Author: William Gallagher

You need good people

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It is shockingly hard to get good people and so when you do, you hang on to them. I was in a phone call just now with a producer who admitted that this is a thing with him, that loyalty is precious. Now, I liked that conversation because I am loyal to this guy and he’s been loyal to me back. But it’s weird that it should’ve come up now because I thought I knew this yet I think I re-learnt it this week.

I’ve been doing a bit of work with the Royal Television Society, popping in to some of their school education days. They’re there to show kids that there are more careers in media than you would imagine, that there are skills you need for media work that help you in every type of job. I go in as a writer, I mock my own old school and praise the one we’re in – as invariably, just invariably, these schools are better than mine was – and I help out during the day’s main exercise.

Oh, you would wish your school had done this exercise. By the end of the day, the kids present a pitch. This time there were 65 kids and they were divided into 10 groups. There have been more, there have been fewer, but that’s the usual group size. All of the kids are typically aged around 14 so they’re just at the point where they’re really looking at their future career prospects.

The pitch is for an eight-minute feature to be made for City8, the forthcoming television station for Birmingham. Des Tong from City8 and Jayne Greene from the RTS brief the kids on the types of ideas needed and how to pitch. Each group of kids has to come up with an idea, then assign roles – writer, producer, designers and so on – then prepare and present a pitch to a little panel of judges. Des is always the head judge, on the days I’ve been there I’m chuffed to say I’ve been a mini-judge too.

But for me the kicker, the thing that makes this not just a fun and good idea but a vividly great one, is that it’s for real.

This is not some paper exercise, it isn’t some classroom contrivance, it’s real.

If your group has a good enough idea, if it’s viable and workable for television and if you present your pitch persuasively enough, City8 will do it. Now, they’re committing to doing one – I think it’s only if there is one that is good enough – and with the RTS they’ve been talking to a lot of schools. Each school’s best idea goes forward to a final next month and after that, City8 will produce and broadcast the feature.

Do this right and you’re on air.

I know adults who’d kill or at least maim for a shot at doing this, so to have it offered to schoolkids along with help to get it right, I’m deeply impressed with the RTS and City8. I’m deeply proud to sometimes be there and I take this seriously. I speak to the kids at the start, I go around every group listening to the ideas and asking questions.

But this time, on the last of these sessions and for the first time, I interfered.

There was this one group that at first were so clearly on the ball that I sat down and practically got right back up again immediately. They hadn’t got an idea yet but they were discussing it like a professional production meeting and I thought the young woman acting as the group’s producer had a real handle on all this.

There were ten groups today so it took me a time to get around all of them but on my way looping back, I stopped by that first table and things were very different. On the good side, they now had an idea but on the bad, it wasn’t going to happen. They were not going to win this because they were not going to be ready to pitch.

I need to be a little circumspect here because this was a school and I don’t want to identify anyone. But what had gone wrong was this particular group. There was a small set of kids who didn’t want to do anything at all, there was a small set who wanted to work but refused to pitch. It was nerves and shyness and you see this, you understand it, you try to help these kids along. Sometimes – fortunately rarely – you recognise that there is nothing you can do in the time, so you just have to leave them to get on with it or not. There are groups you can help, who will take the help. Naturally, then, you help them.

But this time was different because the young woman producing was doing so well. That’s an odd thing to say when she’d lost control of her team but the unfairness of that rankled with me. The school picked the groups and there was a specific plan to break up friends and thereby get everyone working with new people. That’s more than fine, that’s a good idea but in this case, it just seemed strongly clear to me that she was saddled with a tough group. I could see the frustration in her and it was just wrong.

So I took her to one side for a chat and we discussed what she was doing so well, we talked about the problem with the team.

As she gets older and if she wants to do this more, she will need to learn how to control a group better. But for now, I split her group up into two. Her one had all the kids who were willing to work and I created a second set for all those kids who didn’t. That splinter group didn’t get to pitch an idea, I have no clue what they did for the rest of the session and actually I didn’t even think about that until right now. Talking to you, I wonder what they did. But at the time, they were out of my head because they were out of the game.

That’s what happens outside school, that’s what happens when you are pitching for real. You can cut yourself off from consideration, you can waste opportunities.

It’d be great to tell you now that this young woman’s team won but they didn’t. It’d be great to tell you that she has a career waiting for her in the BBC if she wants it – and she does. Except she doesn’t want it. She’s set on a completely different career and I know she’ll get it.

The group that did win deserved to. I voted for them and it was right that they came out top. They had a good idea and I’ve seen before how that can carry you over many a bumpy hurdle, but they also just worked together very well. They rehearsed well, too: got the idea on its feet and used the time they had, used the space they were given to perform in.

You can’t be sure what teams will and won’t work well together but you can be sure what a difference it makes when they do.

Lots of people are involved in this Royal Television Society work but for the days I’ve contributed, it has felt as if I were part of a good team myself. You often don’t get that as a writer, you often don’t get that feeling because you can be finished with your work before anyone else starts, because you can hand over a script and be on to the next project. So I’ve enjoyed this a lot and it’s mattered to me. I hope I get to do it again next year.

This was not written by a woman

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I’m a man. It’s difficult to think of a reason this could matter or be of any interest to you. Okay, yes, I think what you and I have is something special but you’ve never given me the idea you’re, you know, shall we say, thinking of me. Like that. Though if you were, if you ever do want me to put some shelves up, I can do it. Otherwise, I’m stumped. No reason I can conceive of that you would pay my gender any mind.

And yet, I guarantee that you read that paragraph and you knew, you knew for certain that I am a man. It will be because I actually told you I was a man and then I hit on you so you’d be sure. But apparently you didn’t need either clue, you would’ve been able to tell simply through any of my non-gender detailed and non-pronoun-using writing that you’ve ever read or I’ve ever written.

Is it male that I itch to have a topical reason to bring this up today? I think it might be a bit male that I can find a reason and that it’s got something to do with sport. I don’t say that, “something to do with sport” in an offhand way, this is really about the level of my understanding of it. But there’s this Andy Murray guy, he plays tennis, he’s hired a coach and she’s a woman. This would not have penetrated my noggin but for how a man I know mentioned it and rolled his eyes.

Two seconds before, I barely held the word tennis in my consciousness, but now I really want whoever she is to coach this fella to win whatever it is. I’m that invested.

So that’s a topical reason to mention gender. There is also last September when author and literature lecturer David Gilmour said:

“I’m not interested in teaching books by women. Virginia Woolf is the only writer that interests me as a woman writer, so I do teach one of her short stories. But once again, when I was given this job I said I would only teach the people that I truly, truly love. Unfortunately, none of those happen to be Chinese, or women. What I teach is guys. Serious heterosexual guys. F Scott Fitzgerald, Chekhov, Tolstoy. Real guy-guys. Henry Miller. Philip Roth.”

Canadian author David Gilmour sparks furore over female writers – Liz Bury, The Guardian (27 September 2013)

There is a kneejerk reaction to this jerk who should be kneed and it’s that one just starts rattling off a list of all the women writers one admires. But on the one hand, that feels as patronising and oh-how-generous of me as this Gilmour’s allowing one Woolf story does. And on the other, come on: we’d be here forever if I started doing that.

So instead I just dwell for a moment on the age-old question: is this guy a git or what?

Only, none of this is really the reason I’m writing about it to you today. It is all a depressing reminder that there are forever stupid people in this world, but it’s not the reason. The reason is VS Naipaul.

I’m only three years late to this.

In 2011, this fella disparaged women writers and said:

“I read a piece of writing and within a paragraph or two I know whether it is by a woman or not. I think [it is] unequal to me.”

VS Naipaul finds no woman writer his literary match – not even Jane Austen – Amy Fallon, The Guardian (2 June 2011)

He is very specific.

He means it. No woman writes as well as him and it is because they are women. He talks about their sentimentality, how – I don’t really follow this bit, but – “And inevitably for a woman, she is not a complete master of a house, so that comes over in her writing too.”

I hadn’t ready any of VS Naipaul’s writing before this and there’s obviously no point now. I don’t see how I could now ever get through a paragraph without thinking “Seriously? This is supposed to be superior to every woman writer alive or dead ever? Excuse me?”

That Guardian article does the kneejerk list of superb women writers. It also quotes the Writers’ Guild as saying they wouldn’t waste their breath on Naipaul’s comments, which I like.

But I don’t think this fella thought it through.

Well, okay, of course he didn’t. But I mean, even within his own worldview, he didn’t see what this claim means.

Follow. He believes women writers are inferior because they are women. Therefore, men writers are superior because they are men. Our talent, our skill, the very heart of our lives that we strive for as writers comes down to nothing but whether anything dangles between our legs.

That means all writing is bollocks.

There’s no point striving to improve if you’re a woman, I can relax because I’m a man. Nothing to do with me or you, nothing to do with your or my talent, our efforts, our hopes.

Naturally I don’t want to conclude that writing is bollocks as I am a writer and I’m afraid there is truly nothing else I can be. So I’m going to stop a little short of thinking this, I’m going clear my head of this man and of this topic and merely reflect on how fascinating we men can be.

When we put our minds to it, we men are capable of what I really thought was impossible: we can simultaneously be pricks and arses.

 

Fortune and glory, kid

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I’ve only been thinking about this for two weeks. There was a book event at the Library of Birmingham and I was listening to the speakers, half wondering if I could steal how funny and charming they were, when a guy asks a question.

Actually, no, it was more that he stated a fact but added a question mark. He said to these authors: “But the point, the aim of it all is to write a bestseller, isn’t it?”

There are two answers to this and they are both no.

You can have the very short ‘no’ or you can have the longer, more considered, let’s have some tea, kind of no which you already know is what’s happening here. He stated this fact and every part of me thought no. It was that immediate, that certain, and it has not taken me two weeks to think about it. Because I haven’t finished thinking about it yet. I’m hoping that talking it over with you will sort out my head.

I think all that I’ve been churning over comes down to a split between people who write and people who don’t. There are two types of people in this world and they both intend to write novels. I suspect that when you don’t write and therefore don’t know what heavy spade work it is, you only ever hear about writers when they are interviewed. Writers are interviewed almost exclusively only at the point when they have a new book out. This would be because perhaps the only thing more boring than watching video of a writer typing is watching a video of the much longer periods where they aren’t.

But still, the result is that we see writers when they have something new out and inescapably, then, it looks pretty easy to have something new out. They were only on the telly the other day with the last thing, weren’t they?

Then because news wants facts and because there isn’t a gigantic amount you can ask a writer about their new work that won’t spoil their new work, we get the topic of money. This is especially true when the writer has earned some amazing amount.

So.

It’s easy and they make a lot of money.

Maybe it’s natural, then, to think that the point of writing is to make money.

Now, certainly, I write for a living and I like to eat occasionally, I prefer sleeping indoors. And actually I have very often been described as a commercial writer because I like thrillers and Doctor Who and magazines. But I used the word ‘like’ there. I could’ve said “because I write thrillers and Doctor Who” but I said ‘like’. I am a commercial writer but it is because that is where my tastes lie, it is not because I have a spreadsheet saying these are more lucrative jobs than publishing five lines of poetry every ten years.

I do make a living and writers can still make a lot of money, even today, but the answer is still no.

If you go into writing to make your fortune, it is conceivable that it will work, but it is bloody unlikely. So unlikely that doing this for that reason is simply stupid.

Plus, it’s a funny thing, writing: your secret intent has a way of becoming very apparent to the audience. If you’re doing it for glory, we can tell. I interviewed Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight the other week and he was talking about how he as all these film and TV projects that mean a lot to him but there are also these many others where he’s been the writer for hire. But, he said, whatever it is, you have to do it as if it is the most important thing to you.

That’s not a definable thing. You can’t have a formula that says 10% more effort equals 10 times the success of a piece. Yet hack work stands out very clearly.

So you have to write what matters to you and you have to hope that it works out enough that you can survive.

Maybe the real barrier between writers and non-writers is that the nons can’t comprehend that anyone would be so stupid as to do this. They’re right. There’s no question but that writing is a stupid thing to do.

Yet I’m okay with being stupid. I’m used to it in everything else, I might as well enjoy it here. And it’s not as if I seem to have any choice in the matter, but I am glad that I am over here on this stupid side. Because it pains me, it actually causes me pain, when I hear someone being surprised that, say, JK Rowling has written another book. The genuine incomprehension you hear sometimes, the idea that she’s daft when she’s done all those Harry Potter books and made her fortune.

She is daft. We all are. Of course she keeps writing. How could you not?

Finishing lines

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Apparently:

“Happiness is typing THE END after writing a short story or novel”

I was searching for some quote along those lines because I’ve heard it said a lot and reckoned someone must’ve said it cleverly. I found an entire website whose every entry begins “Happiness is…”. I’m thinking that’s a hard site to keep going and sure enough, there are signs of desperation: the next entry I saw read:

“Happiness is, snowman”

I can just feel the writer’s wide-eyed, blank face as he or she hit that comma and wonder what in the world could possibly follow that bloody, cursed, seemed-a-good-idea-when-I-started-the-site line of “happiness is”.

Perhaps comma snowman isn’t the most flawless piece of writing, but there is one thing that you have to say about the writer of it and the site FunHappyQuotes.com: he or she finished the line.

(Incidentally, I would never have gone to a site called FunHappyQuotes if I weren’t searching for something for you so I’d like to say thanks a bunch. I’d also say that I will now put its toxic saccharine style out of my mind forever, but apparently “Happiness is, remembering”. I need tea.)

Finishing is the thing. It’s the thing I want to talk to you about today, it’s the thing that matters. It’s the thing that makes the difference between a professional writer and an amateur. There are other things, like at an extreme level the ability to form coherent sentences, that’s generally handy even if mine tend to go off the rails during paragraphs where my mind is still on the insane idea that “Happiness is, a family reunion” and how I burn to delete those wrong commas in all these things.

But finish.

I don’t know if you like my writing. You’re very nice, turning up here for a read, but I do wonder if it’s really for the tea and biscuits. Nonetheless,  even the doubting writer in me has to say that I am a professional: writing full-time since the late 1980s, freelance since around 1996, literally millions of words published, yeah, yeah. If I took a commission from you to write something, you’d be taking your life in your hands over whether it would be any good, but you could bet that life I will finish and I will deliver on time.

Nobody says you have to be a professional writer. Everybody says there are jobs that are a lot harder than writing, which I agree with but just once wish these everybodies would realise that there are jobs that are a lot easier too. Writing is a funny thing in that the skill and the requirements for professionalism are the same whether or not you’re commissioned. Nobody does brain surgery for the catharsis and relaxation. Plenty of people write for those reasons and without any intention of getting published.

I think I’ve said this before but I need that intention, I need that aim. It transforms my writing if I know that there is an audience because I’m commissioned or because I hope there will be an audience. I’m looking at you right now. This is such a part of me that I don’t honestly grasp how you can write without it. Many people tell me they don’t want an audience and I have no reason to think they’re making this stuff up.

But I do have reason to wonder why they then send me their pieces. Unfinished.

When you start writing something, you don’t know if it’s any good so getting someone’s opinion seems like the sensible idea. It isn’t.

Anything you write down on paper is better than the greatest thing you haven’t yet got out of your head. But you have the whole piece in your mind. You probably don’t have every word, every corner of the piece, but you know what it’s about, you know what it’s meant to be. And I cannot see that from an opening page or a chapter from somewhere in the middle of the story.

I can tell whether you can form a sentence but we’ve already recognised that mine aren’t paragons of grammatic structure. Plus, very many writers are extraordinarily poor and random in their first drafts, it’s like the ideas are bellowing out of them and they’ll worry about punctuation later. I worry about punctuation now, I worry about spelling now – because I know the power of a comma in the right place, I know the breath and the beat pause it gives and I want that. I know that if I’ve misspelt something you might not know what I mean and you’ll probably think I’m an eejit. You’ll form an opinion of me and what I want is for you to form an opinion of the writing.

What a new writer wants is for me to reassure them and instead I form the opinion that they are new. Not because of what they write, but because they haven’t finished. Writing may be a sprint or a marathon but it is never a walk and there is the issue of whether you are capable of finishing. I can’t know that, you can’t know that, until you do. But it’s the impossibility of forming any useful opinion about the writing, that’s what I’m obsessing about today.

It’s partly because I feel guilty. I met a woman at a workshop a year or so ago and she sent me the starts of a couple of different plays. It took me months to reply to her because I had no clue what to say. I think there is a spark there but I thought that when talking to her, I only agreed to read anything because she was clever and interesting – and because she was finishing so many things. She’d planned to start a company, so she did. She’d planned to do a show, so she did. I hope that having planned to write a script, she does. But she hadn’t and I don’t know that there is anything in any way useful I could say.

There was one guy who sent me a script start where I could see it wasn’t going to work but – I feel awful here – he needed to find that out for himself. Am I a right git or what? I just knew that it was true. I didn’t tell him to carry on regardless, I tried steering him. But I knew that he’d figure it out for himself, I knew that would be infinitely better than me telling him – and I also wondered if I were right. If he could actually pull this thing off, he’d be a better writer than I am and who’s to say he isn’t?

Right now, me. I’m the one to say he isn’t because he hasn’t written it yet. I’m looking forward to seeing the finished piece.

But it has to be finished. Are you getting that this is a thing with me? And are you getting that it really is a thing? Because I’m finding it frustrating that I feel I can give you these examples and I can urge you to finish, but I can’t specifically define the reasons why it is essential. Especially since even the word ‘finish’ is a bit vague.

I’m now sure I’ve said this to you before but back in January I had a coffee with a colleague who had finished writing her novel. I congratulated her, we enthused about how great that feeling is, and then we spent an hour talking about how she was going to finish it. She meant she was editing and rewriting, she was developing it further, but we were both saying ‘finish’ so we really did have sentences that went thisaway: “Now you’ve finished, how are you going to finish?”

Listen, the thing is that crossing the finishing line of even a first draft is a separator. Think of all the people who say they’ll write a book or a script one day. You know most won’t, you know some small fraction will start. But then you know that of those who start, most won’t finish. Some small fraction will and you are now one of those. It isn’t easy to finish but that’s part of the point: finishing a draft is an accomplishment and it is a hard-earned one. So there is the psychological punch that you’ve done it, you can do this and there’s the evidence.

I just think it goes further. When you’ve finished a draft, you are in the game. Not before.

I was going to try being clever with you today. I’ve known all week that I was going to write this to you about finishing and endings. I’ve been thinking about how you do hear this line of how typing “the end” is great and yet I never do. I usually write ‘ENDS’ in caps. It’s from my journalism training. Probably an unbreakable habit now. I was also thinking of how you might know something I don’t: journalists, especially American ones, used to end their copy with “– 30 –”, the dashes and the number 30. I have not one single clue why. Do you? I’d be grateful to know, I’ve wondered for a long time.

But I was going to be clever with all this, that was my plan. I was going to burble on at you about finishing and then not finish. Yes. Good, eh? I couldn’t decide whether I’d find some way to fizzle out or whether I’d do the battery-dying gag. You know:

Listen, I’ve got to tell you something urgent. Wait, my battery is dy

You had to be there.

But I can’t do this, I cannot fail to finish. And especially not when I can end by telling you two things that make me look stupid.

The first is that while I will never again read the start of someone’s unfinished work, I am today, this morning, reading two unfinished works. One is a book that I’m editing so, come on, that’s different. The other is a book by a friend and he’s given me something like 20,000 words of the middle to read. That sounds like it’s contrary to every single thing I’ve just said and that would be because it is.

But he did give me the first 20,000 the other week. And this is not a new writer. I know he will finish because I’ve read his work for years, he’s done far more than I have, there’s just no question that he’ll finish. There is a question that this is a horror book and dear god in heaven, I am the sort who finds the Muppets scary. He knows this. But he needs a reader, he needs several readers because this is a live project with a publisher waiting.

So I only look as if I’m going against everything I say.

Except that I actually am going against one thing.

I too have a novel and it’s far from finished. But I partnered with a writing buddy earlier this year and showed it to her. It is vastly better because I did. And next month I am trying out a writing group to whom I will send the start of that same novel.

I just truly don’t know what they will be able to tell me from it. I fully expect six people to say “Happiness is, typed nicely”.

 

UPDATE:

I’ve corrected something: I originally wrote that journalists used to use the term “- 33 -” but Jim Swindles has put me right. It was “- 30 -“. I knew this. I have known this since I learnt it in Lou Grant in 1977. But plainly TV drama gets into me because “33” is the title of an especially well-written episode of Battlestar Galactica. As to what it means, Jim sent me this quote from AJR, the American Journalism Review Archive:

‘Some say the mark began during a time when stories were submitted via telegraph, with “-30-” denoting “the end” in Morse code. Another theory suggests that the first telegraphed news story had thirty words. Others claim the “-30-” comes from a time when stories were written in longhand – X marked the end of a sentence, XX the end of a paragraph and XXX meant the end of a story. The Roman numerals XXX translate to 30’.

 

The Evil 2

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This is just a thought, but I think we don’t really want sequels. We just believe we do.

Film studios used to know this one fact: a sequel will make a certain percentage of whatever the first film got. Whatever that figure was, they knew it and they knew it was less than the original movie but so what? It was as close to a rule, a bankable certainty, as anything could be.

We now know this for a fact: no movie is now made that cannot have a sequel, that probably will have a sequel, that might already be filming the sequel.

We also suspect that no movie will ever be made now that isn’t based on a Marvel comic, but that’s a different concern.

You’ve already thought of The Godfather Part II being better than the first one. You’ve probably thought of The Empire Strikes Back being better than Star Wars. You can take that as being proof that sequels are sometimes superior and that therefore sequels can be a good thing. I’m going to take that as being a very short list.

The thing is, though, that I am not against sequels even as I go to them and even as I suspect that they’re going to be weak. (I do so clearly remember the thrill when The Bourne Supremacy and The Bourne Ultimatum were both as good as the first one, The Bourne Identity. But then I saw The Bourne Other One, Thingy, Forgotten Already.)

It’s the same with books I like, it’s certainly the same with television series. I’m there for the long haul and if I’ve liked the characters, I want to see more of them.

Except I don’t think that’s actually true. I don’t think it’s true for me and I don’t think it’s true for you either.

What we really want is the same thing again. I don’t mean a repeat of the plot, we get those all the time, I mean we want exactly the same thing again. We want ourselves to be the same as we were.

We want to open that book or go to that cinema or turn on that new TV show and see it for the first time again. To be taken to that new place with those new people and to experience that great experience again. To be who we were then too.

It can’t happen but we can hanker for it. And if our hankering means we get good sequels as well as the ordinary ones, well, it’s something.

The Evil I

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I thought that was such a clever title there: The Evil I. Things happened this week that have been making me think a lot about first-person writing and how really no matter what I’m working on, I am kind-of writing for myself and absolutely, specifically writing to you. You can’t tell this since I say ‘I’ an awful lot but I don’t like it. I like writing the word ‘you’, I don’t like writing the word ‘I’.

Before you check, I’ve now written ‘I’ nine times and ‘me’ once. Please bear with me on this for a minute.

Given all this, the mantra has been that writing in the first-person is bad, hence calling the word ‘I’ evil.

The Evil I.

I thought that was so clever. Then I type it here and all I can think of is: when’s The Evil 2 coming out?

When I solely wrote journalism, first person was out because as a journalist I do not matter. I am not the story. As a teenager I used to read The New York Times at Birmingham Central Library but eventually stopped because its style of journalism became featuring the journalist more. I just remember reading one interview in the paper where a third of the article was about the journalist getting ready to meet whoever he or she was interviewing. I seem to remember a paragraph about the orange juice served at the hotel.

That makes me shake. And it makes me tremendously pleased to tell you, if you don’t happen to know already, that the Times is far better now. You might question certain employment decisions (a prominent editor was just kicked out) but the writing is such that I am back reading it. I read a lot of news online through RSS and since that brings websites’ stories right to me, I doubt there’s been a day in the last five years that I haven’t read something on The New York Times.

But no first person in journalism. That’s clearly not a universal rule but it was for me.

I have many and specific responsibilities to you as a journalist, but the core job is to get the news right and to get the news to you. I want to write well, I want to tell you things you don’t know yet are then glad you do or in some way find it useful. But if you can tell without looking at the byline that I wrote a particular news story, I reckon I failed.

It took me a long time to understand that drama is different.

Alan Plater once said that poets write about themselves, dramatists write about everybody else. He knew that was a broad generalisation and I knew he was right. I just also thought that I belonged entirely on the drama side. I’m not interested in me, I’m interested in you. And I can’t write poetry or, say, song lyrics. Just can’t. (Though – this came up in a workshop I did yesterday – I’ve realised that if you asked me who my writing heroes are, the first names that come to me are Suzanne Vega, Dar Williams and Emily Dickinson. All poets.)

(There’s also Alan. And Patricia Highsmith. Paul Auster. Sarah Dunant. Carrie Fisher. Anton Chekhov. But let’s not go there.)

The short conclusion I’ve come to with drama is that the deeper you reach within yourself, the more people you actually reach.

I like that very much, except for how bleedin’ hard it is to do and except for how I’m not interested in reaching more people. One of my favourite jobs ever was writing a thing called On This Day for Radio Times. It was a TV history piece and there was a wee dollop of it in every day’s listings page. I can’t remember the numbers now but I know that at the time, research was saying that about 1.1 million copies of Radio Times were sold each week and that each copy was read on average by three people. So three million could’ve read my pieces each week.

Maybe it’s just that I haven’t the imagination to comprehend that number but I write for myself and I write to one person. It’s best when it’s you but I feel I’m putting some pressure on you now. Let’s not dwell on how you somehow got lumbered with reading everything I ever write and instead look at why I’m thinking about this so much today.

I do think about it a huge amount and very often, most usually whenever the topic of radio comes up. I caught Steve Wright on BBC Radio 2 while driving the other day and I switched him off immediately. It’s very unfair of me, especially since I didn’t give his show time for me to know what it was about, but Steve Wright equals the zoo format to me. That’s the type of radio where there is a posse in the studio, a whole group sort-of co-presenting. It’s what he always did in the 1990s on BBC Radio 1 with “Steve Wright in the Afternoon”, it’s one of the many things I adored about On The Hour: how it mocked him and the format with “Wayne Carr in the Afternoon“. You have such an innocent face. You might need to say that title aloud right about now.

Sure, there was the inanity and the banality of the format but also just the sense I would have that everybody on the show was having this  fantastic time and I was over at the window saying hello, have you forgotten me?

This isn’t some ego thing. There is no reason why the posse in a zoo gang – tell me you don’t think that’s a great title for an action movie – where was I? Right, thanks. There is no reason why the posse in a zoo format radio show should have anything for me, no reason for them to care if I listen. But there’s also no reason for me to listen. So I don’t.

That’s not why this is on my mind today. This is why. I’ve just read The Paris Review’s collated quotes from John Steinbeck, which include:

It is usual that the moment you write for publication—I mean one of course—one stiffens in exactly the same way one does when one is being photographed. The simplest way to overcome this is to write it to someone, like me. Write it as a letter aimed at one person. This removes the vague terror of addressing the large and faceless audience and it also, you will find, will give a sense of freedom and a lack of self-consciousness.

Forget your generalized audience. In the first place, the nameless, faceless audience will scare you to death and in the second place, unlike the theater, it doesn’t exist. In writing, your audience is one single reader. I have found that sometimes it helps to pick out one person—a real person you know, or an imagined person and write to that one.

The Paris Review

Recently a couple of companies have approached me about running advertising blog entries for them. This ain’t gonna happen.

But I was amused by the kind of terms and conditions I would have to abide by if I were to take money from these advertising firms. The key one was to do with what they called website traffic and hit rates and I translated as “number of readers”. It was something about reporting the figures to them and while politely declining the offer, I did tell them that they were welcome to know how many readers I have on this blog.

One.

 

 

 

Don’t lie to me

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I must be on my own here or The Usual Suspects wouldn’t be so popular. But there is an issue in that film that came up to an extent in a play I just saw and unfortunately is also pressing on my mind over a project of my own.

There are spoilers here for The Usual Suspects but I won’t tell you the name of the play. That hurts me more than it hurts you: I enjoyed the play very much and I only saw it on its opening night, there’s a fair chance you could still see it – and I am certain it will tour and tour and tour. Nonetheless, I ain’t telling.

Let me get the Suspects spoiler out of the way: if you’ve not seen it and you want to, look away now.

The twist in the film is that Kevin Spacey’s character has made up the whole story.

Fine. As twists go, it is enormous because it transforms the entire film and reveals the baddie to be the one person who didn’t or at least were not supposed to suspect. And it’s a lie: I like being lied to in drama, I love being misdirected. That’s true in the production as much as it is in the story: I even wrote a Self Distract once called Lie to Me.

But.

I was really enjoying The Usual Suspects up to that revelation. It was written by Christopher McQuarrie, directed by Bryan Singer. The cast was impressive. (Well, you keep hearing stories that the actors didn’t know who the baddie was in the story and it’s a little hard to remain impressed if none of them could be bothered to read to the end of the script.)

Still, there I am watching this film in the late 1990s and I was quickly into it, into the story, engrossed by these characters. But that’s the problem, I was engrossed by the characters. And then told they didn’t exist.

It’s a funny thing: characters in a drama never exist, it’s just a story, yet being told that they don’t, told that within the drama itself, that makes a difference.

All these characters I’d followed and invested in and believed, they didn’t exist and they never did. All a lie. I was meant to be jolted and I was, I was meant to be blown away by the twist and I wasn’t. It’s done cleverly, I should write something that smart, but instead I solely found myself thinking oh. Okay. That’s clever. What time is it?

The twist gave us a surprise but it took away every single thing, every possible element that I had been interested in, that I cared about, that had got me into the story. I don’t think that’s a fair trade. I would’ve come away enthused but instead I left that cinema annoyed and clearly I wasn’t alone because it only won two Oscars and another thirty major film awards.

The Play I Saw Recently included two characters that we join as they are first meeting, first getting to know and to like each other. It’s a funny, touching, growing relationship necessarily conducted in little slices as these two happen to be in the same place. You quickly suspect they are both going out of their way to get back there when the other is likely to be around, but it’s sweet and believable. You want them to get together and that is quite a hard thing to pull off in drama. It’s done well and seems to be the sole light in a bleak story. Except toward the end you learn that their meeting was not an accident and that one of them has been explicitly working to get revenge on the other.

That revelation fits the play perfectly and I am vastly more satisfied with this PISR than I was with Suspects.

However, because we aren’t supposed to guess that this is happening, we only learn very late on that there might be a reason for anyone to want revenge on this person. It’s a big thing that’s happened. I envy how the writer has crafted something that we can be jolt-appalled by yet also feel for the person who did this big thing, how we can understand how it could happen.

But we get that for a moment and then we learn the reveal. The enormous thing is uncovered and dispensed with in a thrice and that reduces it. It doesn’t make it trivial, but it makes it smaller because we don’t get long for us to see how it affects that character. Something enormous is revealed late and the plot moves on instantly so the enormous because dispensed with. It therefore becomes smaller. So the revenge that comes immediately after that feels out of scale. The fact that we haven’t suspected anything – that may well be my fault, the script may well be riddled with hints and as I say it all fits in with the gorgeously bleak story – also changes things. We didn’t suspect this person had done this thing, we didn’t suspect that the other would be there for revenge.

So we’ve spent this time getting to know these two characters and really we didn’t get to know them.

I think it works better than The Usual Suspects, though, because I think we can feel that what we’ve seen is the real character beneath the plot. What we’ve learnt of how these two feel and think is real even though what we’ve learnt of how they act is not.

I’m not sure. Maybe this comes down to how I love stories and I don’t like puzzles. The Usual Suspects is a fundamentally different film if you watch it a second time. This PISR is a drastically different play if you go see it again. Jagged Edge is a taut thriller unless you know whether the guy did it or not, in which case it’s a bit empty.

All of which would be fine, I could do the critic dance and say McQuarrie and the writer of PISR aren’t as good as I am, QED, except that I am tussling with this issue in a project of my own and, oh my lights, it’s hard.

I have a tale that doesn’t exactly depend on you thinking a key character is something when she’s really something else, but it helps.

She’s lying her teeth off and of course I want the moment you realise this to be enormous. But I’m trying to make it so that everything you’ve learnt about her is still true, she is still this same woman going through these same issues – those issues are just gigantically bigger than you expected and they are profoundly more her fault than you thought. I want you to be truly shocked but then immediately feel for her.

Easy.

I know that moment, I can see that exact instant when you are to realise and I know to the pixel where it will come in the story. Unfortunately, it has to be instantly followed by another shock that I fear is about as big. The revelation causes the second shock, I can’t see a way to even separate them by a minute. So whatever part of my brain it is that just does plots for me while I sweat about characters, that’s tapping me on the arm and asking me to ponder this. To ponder a lot – such a lot – whether an immediate second shock diminishes the first one. You want to get the most value out of something, especially when you’ve worked hard to get us to that point, so it’s an issue of whether I am throwing away some of the punch. Whether I am making this enormous thing feel smaller and out of scale.

I might be turning this into a puzzle.

But I am clear on this one thing. Even when you learn the truth about this character, she will still be the same character you’ve come to know. She’ll just have this whole other issue and I hope to make it that this hurts.

I’ve said this before but I think drama is like running your hand over a piece of wood. Go one way, stroke against the grain and your skin gets cut by shards, it stings and you bleed. That’s what a story should do as you go through it. But the way when you then stroke back, stroke in the same direction as the grain, it’s all smooth. Stories have to work in retrospect; take us somewhere new and most certainly, definitely, unquestionably, undoubtedly take the characters somewhere they don’t want to go but they have to be the same characters.

I think.

 

 

Finding Fame

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So there’s this thing about Thomas the Tank Engine. It doesn’t especially matter whether it’s a good or a poor TV show, what tends to happen regardless is that people love it when they’re very young. Then they go to school and wouldn’t be seen dead with a Thomas the Tank Engine lunchbox. Next, they get through the embarrassment and forget about the show but then many years later, they’re buying the DVDs in a nostalgia bin or joining the online Thomas forums.

Hopefully the quality of the show played in to one’s enjoying it when very young, but now that certainly has nothing to do with it: you’re watching that DVD and you aren’t seeing Thomas the Tank Engine, you are seeing yourself.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a complete episode.

But I appear to have gone through this cycle with Fame.

That’s Fame the TV show, not the film. It has always and forever been okay to like the film written by Christopher Gore and directed by Alan Parker. It seems to me that the film is much more about failure than it is about fame and that miserable bleakness plus some great music makes it pretty timeless.

Whereas my main memory of the TV series is that it was extremely bright and colourful and jazz-hands happy. These are all things that lend themselves to embarrassment so the show was always at risk of this but it did also come in 1982 when US television was mostly light, easy-watching fare. My beloved Lou Grant was cancelled the year before and while it was replaced on the schedule by Cagney and Lacey, while Family Ties started then too, while St Elsewhere began as well, most of the year was pretty bad. TJ Hooker started. The Happy Days spin-off Joanie Loves Chachi began its brief run. Bring ‘Em Back Alive. Remington Steele started in 1982 and much as I enjoy it, it was froth. And then there was Knight Rider.

But it’s funny how many of those titles you recognise. Three decades on and the only one you’re not sure of is Joanie Loves Chachi. Then, too, there is little question but that you know this line:

You want fame. Well, fame costs. And right here is where you start paying … in sweat.

I should write a line that gets remembered and quoted in 32 years time.

You’re expecting me to re-evaluate Fame and say that at least that it doesn’t deserve its cheesy reputation or perhaps that it actually deserves to be a classic. I don’t know. I am Thomas the Tank Engine-style blinded to it. But I re-found it by an odd route and it’s proved to be a route that has made me re-evaluate the series as a production. Maybe it’s because I’ve been involved in shows now, maybe because I’ve had to produce the odd thing, but I have a new and very great respect for how this TV series was made. How they physically made 136 episodes.

Every US TV show, especially of that time, was making up to 24 episodes per year but this series was making 24 musicals. A new musical every week. The ones I’ve been watching this week tended to have three musical numbers each: typically a solo song over some montage or other, plus some kind of dance-room-related tune and then usually a big, full production number with the large cast of regular dancers. If you only count the professional routines and not all the pro/celebrity dances, that’s more than we see each week on Strictly Come Dancing or its US equivalent Dancing with the Stars.

Doing that on a drama budget, doing that on a drama schedule, it makes me go pale. The writer in me is also immediately conscious of the impact that makes on your script. You have to stand up three musical numbers, you have to find a story that allows for these to happen naturally during your episode. It’s bloody hard and not every writer, not every episode, succeeds: even in the first few of the series that I’ve just watched, there are one that feel contrived. Nice tunes, but fudged into the story.

Then equally, there’s a writing issue of how long those songs or dances take. Three minutes each? Two? Call it two minutes apiece on average and you are still handing over six minutes of your fifty-minute running time to a musical interlude. Your story has to fit fifty minutes, has to deliver a big moment ahead of each of three commercial breaks and then resolve itself. Oh, and let’s have another one next week. And the week after.

I don’t think I was aware of all this in 1982, though I was already seeing television as something that is crafted rather than just a thing you half-watch in the evening. But I am aware of it now and that made the route I came back to Fame all the more interesting. Because I found it again through the scripts.

I have no clue, not one single clue, what I was looking for online last weekend but in that rabbit-hole kind of way, I found myself coming across Fame and specifically across The Kids from Fame Media Blog. It looks like it was designed in the 1980s and it’s tricky to find your way around. So tricky that while that’s the site’s front door, it’s just taken me a time to find the scripts I first stumbled across. But they’re here: the complete shooting scripts for Fame, beginning with the first season.

I read a lot of scripts, I enjoy reading scripts, I’m particularly interested in this set for how they approach the musical numbers. Some just have scene headings and a few lines of description like

91. BRIDGET’S AUDITION – PRODUCTION NUMBER

starts simply and builds as the corps of dancers from Lydia’s class move onto stage to back and accentuate Bridget’s routine. Leroy is her male ‘support’ dancer, helping her in lifts and turns, etc. The moves are intricate, always keeping Bridget in the forefront of the audience’s focus, leading to a final portion in which all the dancers fall away, leaving the performing arena to Bridget, allowing her to carve graceful shapes from thin air, in concert with Bruno’s music…

Let us all take a moment to imagine being Debbie Allen, not only having to learn her lines from the script as she starred as dance teacher Lydia Grant but also having to go uh-uh, graceful lines, right honey, and choreograph that number.

One script included all the lyrics to the various songs. It was really confusing: the lyrics were written out in all capital letters, very hard to read, and the way they were positioned in the script meant they were followed by dialogue that was clearly meant to precede them. But they did also include very familiar – to me from my radio work – cues and timings for how long the music would take.

And then another script just gives up and says, in total:

MUSIC #1 – TO BE ANNOUNCED

It’s funny how clearly you can see a show finding its feet through its scripts and just how they are written, what they tell the production. I’ve read entire series of scripts before to see how a show develops from start to end and it’s terribly instructive as well as interesting.

So as a writer, I recommend taking a look at the scripts. If you tell anyone we talked about this, tell ’em that I was very serious about production issues and script writing and the history of television, okay? Maybe you can tell them I admitted I’ve enjoyed watching the episodes and that I like the music.

But if you ever tell anyone that I had a gigantic crush on one of the Fame dancers, you’re off my Christmas card list and no mistake.

 

Work away

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I am three hours early for a gig. I’m in a Costa Coffee and am on my second mug. Can I get you one?

It’s strange being somewhere familiar yet in such an unfamiliar way and at an unfamiliar time. We’re drinking in Stratford upon Avon, you and I, and I’ve been here a thousand times. What about you? Probably most often I come for the theatre – the RSC is just over there, behind the high street, you can see the tower – but I’ve also often come just for the sake of coming. Idly, purposefully, for half an hour, for a day.

Always for fun, though.

I’m confident today will be fun too, but it’s different. I’m at the Stratford Literary Festival and I’ll be doing The Blank Screen workshop for creative writers and possibly some normal people too. (Have you heard me go on about this? Take a look at The Blank Screen news site but bring a packed lunch, I talk a lot.)

I talk a lot, I do this particular workshop a lot and it is a thrill how weeks or months after a session I will get a tweet from someone saying they were using what I told them. That they had therefore finished their novel. God, that is wonderful.

However, since it’s you, I’m going to admit something. Today is the first time I’ve run The Blank Screen as a full day workshop. Considering that I have regularly struggled to get everything in, I should be ecstatic. But I’m so used to squeezing down that I’m blinking at the idea of not galloping through things at lightspeed. I’ve done this in a country hour.

In comparison, a whole day feels as long as a radio show: that clutch in the stomach when you know you could have dead air. I am prepared through the roof and I know this stuff I do works, I am excited to get to meet new people and talk about it. But I am stomach-clutching.

I knew I’d be nervous. I know I am always nervous until the second that I start and some kind of light switch switches on. I even spotted a while ago that I was so nervous about this one that I had made a mistake with the trains. I booked myself on one leaving Birmingham at half past stupid o’clock. Hence being here three hours early.

What I had forgotten, though, was how different a place looks when you’re working there. Most of the shops are closed. (Bless Costa.) People look like they’ve yet to be wound up properly for work. I passed a dozen Morris Dancers rehearsing. The streets are busy enough but they feel like a stage set, not quite ready for lights and cameras and action yet. Definitely not ready for tourists, not yet. I’m suddenly reminded of a morning in New York City where workmen just nodded at me like I lived there because no other tourist would be up at that silly time. (No other tourist was recording a UK DVD Review podcast, but that’s another story.)

And today I walked from the station to here. Walking is especially good for showing you a place. (I loathe that I just said that to you. I’m a writer. We sit. We sit good.)

Walking through streets and going to work. I feel more at home here today than I ever have. It feels more familiar than it ever has.

Which interests me particularly because I ran a news story on The Blank Screen earlier this week about research that indicates working away from home is good for us. Just to be Russian doll about it, let me quote the quote I quoted in that Blank Screen story that I’m now quoting:

Research shows that experience in other countries makes us more flexible, creative, and complex thinkers.

How does studying or working abroad change you? You return with a photo album full of memories and a suitcase full of souvenirs, sure. But you may also come back from your time in another country with an ability to think more complexly and creatively—and you may be professionally more successful as a result.

These are the conclusions of a growing body of research on the effects of study- and work-abroad experiences. For example: A study led by William Maddux, an associate professor of organizational behavior at INSEAD, found that among students enrolled in an international MBA program, their “multicultural engagement”—the extent to which they adapted to and learned about new cultures—predicted how “integratively complex” their thinking became.

Read that exact same quote all over again on Go Away. As Far as You Can together with details of the research or at least of where I first heard about all this. Plus musings of when I personally first gathered that going away was a good thing, before I read it anywhere.

It’s really, specifically, that working away somewhere is good though. Not just going. Not just visiting. Working. Becoming part of the place shapes you. And I am fully confident that today in Stratford would shape my writing. If I weren’t so nervous that I can’t write.

They do toasted things here, want to split one with me?

He’s not dead, Jim

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Without spoiling anything in case you haven’t seen it, the latest series of Endeavour ends with our hero in a bit of a pickle. Without spoiling any show ever, they always end with a pickle. But no matter the size or shape of the pickle, we know everything will be fine. We know.

I think I’m okay with that. Part of me feels that this is an extraordinarily bad thing, that we have somehow become accustomed to having thrills but always a happy ending. To always have tunnels of love but with the reassuring information that “this is not a dark ride”. Our entire society is so hungry for happy endings that we don’t accept anything else.

But then another part of me thinks bollocks.

We have seen thousands upon thousands of hours of television drama in our lives and we are TV literate. We know the hero will survive not because we long for it in our hearts, not because we couldn’t face being upset, but because we know without the hero, there’s no show next week. And we know there’s a show next week. Even if Endeavour got cancelled, we’d know that the guy must always be okay because the show is a prequel to Inspector Morse and we’d have noticed if there were no Inspector Morse character in that.

So maybe we make a little pact that we will suspend our disbelief, that we will pretend we don’t know. Maybe. Probably.

I don’t know that’s a wonderful thing, though, because I think it’s somehow taken us in directions that are a bit tedious. There is death in drama and it can be done very well. I’m struggling to think of an example and I am subsequently struggling to think of an example where it wouldn’t wreck things to tell you. Please provide your own example for me, okay?

Films can do it too. I’m going to spoil Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid because you should’ve seen it by now and I’m going to spoil Titanic because you almost certainly have. They are unusual.

There’s a novel – no, bugger, I cannot spoil this. Okay. There’s this novel, right, and just about exactly in the middle of it, the lead character is killed. It is the most enormous, eye-popping, turn back a page and read that again, surprise. I’ve been slapped by planks that didn’t jolt me so much. It is truly a brilliant moment – but unfortunately everything after it is ditchwater dull.

I think it’s the Ballykissangel Syndrome. Ballykissangel was a series about a priest and a barmaid, whether they would get together, and how they were surrounded by all these great supporting characters. The priest and the barmaid leave after a couple of series – spoilers! – and the show continued by moving those supporting characters to the foreground. It didn’t work an inch. Supporting characters are supporting. The show was cancelled and I’m not even sure how long that took because I was gone.

That great novel did a great thing but then had nowhere to go. But at least that death really mattered. Usually now, it doesn’t. Death doesn’t matter at all.

This week I’ve been reading These Are the Voyages, a book about the original Star Trek. (Quick summary: the author loves Star Trek a lot more than I do but the under-the-cosh, health-endangering pressures and the clashes of people under stress are terribly interesting.) You can perhaps tell I’ve been reading this because that’s where today’s title comes from: Bones McCoy was forever saying “He’s dead, Jim”. But only over characters we didn’t care about or most often barely knew.

One of my beefs with Trek is that actually nobody dies. You kill off Spock in one film, he’s right back in the next. Give me a break.

Science fiction brings back its characters because it thinks it can, it thinks that it can have some technobabble explanation that means it can give us the ultimate in drama by killing a character – but then saving him or her so the show can continue. They do kill characters, they do bring them back, the show does continue, but it’s a bump. I remember consciously thinking in Battlestar Galactica – in all other ways an astonishingly strong drama – that, okay, let Roslin survive just this once. But it was a conscious thought, I was out of the story and had to push myself back in.

Soaps also see death as the ultimate drama and they will kill characters off but it’s usually because the actor is leaving and we know that, we’ve seen that on supermarket shelves. Or they’re killing off a character who’s run their course, who has nothing left to give and we know that, we’ve been watching them.

Much more often, soaps go for the life or death peril and always choose life. Death isn’t the big thing because it doesn’t get that far, it doesn’t happen. Or death isn’t the big thing in Star Trek because if you wear a red shirt, make sure to write a will. Or it isn’t the big thing in any science fiction because you’ll be back next week regardless.

Death is trivialised by this and actually I think it’s trivialised by most TV drama, especially detective series. There is a particularly fine moment in Veronica Mars when a killer is brought to justice. I’m going to change the name of the victim to Bert, just to protect you. With that one change, this is the line of film noir-style voiceover narration we get from Veronica:

The one big downside of justice: it feels good, but it doesn’t change anything. A killer’s in jail, but BERT is still dead, which remains fundamentally unfair.

You really feel it, too. Such satisfaction that she’s solved the case, but such an awareness that a character we liked is still gone.

Death can work – I’ve suddenly remembered an Alan Plater episode of Lewis where the inevitable murder was deeply unsettling because the character was so great, was so alive. Actually, I read that script before filming and I remember telling him I fancied that character, even right there on the page.

So it is possible to make death hurt, so to speak, and it is possible to use it as a most effective piece of drama. But I offer that it should only be one, that it can only be one, that there is so much more to drama than whether one lives or dies or is resurrected.

If the only thing you have in a drama is a death and the story is only a whodunnit, then I don’t think you have drama and I know you don’t have a story. You have a puzzle. Quick litmus test: can you watch an episode of Columbo a second time and still enjoy it? Definitely. Can you rewatch a CSI? Nope. And I don’t think you need to rewatch CSI, it’ll be back next week with the same puzzle.

Columbo is about two great characters pitched against each other. The murderer has all the obvious stakes to lose – freedom, perhaps even life – and Columbo has nothing but job satisfaction and his perfect record at stake. But it is riveting drama because the characters are real and they are being put through a wringer and they are revealing more of themselves. More than they should. (There is one Columbo where he breaks that polite “oh, one more thing” persona and is visibly mad at a suspect. We only see it the once and it is extremely powerful because of that, but it’s always there under the surface, whether he’s playing someone, what he’s really feeling.)

You can rivet without the threat of death.

Endeavour has the extra problem that prequels bring in that we have to recognise that this is the same Morse we’ve known but it also has to give him room to become that Morse we’ve known. He isn’t going to die, I have no doubt he’ll get out of this particular pickle. But it’s what that pickling does to him.

There you go. Drama is pickling. I should’ve just said that.