Author: William Gallagher

Thin film

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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?

Ginnunga-gap

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Finally, I’ve got a name for it. Listen, last night I did my 120th speaking gig of the year and this one had something in common with maybe 10 of  the others. It’s not a good thing, not for me, but normally it only happens in what turn out to be the very best speaking gigs I do. That’s not the case now: last night’s wasn’t my very best. It was a Writers’ Guild event to do with supporting the Birmingham Writer in Residence job at the Birmingham Rep and the BBC. Guests were great, audience was perfect and I honestly don’t think anyone left that room feeling disappointed. Yet I wasn’t good enough. I’m thinking about this.

But quite shortly into it, I hit this thing I have today decided to call the Ginnunga-gap. I just make up syllables, really, and throw in a hyphen. if you don’t know the term – and I had to look it up despite knowing it for centuries – let me tell you in a moment. First, what I mean by it.

Whatever the subject you’re talking about, whatever the audience and whatever the format of the event, you have a certain time to fill and part of the job is filling that well. In these 10 or so cases, there has come a moment when I knew I couldn’t fill the time.

It’s usually about two thirds of the way through and we’ve all been working rather quickly, we’re through or nearly through all my material. The time from when it hits me to the end of the event can be as much as three hours. It is a calamitous, lurching fear that damages your stomach.

Officially, the Ginnunga-gap is a gaping abyss, a yawning void, it is the primordial void in Norse mythology. (Wikipedia spells it as one word, Ginnungagap.) That’s not where I know it from. It’s taken me a long time to remember where and actually to recall exactly the term. I knew it was Something Something Gap. It’s also taken me the last hour of searching through iBooks and Kindle when the book I know it from was right there on the shelf above my Mac. In direct line of sight, in fact.

The book is a collected quartet of novels by James Blish that together are known as Cities in Flight. It’s a remarkable series that uses this Ginnunga-gap term to describe the period between the end of this entire universe and the start of the next. I read it as a teenager, I think, and every many years I happen across it again and end up re-reading it. It’s the novel with my favourite technical term: the spindizzy. Love it. Just the word. I’m not fussed what it means.

I’m less keen on my Ginnunga-gap and while I do recommend the novels, I recommend your being better prepared than I sometimes am. I promise you that I’m prepared, sometimes far too much, and I admit that last night my thumb caused part of the problem. Instead of a nice OmniOutliner document with all my notes for the event, I looked down at my iPad and found I was reading the running order of a radio podcast I’d produced earlier in the week. “Well,” I said to the audience. “Any questions for the panel?”

My abilities and performance aside, last night I’d misjudged the amount of time we’d need for what we were doing and that was partly because I didn’t get exactly the audience I’d anticipated. Everyone who came was serious and there to find out things, but I’d mentally budgeted time for more people and the inevitable number of long-winded questions you get from a proportion of folk. Plus there are various issues around this topic that I’ve been asked about privately and would have to deal with but didn’t come up on the night. So I’m okay with that, that’s a natural development of an event in progress.

But this time I got the Ginnunga-gap about seven minutes into the 90.

Nine out of these last ten events with this stomach-tearing gap worked out brilliantly, in my opinion, and there is definitely something about working under pressure. Also about having a mental grab-bag of tools and topics plus a bucketful of anecdotes. None of that helped last night because my job was not really be there, to not be in the way, to not be the point of the event. Instead my job was to solder the panel and the audience together and make sure the former got to say what they needed and the latter got to hear what they must. I actually think I handled the questions well, choosing the next person, letting others know I’d seen them so they could put their hands down, then correctly going to those people, calling many out by name although most I hadn’t met before. All the usual stuff.

I’ve just realised that this particular usual stuff is when I’m working with the audience or I’m working with the panel. When I’m on my own – let me go from Norse mythology to Strictly Come Dancing – I’m out of hold. And there’s too much gapping.

Next gig: tomorrow.

 

Christmas Double Issue

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There is a pretty good chance that the words “Christmas double issue” mean something to you. Possibly they even mean a lot. If they do then you’re thinking of Radio Times for certain, maybe also TVTimes and if they don’t then you’re thinking eh?

RT Christmas cover

For the past 46 years, Radio Times magazine has produced a double issue of television and radio listings covering Christmas and New Year fortnight. Anything that lasts that many years, and looks set to continue forever, is going to build up a certain history but RT was at the heart of Christmas. It’s not unreasonable to say that Christmas wasn’t Christmas without Radio Times. I don’t think it is so special or important any more, I think the fondness we have for this issue is momentum from when it was usually the best and sometimes the only way to know what was on TV.

It’s the biggest-selling issue of the year by far and certain planning for it begins in January. That’s logistical planning to do with the print runs and the distribution. Editorial planning begins much later and I’ve completely forgotten when.

Even though I spent many years at Radio Times, chiefly on the website but also often writing for the magazine, I can’t remember when it all begins. I just remember that there is a stretch of weeks when you’re working on the regular weekly magazine plus the Christmas one. It’s known as pickup and I do not know why. Because you have to pick up the pace? I don’t know.

Pickup is exhausting and I’m thinking of all this now partly because the 2015 one should be out this weekend but also because there was a photo on Facebook of RT people working late into the night. I’d forgotten the exhaustion. Not that I ever truly experienced it to the extent the full time staff did.

But when I was writing their On This Day television history column, there was a point around late November when I would have to deliver five weeks’ worth in one go to meet all the various deadlines. That wasn’t easy.

Then – I can look back at this fondly because it was a long time ago but actually I was quite fond of it at the time – the Radio Times website used to have its own pickup period. Being online, the site’s pickup period used to begin the moment the magazine’s one finished. And for a couple of rather glorious years, I used to work on the magazine’s pickup and then immediately swap over the site’s one. Loved it.

I’d have to ask before I could tell you with any confidence when I left Radio Times but it has to be a lot of years ago now. And yet if you get the Christmas Double Issue and you look very, very hard, you will find my name and an entire 100 words I wrote.

I’ll take that. Christmas wouldn’t be Christmas for me if I weren’t in the Double Issue.

Time and space

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Damn him, he was right. At midnight on my 21st birthday, this fella sat me down in front of him, crouched very close and told me that because he was doing this, I would always remember that moment, I would always remember him.

It felt a bit invasive, really, and I have some small pleasure in telling you that I remember the moment, I remember the room, the house, the woman next door I had a crush on, I remember everything except who in the hell he was. I can’t quite recall his face, can’t quite forget it either. So he’s in my head but as if with one foot in my noggin, one foot not.

I can’t decide if that’s better than my 30th of which I can’t remember a single thing. I’ve been pretty good ageing one year a time and in the right sequence but if you told me I’d skipped my 30th, I’d believe you.

My 40th is easy: I was in shock. Not because of the age, I’m not one of these people who get bothered by a number, but because of my wife Angela Gallagher. My teenage self would be startled that I was married, my sophisticated 40-year-old self was agog that she was still with me, but that wasn’t the shock. The true, honestly put-me-into-trauma-shock was that she surprised me with a trip to New York City. It’s my favourite place in the world and I did not see that coming.

Listen, I think you see where this is going and I think you see full well that actually I am one of those people who get bothered by a number. I wasn’t. But I am now. As I write this, I’m 49 and when you read it, I will be at least 50. Could be older if you’re a slow reader or if all that survives of the 21st century is this chat with you. But at least 50.

I have found it hard. I am finding it hard. I could do you a CV and it would sound okay. I can tell you that I am half the writer I wanted to be but, truly, I’ll take that – so long as this isn’t the end and my writing is still in progress.

It’s not even as if I simply feel old. I do, though. I was working with a school recently when an 8-year-old called me a ‘random unfamous guy with no dress sense’. I’ve also recently been described as a looking like an English teacher or ‘everybody’s favourite Geography teacher’. One guy thought I was a professor and didn’t mean it as an insult, I think he even fancied me. (Still got it, eh? I’m asking you seriously: I can’t tell. Can never tell.)

And none of these things are bad plus the fact that people have descriptions of me is profoundly flattering. Even the bad opinions, it means I am somehow in people’s heads. Briefly, no doubt, but there. Considering that I just assume that when I’ve left a room, I am gone from people’s minds, I am warmed by all this. Warmed by English or Geography, warmed by it all.

Only, they’re wrong. How can they be so wrong? I’m not a professor or a lecturer or an adult: I am 17 and I haven’t done anything yet.

That is a big, recurring thing with me that does not need a 50th birthday to be in my mind: the sense that I have only just started, that I have so much to do and, yes, not a giant amount of time left in which to do it.

So clearly I should get on with it, shouldn’t I? Except I wanted to tell you something. On my birthday I will be in Paris, my other favourite place in the world and while I get that these are not great times for the city, the time and the space means a lot to me.

And so does this. When I remember my 50th, it will be a memory of me crouching down to look you in the face and telling me that I will always remember talking to you right here.

Learning from rejection

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This isn’t about you or me, this isn’t about improving our writing because of rejections and it isn’t about taking deep breaths and getting over things. I don’t bother with the deep breaths and if I took time to get over things, I’d never get anything else done. Instead, this is about them: the people who do the rejecting and how they do it. For I got two rejections yesterday, which is ordinary and normal, but them coming within minutes of each other and being so very different stopped me short. I am disappointed about both of them and in each case they were things I actually wanted rather than being a freelancer just opening a discussion. You know how it is, I’m a freelancer so I’m in business, often enough times you pitch for something and it’s purely a financial choice. It’s for the cash, face it.

I always think you can tell when that’s the case: when a writer is doing something solely for the income and isn’t really interested, that comes through in the writing. This is one way where writing can be a bit arty-farty: if an accountant is doing a job they don’t care about, the numbers still look the same at the end. With a writer, the text is different. You can’t point to a particular word but you also can’t fail to see the tone.

In both these cases I was fully and entirely genuine, very much into both but the reason these rejections are sticking with me, the reason I want to talk to you about them today, is that I think I’ve been a bit stupid. I just said to you that you can’t miss the tone of a disinterested writer: I have always known that you can tell a lot about the person writing regardless of what they’re saying. I’ve also always known that I have no chance convincing you that I’m deeply charming and roguishly handsome even though I swear I’ve improved since we last met.

What was stupid of me was to not realise that this applies just as much to the writers of rejections. Usually a rejection comes in, you shrug or occasionally think “What was this one again?” and you move on. Sometimes it is a knife, I’m not saying it isn’t, but in the ordinary, normal everyday run of things there are lots of ordinary, normal everyday rejections.

One of these two was like that. I’m freelance but this one was for a six-month contract, it would’ve been a big deal and I honestly couldn’t decide about it in time so I applied figuring I’d think it through if they offered me the gig. Yesterday’s email from them said sorry, you haven’t got it, try us again next time. It was short but not terse, clear but not blunt. It was polite and it was professional. So am I: while I’m disappointed, I wouldn’t have looked at this rejection twice if it weren’t for the other one.

The other was about a short play. I rarely say this because I rarely think it but I adore this play of mine. It is joyous and I wrote it for two friends, I wrote it with them in mind, I pretty much wrote it at their insistence and I am inexpressibly grateful to them. Since the minute I wrote it and submitted it to a local festival they pressed me about, I have wanted to see it performed – and I’ve also wanted to do something more with it. Something bigger. I couldn’t while it was in contention for this festival so for the first time in ages it actually did annoy me that things got delayed. Give me a yes or give me a no, I’m fine either way.

I think the result was about four months late, I’m not sure. Might be less. And it was a no and I am fine with every part of that except that I do feel I’ve let these friends down. They got me to write a great script, they’re not even going to see it performed. I will. The delays mean I’ve lost a spot that I could’ve pitched it for in something else but it’ll be staged somewhere.

What fascinates me is that I read this rejection email and for the very first time ever, the subtext tells me I would’ve had a bad time if they’d said yes. The rejection email was Dickensian. Charles Dickens writing about a death in the family. Hand-wringing melodrama about the anguish the decision had caused them. The Royal Shakespeare Company would never be so crass but it was like the RSC rejecting a seven-year-old rather than just another festival saying nope, sorry, we don’t want it.

I can’t really tell you the name of the festival but you’ve never heard of it anyway. My friends say good things about it but I wouldn’t even know the name if they hadn’t told me. If I’d got in, I’d be very pleased but there is just no part of it that’s a big deal. I think I’m being unprofessional telling you this – I can’t help myself, you’ve got that face, I tell you everything – but what I learned from that rejection letter was that I’d have had a bad time working with these people.

Hey, maybe they just write a rubbish email. But speaking of that, just now, back up there where I was mentioning the six-month gig, I had an email. Forgive me, I broke off for a second to check it because it’s important and turns out to be relevant. Earlier today, I read a new draft of a piece I’m collaborating on and responded that I like this bit, don’t like that change, have removed this line, would like to add this other thing if we all agreed. The email I got back interrupting you and I said, broadly, yep, no, fine, yes and, bang, the article has been published.

Rejection is just part of the job and telling me a serialised drama about your rollercoaster of anguish and heartbreak rejecting me is insulting and patronising. When I work with you on a festival we are working together, we are working together to create something for an audience. When you try to stroke me like I’m a kitten with toothache, you have an insupportably high opinion of yourself and rudely low opinion of me.

I do not want to trivialise rejection, I’ve had the knives in the stomach, but those blades are rare and usually rejection is trivial. My friends are telling me to try again next time so excuse me, I need to go tell them no, I’m going to pass on that. I wonder how they’ll take it.

Bad things happen when you handwrite

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So I was using the new iPad Pro the other day and was handed the new Apple Pencil. I thought this was a sily name for a stylus but no, it’s the right name. Maybe because it was handed to me before I asked, maybe because my mind was on trying out the Smart Keyboard instead, I said thank you and scribbled something on the iPad’s screen. That’s nice. And then took a moment and a blink realise that it wasn’t paper and I wasn’t holding an actual pencil. This new device is that transparant, is that natural and normal. Immediately.

You know how parcel delivery firms get to sign your name on their touch screen devices and the entire world recognises that no one will ever recognise that scrawl as being yours or anyone else’s? I wrote my signature and it was my signature. It was terrible and awful and embarrassing, but it was precisely my signature.

It’s just that somehow this makes me want to confess to you something about the terrible and the awful handwriting. It makes me want to get something off my chest and maybe even atone for it. Maybe it’s doing that writing on the iPad Pro, maybe it’s the news of Terry Wogan having to miss Children in Need for the first time since the 1980s, but I minded today of my handwriting.

Specifically of my handwriting during Children in Need. I can’t remember the year now but the odds are that it was late 1980s or early 1990s and I got invited to work on Children in Need at BBC Pebble Mill. Can you imagine the thrill of being included at the heart of this in the MIdlands? I was giddy.

All I did was sit in Pebble Mill taking pledge calls. I can’t remember where in the building, I can’t picture any detail, except I can hear the voice of a caller saying she’d pledge £10 if someone would publish her book. There’s a thing with the BBC that everyone pays the licence fee so everyone pays for this service so you can’t be rude or even curt with anyone. But on Children in Need night, she was taking up time that another caller could’ve been using to give us their credit card numbers.

Or in theory they could. My other memory of that first night, apart from a great sense of becoming bone tired by the end of it, is of a producer taking me to one side. Oh, this is decades ago now and the agony of telling you this.

She patiently explained that if we can’t read the credit card numbers, we can’t get money from them. And she patiently explained getting money was the entire point of the charity night. You could bristle at her patiently explaining, you could resent being treated as an imbecile – but I couldn’t disagree that my handwriting was that bad and I deserved every syllable.

There you go. My handwriting cost the BBC some money. Let’s go further: my handwriting lowered the total, stopped Children in Need doing all it hoped. Let’s not go so far as to say that lives could’ve been saved if I my 9 was decipherable from my 7. Please.

I was asked back the next year but they kept me off the phones. Anyway. To donate to Children in Need without risking your credit card to me or any other scribbler, go online here.