything else.

Here’s the thing. It has taken a couple of years but it hasn’t taken a giant amount of effort: at some point I realised I wanted to write short stories so I did. Now without my truly noticing it, it’s become true.

We can, therefore, you and I, decide what we want to do and then do it and the next thing you know, it’s what we do.

So that’s it. I’m planting a flag in the ground today, this moment, and vowing to you that the next thing I’m going to do is become a halfway decent short story writer.

Exposed

Posted by

I have literally bled over my keyboard: I like to say that it was from the power of my writing or at least the power of my typing but in truth I just had a paper cut one Tuesday. This was untold years ago but I want to talk to you about it today because I’ve had three messily disconnected thoughts that I think might just be very tidily connected, if we can just focus on them.

At the start of the week, a friend mentioned that she’d had some criticism of a script of hers, that she’d been told “not enough bombs go off in it”. My friend agrees with this and now she’s said it, so do I. Only because she’s said it, though: I read that script, I enjoyed it very much and between us I rather envied her writing, but yes, on reflection, it needs a bomb or three.

Then a couple of days ago, another friend sent me a poem of hers which, as well as a good thousand other things, was about her breasts. Now, I’m a man and I am rather deeply flattered that she correctly trusted that I would take this poem the way it was intended, that I would look at it as a piece of writing she wanted an opinion on, that I wouldn’t go all hot and flustered about it.

Okay. I went a little hot and flustered. Oh, but you should see it: a real example of the power of a poet where those thousand things are all there, all present, all explored in the shortest, tightest, briefest writing. Every word vital, every rhythm and punctuation a key part of the effect.

Only, look what I just did. I admitted to you that I got hot and flustered but then I immediately ran off to hide into literary critique and try to sound like a professional writer. I did the equivalent of coughing at you, of saying I’ve just got something in my eye, of saying “so anyway, did you see the match?” or something.

Her poem is really, I feel, about many different kinds and levels of intimacy, of trust and bonding, of shared and unshared experiences and feelings, I think it’s about friendship and just human connection. But I’ll say it: her poem is also very sexy.

I found that hard to say to you. I find I’m also suddenly hoping she never reads this or that the next time we meet up, we can drink a lot of whisky to disguise my red face. Nothing could go wrong with that idea, could it? But I also need to accept that I find it hard to write material that is exposed and sexy. I think it may come from childhood when I read a lot of Arthur C Clarke and got exasperated at how schoolboy his constant panting about breasts in zero gravity is. Flash forward a lot of years and someone told me they thought a character of mine was a sexual fantasy and I was appalled because I think she’s right yet the character is not a fantasy of mine. Did she think it was, would you think that’s what I, um, respond to?

I think sexy goes far, far beyond the physical and I’ve written many women characters that I’ve fancied on the page for their wit and excitement, that I’ve then fancied in studio for who played those characters. I think you are now reading the only thing I have written about body parts. No, wait, I did a Self Distract once about the word skin. Okay, you’re now reading only the second thing I’ve written about body parts.

That skin one was to do with a misheard Suzanne Vega lyric that I found charged and exciting and true, and therefore feel gigantically smug that as it was misheard, that means I wrote it and she didn’t. I also feel stupid for mishearing a line for twenty years, but. Speaking of Suzanne Vega, though, she has a song with called Ironbound/Fancy Poultry and, set in a food market, it gets to speak of “breasts and thighs and hearts”. It’s taking words we associate with sex and keeping that association but also taking the words out into the light to examine them.

I said I had three thoughts and you’ve got to expecting that the third is also about sex. I’m being very male today. Only, no. This is where the disconnection comes in, the feeling I have that I’m groping – unfortunate word, sorry – toward something more. This third bit is about another friend who, possibly two years ago now, also asked me to read something of hers she was working on. It was a novel and I enjoyed it but in the talk with her later, I realised she’d had no qualms about asking me to read it.

There was nothing in that manuscript that worried her. Wait, no, there was one thing: she had a character called Will who was particularly attractive and she needed me to know that “he isn’t remotely, distantly, possibly based on you, William”. I would never have made the connection, it would never have occurred to me that it was my name, but now I went harrumphing into reading it.

That was all that troubled her, the coincidence of names. And I can see us in a coffee shop talking later, I can see the moment when I realised that what I felt the book was missing was something that gave her, the writer, qualms. Something that exposed her more, that for all it was about interesting characters in an interesting situation, it needed to also be more about the writer. Exposed is the right word. It needed some risk. I think the piece needed something that when she handed me the manuscript, she was embarrassed about how I’d take it.

This is what I’m striving for with you today, what I realise my writing needs to strive for more. I hurt my characters, I have emotional bombs going off and I have emotional bombs waiting to explode, but I don’t cut into myself. I don’t mean that I have to write about breasts but I need to bleed over the keyboard much, much more and the fact that I hold back is really getting on my tits.

Fortunately, nobody owes you anything

Posted by

“I’ve been loyal to British Gas,” said a member of the public on BBC News this week, “and I expected them to be loyal to me.” It was a story about pricing and the fella was commendably succinct and clear but he was wrong. More, he was wrong in a way that I see a great deal in writing.

The short version with British Gas is that he paid them for gas, they provided it, the end. Whether he was with them for a week or a decade, it’s the same transaction and ascribing a loyal relationship to it is like naming your car or the way that Britain thinks it’s got a special relationship with America.

The longer version in writing and actually in any work is that you are self-employed. Whether you think of it that way or not, whether you get to tick that box on your tax return or not, you are. Maybe right now you are working with a company but it is with, it is not for. They are paying you and will continue to pay for as long as you’re worth the money to them, and as long as they have the money. You will continue to work with them for as long as it’s worth it to you.

That’s not to say that there isn’t loyalty and there aren’t relationships but they with people, not with organisations. You can well argue that I’ve been loyal to the BBC but I’m long gone now and I’m not going back. You can even more argue that I’m loyal to Apple since I buy a lot of their products but again, no. One of my favourite keyboards – I’m sorry, I’m a writer, some of us get into pens, some of us into keyboards, it’s not healthy – but one of my keyboards is a Microsoft one. Love it. If Apple brings out something new, I will look at it not because it’s Apple but because their kit has been so very useful to me.

And I’m not saying you should clock-watch or be a jobsworth, either. I don’t believe I have ever had a commission or a contract or a job where I paid the slightest attention to the hours I was supposed to do. You’re there to do get something done, not to fill a time sheet, so if it takes you longer to get it right, you take longer.

Wait. I worked for Apricot Computers once and that was a dog of a year. I definitely clock-watched on that one. But then just as having had one spectacularly bad director means I relish all the good ones, one dreadful year there means I also deeply appreciate having work that I adore.

(Oh! Quick aside? There was someone at Apricot with a title like Communications Manager who left on maternity leave. I forget the details and the timings but a short while after she left, she had her child and she sent a note about it to be posted on the company’s noticeboard. She was British, working in the UK and working in communications but she wrote that note in hard-to-read flowery calligraphy – and in French. Give her credit though, that did communicate an awful lot to me about her.)

I was loyal to Radio Times, I think, and with all friendly and even rather happy respect to them, I was wrong. Only because I enjoyed it so much there and it felt so right to do it that I stayed too long. They got rid of me when I was no longer worth it to them but in truth it was several years after it had ceased being worth it to me. It’s not like I’d trade my time there for much of anything, but I would compress it down a bit if I could.

I think it’s just easy to stay somewhere or to stay with British Gas and call it loyalty. Plus you do get a lot of warmth from both. But think of it as loyalty and you’re going to feel knifed with betrayal when the company kicks you out or British Gas raises prices again. You’re also not going to look ahead and if you don’t think about what you’re doing next and what you want to do with your career, with your writing, nobody else is.

I was doing a mentoring thing yesterday which is partly about writing, partly about the business of being freelance and it’s peculiar how saying something to someone else helps you realise it for yourself. It’s fine and normal and necessary to apply for jobs but writers create their own opportunities. Rather than waiting for job advert and competing against other candidates, go to a company with a project that precisely fits you and nobody else. Most will say no but at least they’ll say it quickly and you won’t have to answer damn questions like “What is your biggest weakness?” And some will say yes.

I’ve worked with a few people now who are technically freelance but don’t see it that way. They work for an agency, they feel, and they all have exactly the same concerns and resentments about how the agency treats them. But you do not work for your agency, you work with them. It’s the tiniest of different ways to think about it but it’s an enormous difference that mentally helps you negotiate better and know when to leave for somewhere else.

Only time can tell

Posted by

Late one night this week, stewing with a cold and unable to sleep for coughing, I started to watch Somewhere in Time on Netflix. Don’t look for it: the film has gone. Even though I am new to Netflix, I did know that this happens, I just didn’t know that it could happen before I finished watching something I’d started.

There’s something fitting about it disappearing like this. I have to be in exactly the right mood to watch it and that mood is a bubble that never lasts long. Maybe Netflix is the Brigadoon of online streaming video services and in another hundred years the film will reappear. For a few moments or preferably the film’s 1 hour 48 minute running time, it will be as if the movie had always been there.

It does feel a bit like that now: it was made in 1980, and you can tell, but originally it was partly a present-day film, mostly a period piece and so now it feels like two period pieces. If you don’t know the film, it’s written by Richard Matheson and stars Christopher Reeve and Jane Seymour. I think summarising the film diminishes it and that maybe that’s one reason it was a flop on release: it’s a time-travel romance. The film only succeeded, only became a huge hit, after it was seen knocking around cable TV channels in the States. So really it only became a hit after people saw it.

If you do know the film, that’s not what’s on my mind. The book is. I like the movie but for the most part it is a nicer version of the story, it has an innocent sweetness that is sometimes good but often just too much. In comparison, I feel like the original novel tore at me. By chance, this week I’ve been interviewed for a TV show about my life – I was chosen because of my brilliant and apparently unique availability – and thinking about myself, seeing that film, being caught in this cold, it somehow showed me that this novel is deeply important to me.

somewhere-in-timeThe novel is also by Matheson and it’s called Bid Time Return after Shakespeare’s line in Richard II: O, call back yesterday, bid time return. Or it was called that: most editions after 1980 rename it Somewhere in Time. It’s obviously about time and for whatever reason that has become a profound obsession for me in drama and fiction. I also know that it is the first romance novel I read and while I haven’t read that many more since, I’ve noticed that everything I write is imbued with this. It used to scare me a bit: you might not spot it but I can see time and romance – and, full disclosure, thrillers – in every single thing I write.

I just don’t see romance as slushy, I see it as dangerous. That unpredictable, unreasonable, impossible lurch in your life. I’m fascinated by the power of romance, the compulsion, the roaring way it changes who you are and exposes who you can be. I’m riveted by what in the hell makes us admit to someone that we fancy them – and by what it’s like when they feel the same. That’s not slush, that’s primacord explosive.

Picture me forming this opinion when I was around 15. I suspect hormones played a part but I also think it would’ve been around then that I found the novel. I wish I could remember the details but I think I read it and at first didn’t realise how it got into me. I do vividly remember wanting to re-read it and not having a copy. At the time, there was a science fiction bookshop in Birmingham called Andromeda and they didn’t have it in stock. Nowhere did.

I remember standing at the Andromeda counter, mentioning to the owner Rog Peyton that I was so disappointed to not be able to find a copy anywhere. And I remember him saying something like “Wait there”. This was an independent bookshop where you felt much of the stock was there because it was beloved by the staff and when I say they had a special place in their hearts for Bid Time Return, they actually had a special place in the back. Rog had kept perhaps three or four copies of the book to sell only to people who were specifically searching for it.

At this point the book must’ve been quite rare and out of print, though the edition he sold me had the film’s rather beautiful period illustration on the cover so the movie was out. Maybe it’s a sign of how poorly the film fared at first, certainly it was a sign that Rog didn’t want people to casually pick up the last copies and chuck them on a shelf to never read.

I say all this to you and I can see me in that shop, I can feel that paperback in my hands. The novel is the same story about a man who falls for a photograph of a woman –– so far, not so very unusual –– but discovers that the photo was taken sixty years ago. It’s a funny thing: you know they are going to meet and you don’t care how the time travel is done, yet it has to be done in a way that carries you along. Or at least in a way that doesn’t drop you out of the story. It’s a remarkably fine line and the film is fairly good at it but the novel kills you. You are in that story and you are feverish as Richard Collier of 1971 burns to reach Elise McKenna of 1912.

Then you also have to have their first meeting and even at 15 I thought bloody hell, Richard Matheson is a smart writer. I’m willing to spoil a lot of this for you as it’s over forty years since the novel came out and about thirty-six since the movie, but I won’t spoil that scene which works well in the film and perfectly in the novel. I also won’t go to the filming location and re-enact the moment but people do. A lot.

I want to spoil or maybe just a tiny bit heighten two other moments, though, and especially as I think they’re appropriate to writing. One is very much about books and the other is very much about visuals.

The first ties to this business of getting us to agree about time travel: we know it’s coming, you don’t have to really sell us but you must somehow make it fly. Matheson does all manner of things to set us up for this in the book and his film screenplay does many of the same things but quicker. Yet arguably it all turns on one moment of deeply believable despair as Richard Collier no longer believes or can even hope that he’ll ever do it.

Matheson brings us to a moment where we did not see this coming but we should’ve done: Richard is in a hotel and trying to get back in time to that same hotel sixty years ago. He goes hunting for the hotel’s guest books and in one of these dust-caked, mouldy old ledgers, there he is. His name, signed in as a guest in 1912. Matheson plays this as clinching proof for Richard, the thing that makes him believe and so makes him succeed but I keep thinking about that signature waiting there. Throughout Richard’s life, that line was in that ledger waiting for that moment of discovery. That line would not be in that ledger if he didn’t find it.

Then visually the entire plot turns on the photograph that Richard sees of Elise. The way it’s described in the novel and the feeling that is conveyed in the movie is that it seems as if in this photograph she looking at Richard. Even at 15 and certainly now at somewhat older, I’m thinking right, sure, he just fancies her, don’t try to make it slushy. But the punch, for me, comes much later when we find out that actually, yes, she is looking at him.

There’s a brief scene where Richard walks in on the photograph being taken and the moment of the lens click is the moment Elise has seen him. She is looking at him in that photo and if he hadn’t been there, the photo would’ve been different and maybe he would never have looked at it.

I’m biased because I love the novel, I like the movie and I think about all this far too much. But these are resonant moments that – I’m right, aren’t I? – only time can tell.

Read the film’s screenplay online
Buy Somewhere in Time the movie in the UK or in the US
Buy Bid Time Return/Somewhere in Time the novel in the UK or in the US

Taking Time – the Movie

Posted by

image

Here’s a nice way to look at something: I can tell you that I’ve written my first short film and that it is a gorgeous piece of work that centres on my dramatic obsession about time and its passing, time and its inexorable movement, time and regret. That’s a nice way to look at it and it is in all ways true, except it isn’t.

Taking Time is a short film produced by Ian Kennedy, directed by Gabe Crozier and starring Denny Hodge. It was written by Ian Kennedy, Andy Conway, Liz John, Mark Brendan, Nicola Jones and me, William Gallagher. I am unquestionably the smallest part of that list but it’s a big deal to me.

Sitting in that cinema on Tuesday, seeing my section of our film and especially seeing my name on the credits, that was quite a moment. I’m reminded of the first time I was in a magazine, the first time I was in a newspaper, the first time I was on television, the first time I saw actors on TV saying my words, the first time I saw a cast doing that on stage, the first time I had a book of mine in my hands. I remember the first talk I gave, the first workshop I ran, the first time I went into a school. Really vivid, all of them, and my credit on that screen is there in my head forever.

Well, I hope so. For some reason I can’t remember the first time I was on radio. That startles me: I could make a good guess: it would be on BHBN, the Birmingham Hospital Broadcasting Network – hospital radio that at the time went out to twenty hospitals in the region – and possibly followed quite soon by BBC Radio WM. But I don’t know, can’t remember.

I’ll worry about that later. For now, I am just enjoying that I have a film out. Okay, it was premiered this week and it’s next showings will be in film festivals so I can’t yet point you to a screening time. And it’s not my film, I am that tiny cog.

No.

Bollocks to that.

I’m talking to you, I’m not writing a press release, so this is how it is: it is my movie. I wrote a film. It premiered this week.

You can read more about it on the Screenwriters’ Forum website where you’ll also find out about the Forum’s new script development workshops. That’s another excellent thing that Forum chair Ian Kennedy has introduced.

That’s a thought. You’re nice so you’re thinking I’m being modest about my contribution but no, I’m a cog. And here’s an example for you of where credit should really go. I used to be the chair of the Screenwriters’ Forum and in my last meeting I think I had about six members turn up plus we ran out of apple juice.

For new chair Ian Kennedy’s latest meeting, he had a full-house cinema audience and a movie with the whole thing covered by BBC Midlands Today.

But it’s still my film, right?

Thin film

Posted by

All week I’ve been looking forward to talking to you because – please wait for this and picture me savouring telling you – I’ve got a film coming out. Next Tuesday night, “Taking Time” gets its cinema premiere. I need you to know that actually my contribution is the smallest thing: this is a short film written by five writers and I think I account for about one minute of it. Still, it’s a minute. In a film.

I’m actually refusing to watch it before Tuesday because I want to walk into that cinema and enjoy it. But let me point you at details of the film because it’s also part of the launch of the Screenwriters Forum which you might be interested in. Otherwise, I’m going to tell you more about this next week instead, because something happened last night that I need to tell you. I’m not sure there’s anyone else I can talk to about this as it’s confidential. Plus you’ve already seen through the thin film that is my hard man tough guy image.

(Hang on. If the film is rubbish then I won’t mention it next week and we won’t speak of it ever again, okay?)

Anyway.

Late yesterday afternoon I ran a scriptwriting workshop in Stourbridge Library for Gavin Young. He’s a writer, performer, storyteller and at the moment also the Reader in Residence at the library who booked me for this talk. I had a blast. I hope everybody there did too, but I definitely had a blast and a half plus it came at the end of back to back workshops and deadlines. For me, it was like getting to natter with a group of fellow writing nutters. I did have to run away immediately afterwards to get back to writing deadlines, but it was the last event and it did feel like a long week was over.

It’s early evening in Stourbridge. A dark winter’s evening. Windy. Cold. And raining enough that I shouldn’t have got out my phone but when do I not get out my phone? There was an email waiting with the subject heading “A little bit of feedback for you”.

I can’t tell you very much at all as it’s to do with work I’ve been doing with school-age kids but because of who sent me it, I knew from her name and that subject what it was going to be about, I knew it was going to be from parents. I crossed my fingers as I tapped to open the message, hoping that this feedback was going to be okay.

It was.

There were just a very few short lines and if I could tell you what it was, you’d think that’s nice and I think you’d be pleased for me but you wouldn’t be gasping.

I didn’t gasp either.

But I stood in that road and I cried.

Book people

Posted by

This is new. As I write this to you, there’s a writing workshop going on and I’m producing it. Just over there. In that room. Now, obviously I would come out of it to talk to you – nobody else, mind, let’s be quite clear there – but I’m not in the room at all. The session is being run by <a href=”https://twitter.com/smalextownley”>Alex Townley</a> and I’m hearing laughter, I’m hearing the buzz of chatter, I’m hearing that it is going very well.

I should be feeling rubbish out here but instead I am deeply, deeply delighted. It’s like when you write a scene you think is good, you hope it’s good and then you see it working even better. A couple of years ago now I sat in the audience at the Birmingham Rep watching a discussion event on stage and actually marvelling that I’d made that happen. You can’t count the number of other people involved but I couldn’t dismiss the fact that I made it happen. Nobody in that audience had any idea I had anything to do with it and at the end, everyone on stage got applauded and I was right there applauding with them.

There is something just tremendous about creating things, I think, and when you have someone good doing part then it is tremendous that you saw what they could do and you got them. This week of the writing workshop series is about creating characters and bringing them to life on the page: no question, Alex is the one to tell them about that. Equally no question, or at least not very many questions or at least I’m not listening to you if you’re questioning, is the fact that I’m the guy to do next week’s one on dialogue.

You should probably not get me started on dialogue. It’s my thing. You’ve got your thing, I’ve got dialogue. It keeps me warm.

And the instant I say that to you, my mind splits in two directions. I want to tell you of a line of dialogue that cropped up in a TV drama recently where someone said: “I’m done with listening, do you hear me?” I don’t fully understand why I laughed at that.

But my mind also wants to address the realisation that I’m just after saying that to you about dialogue and what am I doing tonight? I said a few words at the start and I will at the end, otherwise I’m sitting here typing.

It’s not typing, though, is it? It’s writing to you. It’s a weekday evening as I write this, I’m sitting in the offices of <a href=”http://www.writingwestmidlands.org”>Writing West Midlands</a>, there’s a colleague working across the room, and next to both of us is this room where a group of writers are having a good time concocting characters. I think this is pretty good.

Reading and writing

Posted by

I can remember my sister trying to teach me to read. I can see her, I can see the room, I can feel my anxiousness to get away, I can hear my mom saying okay, well, maybe that’s enough for today. I was slow to start and while I’m fuzzy now on the details of how it went at school, I know I was in a remedial reading class for a least a while. I know that because I can equally clearly see the room and the teacher.

Again, I’m shaky on details but I think it was that several of us who were below average reading ability were regularly taken off out of classes and into some other room to read. I’m sure of it, actually, because the thing I can see, the moment I can completely visualise is when the teacher thought I was pretending to read.

Whatever it was, however it happened, there was just one moment when suddenly I could read very well. I’m not certain I even realised it: I picture her asking me to read something aloud and instead of struggling as I presumably did up to then, I read it flawlessly. I read that flawlessly, I read the next piece she shoved under my nose and the next. I read and read and never went back to that remedial class again.

I don’t often tell people that but chiefly because I don’t often remember it. Reading is just part of everything I do, it’s part of everything I am. Only, I wanted to tell you this today because something happened this week. It’s something that I am having difficulty processing, I am struggling to get it into my skull. But then equally, I can’t seem to get it out of my head either.

I’m a best-selling author.

Seriously.

You’ve got to let me qualify that, you’ve got to let me try to whittle it down a bit. I’m a best-selling author of a non-fiction book, actually solely an ebook, and I’m a best-selling author only in its very, very specific niche. I’ll tell you: the book is called <a href=”http://amzn.to/1OdOCJx”>MacNN Pointers: Get More from Your Apple Software</a> and I co-wrote it with Charles Martin. We are best-selling authors of this collection of tutorials on how to use the software that comes with your iPhone, iPad, Mac and so on. We co-wrote it, I edited it and the book was proposed by Mike Wuerthele. He’s managing editor of MacNN.com, Chas is editor.

Within a few hours, certainly no more than a day of it being available, the book went to number 1 in its category on Apple’s iBooks Store in both the US and the UK. On Kindle, it was number 2 in the US and nowhere near as high in the UK – but high enough that Amazon listed it has a Hot Seller. Then at some point it became number 10 on Amazon for books in its category. That’s books, not ebooks. Number 10 in its category across both ebooks and physical books.

That speed isn’t just exciting, for me, it’s directly responsible for the best-selling status. For publishing has changed and not just in the fact that there are now ebooks. It’s changed in how I believe it used to be that the book that sold the most number of copies was the best-selling number 1. I don’t know that was the case but it sounds pretty reasonable. Today that is a factor but so is the speed of sales: something selling a dozen copies a minute will chart higher than something selling a dozen a week, even if the former only lasts for one minute.

So the fact that, for whatever reason, the book was immediately popular, that’s what took it into this status. I can tell you we’ve sold a couple of hundred copies so it’s not like we’re shirking.

I’m not thinking of numbers though. I’m certainly not thinking of the money: this is not something that will change my week let alone my life. I’m thinking instead of how this is like the time a proof copy of my first-ever book arrived. I held that book in my hand and I realised no one can ever take it away from me. Good or bad, I’d created that book and long after my death if any other writer wants to cover the same ground, their proposal will have to explain how my book can be bettered.

In much the same way, then, you can argue that best-seller status doesn’t mean what it used to, you can very well argue that it’s a bit different being a best-selling author in a non-fiction technology category than it is being a novelist on the New York Times charts. But you can’t take it away. No one can. I actually am a best-selling author.

I’m a little red-faced with excitement yet also pale: a slow-starting reader, a remedial-class reader, what one pixel changed in my life or my head that turned me into a writer? I am unemployable in any other job: I think a lot about what would’ve happened if I’d not found this in me.

I’m also uncomfortable being proud of this. I’m only telling you, right? And any publisher I ever pitch to, naturally. I’m modest but I’m not stupid.

No, sorry, modesty is wrong. I am British, that is how I feel about it, but I’m also proud and so I should be. I didn’t particularly aim to be a best-selling author, the lifetime ambition has been just to write and keep writing, but now it’s here I am and I should be proud.

I got to this the long way around, I got to it through stubborn persistence. So yes, I’ve been pig-headed for a long time and maybe now I can spend a minute or two being big-headed instead.

I have seen Star Wars – and so have you

Posted by

You have seen the new Star Wars, you have. You just might not know it. Star Wars: The Force Awakens is a remake of the original film with Rey (Daisy Ridley) as a new and less wet Luke (Mark Hamill) and that does not seem to bother many people. The film has made something like $1.5 billion in the last half an hour plus it has had superlative reviews. Only, do you know who else has seen Star Wars?

Rey.

The lead character in the new Star Wars film has seen Star Wars.

Remember that often parodied scene from the original when Obi-Wan Kenobi (Alec Guiness) controls a Stormtrooper’s mind? “These aren’t the droids you’re looking for.” Rey has seen it too because that is the only way that she could possibly know that you can do this and how to do it.

That’s too far for me, that is going too far. I adore Back to the Future part II which is literally the first film repeated but that’s done with the glorious chutzpah of going back in time and showing us the same scenes from a new perspective. Love it. Star Wars: the Force Awakens doesn’t have that wit.

It sets out to be a new episode in the series and initially has the occasional nod to the original. That’s risky: it’s hard to stay absorbed in the new story when you can’t help but nod at references you recognise. It might be worth the risk, to a point, as the needs you to know it’s part of the same world as the original but long before Rey gives us a movie review, the references overwhelm.

I remember watching JJ Abrams’s Star Trek Into Darkness and murmuring “cue Spock” just before he entered and delivered word for word the line I knew he would. With Star Wars: The Force Awakens, I clearly remember thinking “at least they’re not going to repeat the trench scen – oh. Bugger.”

I’m with you if you loathe George Lucas’s Star Wars prequels and I’m with you shuddering about Jar Jar Binks. But it’s a fine, fine line between the appallingly poor Jar Jar and the cultural icon Yoda: Jar Jar could’ve worked and at least Lucas was trying something new. The Force Awakens isn’t.

Even the new film’s seemingly big and genuinely good move of concentrating on a woman character isn’t truly new because it is done in the very oldest of ways. I just called Rey a woman because she is but every character in the film calls her a girl. More, every character is surprised when she can fly starships and when she can fight.

She’s never allowed to just be, to do what she does. If a scene is not a repeat of an original Star Wars one then its purpose is to show that the new creative team has cast a wom – sorry, girl – and that they’re great for doing so.

On my drive to the cinema, a car pulled in front of me with a bumper sticker saying “You’ve just been overtaken by a girl”. You’re not now thinking I should’ve called the police, a prepubescent underage child was driving, you’re thinking you know exactly what it meant. It meant that the driver was embodying girl power and that I, as a man driving behind, must be somehow threatened by this, must have my machismo thwarted.

I don’t have any machismo and I could not even fake giving a damn that this car was in front of me. But I have a lot of bile at the assumptions and the presumptions. In the same way, The Force Awakens assumes and presumes that I will be surprised a woman – sorry, girl – can fly, fight, breathe, be. So in the same way I am annoyed and affronted and insulted.

It’s just worse that I already knew the film so well from last time that it couldn’t keep my attention.

I’ve not seen Star Wars

Posted by

I’ve not seen the new film so I can’t spoil it for you. But although I hope to get out of work early today to see it, it’s not the film that’s on my mind. I’m not really thinking of any of the Star Wars films themselves, I am thinking of how they crop up every few decades and remind me of everything else that was going on.

It’s like life is this long rope back down the mountain and the Star Wars movies are pitons in the rock. They are fixed points and each one reminds me of that spot in time even though the films themselves aren’t a big part of those moments. I mean, I have a uselessly good memory for footage: for example there’s a certain type of US TV drama whose closing credits would be done over clips from the episode and I always unerringly notice when the clip is a different take. Totally useless, though sometimes handy when you’re editing video and can remember seeing just the right moment within the hours of footage. So I’m footage-aware, except with Star Wars.

When the prequels are on the telly I have caught myself wondering if I even saw these films because I don’t recognise anything. And as big as all the Star Wars movies were, maybe none were as anticipated as Return of the Jedi. We’d had Star Wars itself, we’d had The Empire Strikes Back which as well as ending on a cliffhanger was also just a good film, so Jedi was a big deal. In six movies, the single frame I remember from seeing in the cinema is an early shot in Jedi where we see the Death Star and I thought oh. We’re late getting into the cinema, such long queues genuinely around the block at the Gaumont in Birmingham, and they’ve started the film before we are at our seats. Doing that excuse me, pardon me, thanks dance through the line, I am seeing the Death Star on screen and all interest, all excitement somehow punctured.

That’s all I remember from the films as I saw them in the cinema: the deflation at Jedi, that single shot somehow telling me this was not going to be a great night. It wasn’t and there’s probably a life lesson in how I believed it was a disappointingly poor film but we didn’t yet have the prequels to know what poor means.

I do remember a vague shot from when I went to see Empire. It’s much less clear in my mind and partly because it isn’t from The Empire Strikes Back at all. I’d won a contest in the Evening Mail and got to see an early screening. I remember the thrill of being in a cinema during the day to see an exclusive screening and the footage I remember is from one of the Omen movies that was playing when we were led back out through the auditorium.

For Star Wars itself, I say the title and I see a very young me walking with my mom across an ice-cold Birmingham. I remember excitement, I remember my mother saying she didn’t understand the film, I think I remember her holding my hand. I do remember us having a meal out at a Berni Inn. I remember how special that was. If you remember that chain of steakhouses, you may think I’m being sarcastic but no, it was special at the time.

I was the exact perfect age for the original Star Wars when it first came out. Exactly perfect: with Star Wars I was a little boy rooting for Luke and Leia to get together but by the time Empire came out I was old enough to see that Luke was wet and Han Solo was the guy. Later every man you know is supposed to have gulped a bit at Princess Leia’s gold bikini in Return of the Jedi and I didn’t. I saw that and felt I was supposed to gulp. I resented it: you think you can push my hormones around? But I had fallen hard for Carrie Fisher in Empire and maybe it’s because she had more to do in that, she was a more interesting character clad in white snow gear instead of barely wearing gold. Maybe I was also getting all sophisticated: I think it was around Empire that I finally nodded and thought yes, it was right that Star Wars had lost out at the Oscars to Annie Hall.

I’m a boy for Star Wars, I’m hormonal for Empire, I’m disappointed for Jedi. Flash forward to 1999 when The Phantom Menace came out and what I remember so vividly is going to see another press screening. I’m now a BBC film reviewer, writing for Ceefax and possibly the nascent BBC News Online if that had started yet. Sitting in a very large press screening, aware that somewhere over there on that opposite side there’s Barry Norman. I’m seeing a film at the same time as quite legendary film reviewer.

I’m also seeing it at the same time as my editor from Ceefax. Never before or after did the editor go to a screening with the reviewer, never before or after would two people go to any screening, but this was big. The first Star Wars in nearly two decades. I remember going in to that Leicester Square screening with her, I remember us coming out. I liked that editor a lot and far, far more than I liked the film and I hope she felt the same. I know she felt the same about the film.

There was this giant, giant movie, this world event really, and I can see us walking out of the cinema into bright sunshine and all thoughts of the film evaporating. We were more interested in what we were doing for the rest of the day, getting back to the newsroom, the other deadlines going on, anything but the movie.

That was 16 years ago. Today my BBC work is behind me and I’m not reviewing Star Wars for anyone. But I’m going to a screening and I’m thinking of the work I’m doing now, I’m thinking actually rather excitedly positive thoughts about what I get to do these days. More excited about my work than about this movie. I’m also just thinking of that editor, of that Death Star, of Carrie Fisher’s heart-buckling Nordic look in Empire and her superb writing style since then, I’m thinking of The Omen and how the Gaumont cinema is long gone, I am thinking of an ice-cold night walking across Birmingham holding hands with my mother.

Who needs to actually see Star Wars?