Outlining. What is point?

Okay, one line in and I’m already torn: do you recognise the Down the Line reference or don’t you? I’m going to with yes, you do, because otherwise you’re now thinking my grammar is shot to pieces and this would be a bad thought to give you when I’m about to talking Writing, with a capital W.

Or at least Outlining, with an O.

Previously on this subject: I don’t outline. I know where I’m going with a story or I don’t. Usually I’m aiming at a point, very often I end up somewhere else. But it works and the worst thing that has happened so far is that I’ve had to decide to delete 40,000 words. But they were also rubbish words, so I’m no martyr to my cause.

One reason for doing things this way is that my outlines rob the story of any interest for me. And one excuse for not doing outlines is that I am fast enough that even under pressure I’ve got time to revise things.

But, truth be told, the primary reason is that I know many, many people who first do an outline and then draw up a chart: scenes 7, 12 and 55 are easy ones, I’ll do those today; 19, 1 and 13 are toughies. Then they tick off each one as done. Sure as anything, each of those scenes will be fine but they’ll also be discrete and separate. I’ve never known any outline-kind of person to suddenly find the exit moment of a scene and allow themselves to go off early or bring in an entirely new scene. Or allow the characters to do anything except what they’d slavishly worked out before.

Consequently, each scene is complete in and of itself, it has a beginning, middle and end. Only, that means every scene starts, middles along a bit and ends. Put down one scene and pick up the next. Start. Stop. No flow, no energy carrying from scene to scene so no, in my opinion, compulsion. I see this in a lot of UK TV drama: stories are just a sequence of events, none especially more important than the other, at least not to the viewer, and time just passes along nicely enough.

I don’t think stories should be full of crashes and incident, bangs and wallops, but you’ve only got people for a short time so there needs to be a driving force through it. It can be soft seduction, it can be peril, but it has to be alive. And as much as I believe writing is both a craft and an art, I think a too-mechanical approach to it does rob you of impetus and it can kill the story.

So I’ve been doing this outline, right?

It’s for my Folly. I swear I may even name the script Folly. I mean it in the building sense; the way you have rich geezers paying people to build elaborate and pointless towers on their land. I pass one on the drive to London: totally worthless, but nicely made. That seems to be what I’m doing here. But I’m trying to do it quickly so I can get this story out of my head, like a writing exorcise, and get on to the now famous ten page debacle.

So I thought I’d outline.

But there’s also the fact that one thing I am actually good at is building sequences. It comes from my radio training, I think, the ability to fashion a small sequence of scenes or clips that play against each other, that bounce you through, that together tell you more than the individual pieces do. And that just keep your interest. And the thing that is so annoying about this Folly idea, the thing that means I’ve got to get it out, is that I’ve seen it all as one gigantic sequence. I knew instantly what the entire shape of the tale was and there were myriad (okay, 30) scenes I immediately knew I’d have to do. It’s one of those ideas, you’d think of the same 30 moments too.

So I thought I’d outline. Get them all down before I forget any.

I’ve now done this. I took advice from outliner types, I wrote it all down.

And here’s the thing. The notes I made originally of these 30 scene ideas: no matter how I play with this outline or re-imagine the entire story, each one goes straight into precisely the same spot I first thought of them.

My outline is nothing but a nice list of the same points with a few tabs in.

Have I wasted my time outlining? Will I end up with the same kind of dead flat story I fear – and do so without gaining anything at all?

You’ll never know: I’ll never show you the final piece. I mean, it’s a Folly.

But I’ll confess if I think the end result works or not.

William

I went off the grid this afternoon: I delivered all the copy I had to and then snuck off to see Die Hard 4. There’s something about nipping into a cinema in the daytime; although you can have your phone and you could walk out at any time, you don’t and you don’t. You agree to stay there for two hours and in more ways than just your phone, you switch off.

I love thrillers. I also love character and I know that if your dialogue isn’t there, you don’t have any characters. I might relish the plots of someone like Steven Moffat but even his intricacies and cleverness don’t work if the characters aren’t right or if what they’re saying is just telling me the plot.

There’s a bit of that in Die Hard 4. There’s an awful lot of it in most thrillers and it’s why I doubt I could name you five great ones. At least not without handing over two of the places to the Bourne flms. Similarly, how many great detective stories are there? I can think of 122 of them but they’re all episodes of Homicide: Life on the Street.

But I go to thrillers and I go to detective films really wanting them to work. Er, that sounds like I go to comedies hoping they’ll flop. I mean, I really want thrillers to work. There is something exultant about characters and a story that burn up the screen and that seem to really move, to scoop you up and carry you into mayhem. That seem to do what writers have trademarked as going on a journey.

I was exhausted at the end of Die Hard 4 but it didn’t seem like John McClane had gone anywhere. He was still the man he was at the top and that was disappointing. It’s also a mawkish film at times and it also uses a lot of the apparently hip thriller terms du jour, most prominently this “off the grid” rubbish. It wasn’t rubbish when we heard it in The Bourne Identity, but it is is now.

Yet if I don’t think Die Hard was 100% great, I seem to be thinking it was 70% good. I am unforgiving, usually, and if there’s a moment or eight that reek of the-writer-couldn’t-do-any-better or, worse, that the filmmakers think I want a pat the dog scene, I’m gone for good. Last time I nipped out to a cinema on a working day was to see Superman and I strolled out of there about half an hour in.

Die Hard 4 definitely has moments and it had momentum, I did want to see what happened next. I’m arguing three sides here, the two obvious rivals that it hasn’t got great characters and it does have big thrills, and then the third side that the thrills don’t work.

Some do. Actually, many do. But if I’m to forgive characterisation and wallow in spectacle, I have to believe it. It doesn’t have to be believable, I just have to buy it. So a film can end with the most almighty impossibility and I’ll be there if the film has carried me to it. The ending of DIe Hard works well – at least, the very end does; there’s a hugely convenient leap right before it that disappoints me – and a lot of the start does too. As long as I can believe the hero could get out the way he does, I’ll take anything. When Die Hard goes wrong, it’s because the escape isn’t believable.

This won’t spoil the film because it’s in the trailer anyway, but at one early point John McClane sends a car flying up into the air and into a helicopter.

I buy the destruction of the helicopter. I buy the car going through it. I just can’t buy it taking off into the air.

It supposedly happens because he sends it hurtling into a ticket booth or somesuch and I can’t make that connection, I can’t make that work. Whereas moments before there is a scene with a fire hydrant and the helicopter which I do buy even though according to the people who write up goofs on IMDb, it’s physically impossible.

I think what I’m slowly realising is that believability is skin deep. It’s a very delicate line and it must also be personal taste. Like a pain threshold.

Now will I please get to work on my ten pages of script?

William

So there are a few people waiting to see the next draft of my play – and some of them even know they’re waiting for it. That’s obviously fantastic and I’m also feeling pretty good because I’ve actually written it now. All that hot air about how, oh yes, lots of ideas, absolutely, that’s now in fact done. I’m at the stage of refusing to look at the script for a short while because otherwise you know I’ll send it out and about one buggersecond later I’ll realise something.

And there’s thing with Piers Beckley and the BBC Drama Writing Academy: I’m waiting to hear he gets in, partly of course because that would be a good thing, but also because I’m looking forward to raging with vivid green jealousy.

But the truth is that what I should actually be doing now is writing my entry for the Red Planet contest.

And I’m not.

I mean, I’ve read the opening ten pages of every script I’ve written, in order to see if one of those will fly. There were a dozen, would you believe that? Twelve whole scripts, not including the dogs. Either I’m prolific or I’m rubbish but this is not the kind of question to ponder when you’re entering a competition.

Still, some of the twelve look pretty good. None that I don’t want to radically change, but good.

And Danny Stack recommended at the launch of this contest that we should read the opening ten pages of any scripts we really rate, to see what makes their start so good. Can’t fault that advice, it’s smart, but I just turned to my shelves and there must be over a thousand screenplays there in one form or another. I read a few West Wings. Shawshank. Trainspotting. Some Jack Rosenthal, some Alan Plater, John Hopkins, Troy Kennedy Martin, William Goldman, Paddy Chayefsky. Russell T Davies. Actually, I haven’t re-read any of Davies’s, I’ve just had a great time re-reading his introductions. In both the Queer as Folk and Doctor Who script books he does his intros as scripts and they are joyous.

Funny, though: no women in that list. I’ve just had to hunt to see that I do have Caroline Aherne, Connie Booth and Victoria Wood scripts. Oh! Also Emma Thompson’s tremendous Sense & Sensibility. Oh Plus! Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit. Made me weep, that did.

But this is a big surprise to me, big enough that I’ve just been knocked off the point I was building up to. Mind if I just explore a concern here? I’m honestly stunned that my collection could be so impossibly male-biased. Dare I turn to my right to where the novels are? Jeanette Winterson again, Carrie Fisher, lots and lots of Margery Allingham, some Patricia Cornwall from before I got too scared to read those. One Jane Asher (you should really try hers: she has a great way of building a brooding tension). Patricia Highsmith. Helene Hanff. A bit of Bronte. A bit of Austen. Oooh, another Jane Asher. What happened to alphabetical order? And is Leslie Thomas a man or a woman?

It’s not like I buy to a quota, this is just years of what I was drawn to. But I’m surprised because the reason I’m a writer is Lou Grant, the MTM television drama from the late 1970s and part of that show was watching how two writers whose work I admired climbed up the credits. One of them is Michelle Gallery who seemed to vanish a bit after that show but pops up occasionally with movie-of-the-week kind of screenplays. And then there’s April Smith who I’m really excited to see has returned to TV. I only looked at her site to get the address for you and there it is, after a strong TV career and then latterly many years of writing novels, she’s nipping back onto the telly.

So I’m happy again now, just enough to take my mind off this whole gender-stereotyping thing and back onto the point.

Which is that I’m latching on to any excuse not to write the ten pages I should for the contest. We all have a self-distract button and I am thumping mine repeatedly.

You may have noticed.

I even updated my website, williamgallagher.com with some new bits and pieces.

Cleaned the house.

Wrote a piece in this week’s Radio Times magazine about the locations used in Harry Potter films.

Wrote up the results of a poll RT magazine has run about the best science fiction and fantasy shows. It’s in next week’s issue. Which reminds me, I had this exchange about the final pages with the art editor yesterday:

ART EDITOR: I don’t know if they’ve been changed since you wrote the copy but it’s very funny now.
ME: Definitely changed, then.

Um.

Alphabetised my book collection.

It’s not that I’m struggling to find an idea, incidentally. I have one. It’s just unfortunately absolutely 100% perfect for an existing TV series which will never, absolutely 100% never, look at a spec script. And one of the producers is on the panel for this Red Planet comp. There is no possible way in which I should write this script.

So I’m writing this script, right, and – actually, yes, I am writing it. Pointless, really, but you know what it’s like when you’re reading something you can’t put down? When you’ve got to turn that page? I’m unable to shake this idea and I want to see what I can do with it. So I’m writing a script I’ll never send to anyone.

Anyway.

Had a bath.

Played Scrabble a lot.

Refused to buy Suzanne Vega’s new album until I’ve written the ten pages for the comp.

Decided what I really need to write the ten pages is to buy Suzanne Vega’s new album.

And now, you’re the only one standing between me and the pages. I’ll take any suggestion for how I can prevaricate more, anything.

Hey! It’s gone one o’clock! I’m going to break the habit of a working lifetime and have lunch. You’re brilliant, thank you.

William

Just back from the screenwriting festival, wanted to point you in the direction of the Red Planet Pictures’ competition, hesitated, figured you’d only go and win the bleedin’ thing, considered sending you to the Balamory site instead, decided that was mean and, more importantly, that you’d see through it immediately, so go on then, here you are, here’s the Red Planet link.

Never seen a writing prize so good. Or do I mean I’ve never seen a writing prize more precisely in tune with what I want to do?

But less of what I want to do, more of what I do: there’s a mistake in this week’s Radio Times where the On This Day entry of mine for July 8 has somehow been repeated on July 10. If I’m still doing this next year, which I very much hope, then I’ll reuse the missing one. You’ll never guess when. In the meantime, though, in case it’s of interest, it’s below.

William

RT/ON THIS DAY/WEEK28/GALLAGHER

July 10, 1983

…24 Years Ago

“She was everything a woman should be; the perfect heroine and the ideal wife. What, then, is Helen Mirren doing in the part?”

RT saw her as “unarguably one of England’s most exciting actresses” but had some trouble picturing her in the title role of The BBC Television Shakespeare: Cymbeline. The playwright was unavailable for comment so director Elijah Moshinsky talked it through.

“I wanted an actress of great sexual voltage,” he said. “Helen can act enormously complex sexual emotions at war with each other.” William Gallagher

NOTES
Cover: Helen Mirren, RT 9-15 July 1983
Feature: p4, billing p25

I just like that line.  See you at the Cheltenham Screenwriters’ Festival?

One of my cast from Time and the Conway Twitty Appreciation Society, Richard Sutton, was in last week’s Dalziel and Pascoe on BBC1.

Um, I actually want to point you at a story about eleven colours, but there you go. While that heading’s on my mind, I must watch Three Colours White. I’ve read the three, I loved Three Colours Blue when I saw it, but I couldn’t get through White. Which means I’ve had Three Colours Red on my shelves for years and can’t watch it yet.

Anyway, eleven colours. I found something interesting, though I notice now that it’s a month or more old so you may have seen it already, in which case you won’t be interested and I’m folding my arms, looking at you, tapping a foot, wondering why you didn’t tell me about it yourself:

http://www.colourlovers.com/blog/2007/05/01/11-great-color-legends/

Sometimes I type a random word into Google and just see where it takes me, but this time I came across this because of a Photoshop website. If I could only remember which one…

William

Listen, I haven’t just won a Tony award, have I? That was just a dream, right?

I really am dreaming about my play and a substantial part of me recognises that this now bordering on silly, if you were to mention the word ‘childish’ I might be upset but I wouldn’t entirely disagree.

But still, you know I did this play, you know it went spectacularly, gloriously, joyously well, what you might not know is that it went well twice. I won’t keep going on about the day but I’d like you to come backstage with me to the first moment I felt the day was going to be good.

For whatever reason, the day included a very long lunch break and my director used that time to run through the two plays she was doing that afternoon. I roamed around the back of the theatre while she, writer Debbie McAndrew and their cast ran through the first play, Mari’s Wake. I think my piece was a great, exuberant finish to the sessions but there’s no question that Debbie’s piece was the strongest play of the day. I’d already read the script so I was able to wander, enjoying the performance but also soaking in the atmosphere. For this lunch time run through there were probably ten people in the theatre; cast, director, writers, crew. Maybe fifteen. So it was a good time to relish that you were having a good time.

And at one point I stood right at the back, high up by the door, leaning like a more talented James Dean and looking fantastic.

Shows how much I know: two dear friends came in at that moment and report I was actually looking worried as hell. So much so that they sent my wife Angela to go calm me down.

And then I was up, my play’s turn. No hanging around, no real time for anything, just enough minutes to have my play performed for me and that same fifteen or so crew and this is this the thing that got me into thinking the day would be good: the crew laughed. There’s that laugh that you know isn’t really earned: you’re recognising there’s a joke and you’re being nice to the writer. I got some of those but I also got that surprised laugh, the genuinely amused laugh.

Fantastic.

Because of that, when the real audience came in, I was a lot less worried than I’d have expected. You could still have blended whisky on me but I was able to enjoy it.

Very interesting how audiences change, how one joke will fly higher with this group than that. And I’ve got friends who argue audiences are stupid, that they need everything explained but this enrages me because you know that’s wrong, don’t you? I’m an audience, you’re an audience, when we’re watching something on stage or on TV we don’t miss a single thing – unless we’ve stopped watching, in which case boring us before patronising us is really not the way to go. Yet as much as I respect audiences, I underestimated this one: there was one joke they all, every single one of them, got a whole line early. Consequently the punch line, per se, felt like a clunk and I’ll watch for that in future.

Gotta go, my ego’s on a low light, it needs more stoking,

William

GRAHAM: Tell me what you see.