I’m so tired. It’s 2am, but I’ve got to talk to you. I’ve got to Talk Things Through.

Previously… the Red Planet Prize could’ve been made for me – but it wasn’t. Not this year, anyway. I got to the finals, which was without question the single most affirming thing that’s happened in my writing career. I mean, stage plays, yes, Radio Times, no doubt. But Red Planet wanted one-hour TV drama and that’s my bag. That is the reason I am a writer at all. (qv Lou Grant.)

“The way I work generally is I figure a code, a general measuring stick parameter. A thirty scene thing means that each scene is going to be around four pages long… I have a tendency to work rather mathematically about all this stuff. As I build this up, you’ll see it’s done vaguely by the numbers.”

Aren’t you rushing to see the movie this fella is planning?  I think you knew it was a man. But it’s George Lucas and he’s speaking privately in the first of five story conferences, five nine-hour story conferences about Raiders of the Lost Ark in 1978. He’s spitballing away with Steven Spielberg, briefing  screenwriter Laurence Kasdan.

Fancy reading the whole thing? A transcript of the entire thing is available right here in PDF.

I think I’ve said before that a reason the latest Indiana Jones film was so poor was that it was just a series of stunts with some bits to string them together. There were other reasons too, but that was one and it’s a failing of a lot of films. But as I’d thought I’d heard and now know for sure, it’s precisely how Raiders of the Lost Ark was done.

More, the stunt scenes they couldn’t fit in went on to become the next couple of films.

So maybe George Lucas has a point.

Nah.

Mathematical screenwriting? What’s that line of Aaron Sorkin’s? I can’t find my copy of his book but it was a crack about network TV executives saying you can’t have politics on TV, can’t have people with moustaches… Sorking said something along the lines of: “People make up rules  because it’s considerably easier than learning the real ones.”

Blimey. From Lucas to Sorkin in one blog. There is actually a chance these two fellas have never been talked about in the same breath.

But anyway, I was fascinated by the Raiders documents: the torrent of ideas, for one thing, but more how we know so very well how Kasdan absorbed all this and wrote something so very good.

William

I’ve had some wonderful nights in theatre and I’m going to admit to you that up to now the best have really been when it’s been my own material on stage. Sitting in an audience, feeling them laugh and choke, knowing that an idea you had in your head is now working. Does it honestly get better?

Yes.

On Saturday night I was at the Carriageworks Theatre in Leeds where my wife Angela Gallagher’s first-ever play, Rainwatching was performed.

You can’t imagine how good it was. It went down a hurricane. Rainwatching closed out the whole festival of new writing and when the lights came up, the audience was in tears. There was a writer/actor/audience discussion panel right after it and most of the other plays were skipped over in seconds but Angela’s was all anyone wanted to discuss. I may be biased there, but still.

The piece is a very raw, apparently simple but truly rich and very powerful monologue about a cancer patient with a right git of a husband. And during the panel discussion, the theatre announced to the audience that Rainwatching was to be restaged over the summer – in a trilogy including a monologue for the git husband.

I’ve written that. And I’ve written the final part of the trilogy, a piece about another character in both the first two monologues. It’s the best thing I’ve ever written.

It’s funny but one of the strongest reactions on Saturday night was about this husband character, Len, who we only hear about, we never see in Angela’s Rainwatching. And another strong reaction was to the idea of seeing him in mine: everybody wants to see him, everybody wants to hear his side. But women who had been cheery with me until this point, positively turned on me: challenging me, I mean really threateningly challenging me, to try justifying this git. The look in their eyes!

I’ve never had such a good night – and nothing of mine was actually performed. But the power of Angela’s piece, it was wonderfully affirming to see an audience reacting the way I believed they would.

What I didn’t expect was the reaction after the show. Because of the panel, the audience knew what Angela looked like so they kept seeking her out in the bar. When we were leaving, people abandoned their conversations in mid-word to come over to her: not just to congratulate her, but to actually thank her for writing it.

And to give me a funny look about the sequel.

Wish you could’ve been there. I’ll let you know when dates for the trilogy are announced – and in the meantime, fancy seeing what the fabulous writer Angela Gallagher looks like? Stop by her Breast Cancer Walk donations page and say Mr Angela sent you.

William

Listen, sorry in advance: I’m about to not tell you something. But it’s fantastic.

Remember your careers teachers telling you that interviewers are going to ask you what your weaknesses are? And that you should say “Well, perhaps I can be too much of a perfectionist”?

Such bollocks. And yet, it was prescient bollocks because it foresaw the world of the writer’s blog: obviously one writes in order to communicate precisely how huge our egos are but, still, there’s at the very least a frisson of self-advertising in doing it. I don’t think I’ve got any work through talking to you like this but I can immediately think of times when an editor has read what I’ve written so I’m aware that this cannot be the entirely relaxed, artless chat that one would like.

So when Piers picks up a meme from Lara, and others before her, asking for us all to say what we’re good and bad at in writing, I’m going to go out on limbs and say the Good just might be emphasised over the bad. Even down to initial capital letters.

And why not? I hear the challenge and I dive in with gusto:

WHAT I’M FANTASTIC AT
Dialogue, characters and pace that mean my material has life and verve right there on the page.

what i’m bad at
Well, perhaps I can be too much of a perfectionist.

William

On the Mac in my office, there’s a half-written review of my 2008. I made some notes on my iPhone too. But here, sitting in front of my PowerBook, I realise one thing: I have too many computers.

And I’ll delete all of it because I also realise that there really is only one thing to say: Angela’s breast cancer has been treated and, so far as you can ever get anything like an all-clear, the treatment has done its job.

So, see you in 2009?

Okay, well. This time last year I wrote a huge amount about quite a little; it was all success, success and three times success but primarily so that I could then slap you with the news of Angela’s diagnosis. I like a punchline. When I thought about the year ahead, rather than just day-to-day and appointment-to-appointment, it was to mentally write the whole of 2008 off. But it’s been a stubborn bugger of a year and a great deal of it seems to have been rather successful again, almost as if it’s in spite of me.

Well, I say that and I don’t believe it: this year I have obviously looked after Angela before anything else yet still I’ve had three stage play productions, worked on two new magazines, become a finalist in one contest. Plus the annual dance around BBC Radio 4 just seemed to be more fun this time. I won a spot on an invitation-only BBC Writers’ Room course.  I did a Doctor Who blog that became the most popular read on the RadioTimes.com website. I shot short films for Radio Times, worked on commercial DVDs, I’ve had an overwhelming worldwide reaction to a casual aside I made that I might give up doing the UK DVD Review podcast.

And it’s all come from pitching every day. Every working day for the year.

It might not have been much: I counted meetings, phone calls, emails, script submissions, contest entries, all sorts of things as being the pitch for the day but I did it. Well, I have one more to do but I suspect I’ll manage.

If I’m to be 100% honest, I should tell you that I have also managed to lose a lot of work this year: quite a bit of Radio Times magazine work went away – all for quite fine reasons, all very amicable and fine, but still I do miss some of it. But then you compare the loss of On This Day to the time I had to hold Angela upright in the chair at the GP surgery. How she had a bad allergic reaction to one of the chemotherapy drugs and because I raised the alarm, the entire medical staff ran to her with a crash-cart. You can live without On This Day.

Still, it’s been tremendous having readers complain to RT. One woman from Sussex, I think, phoned the reader services department to say she’d seen I wasn’t writing the feature and wanted to ask if I were okay.

I used to think that work was everything and, well, I still do. But we’re writers, we can handle contradictions: I simultaneously think that people are everything. I said I pitched every day; sometimes I’d forget that was what I was doing. The people on Doctor Who Adventures magazine, for instance, are just so nice I amble over to see them when I can and probably I ought to be bringing ideas, I ought to have had a Pitch In Mind. Often enough I have, I suppose, but usually it’s an amble. Similarly with Radio 4, I think: there are producers in R4 whose work is fantastic and I just enjoy talking with them. Radio’s a funny world: I did have a proper pitch meeting with a radio producer and it looks like I will get the work I was after, but the best bit was nattering about radio in general. For a couple of hours.

Which is what I’ll end up doing with you if I don’t shut up. I did just write you a few hundred more words about all the great things that have happened with my work this year, but let me skip: in so many ways, and for so many obvious reasons, I’m ready to move on from 2008.

But some years won’t let you go easily. Like 1983. Follow: I went to the Longleat Doctor Who thing in 1983 and this week I learn from a DVD feature about it that there were 70,000 people over the two days of the event. If you don’t know about this event, Who writer Paul Cornell described it only mildly-jokingly as Doctor Who’s Woodstock.

Now of those 35,000 each day, I’m on the 25th Anniversary DVD of Doctor Who: The Five Doctors. Imagine my jaw flapping about as I watched this DVD a few days ago. Have a look:

I have rarely had so much hair. Or a duffel coat.

Normally, I’ve got to tell you, I don’t like photographs from that long ago. I’m not keen on one taken 20 minutes back. But seeing myself at Longleat like that, so unexpectedly, I don’t know: I’m just sure that the me back then would be pleased at the me I am now.

Though if we could’ve just had a natter, I’d have told me to tell me to hurry up. And to get Angela’s breast examined earlier.

That’s the reason I’m glad to be done with 2008. But I’m also looking forward to 2009 for all the work that’s ahead of me – and because I’m going back to New York City in May.

Have a good new year,
William

PS I figured out Blogger’s location-aware bits. And how to make it lie.

I’m in a cottage that would suit Wuthering Heights – well, bar the wireless broadband, the Sky Freesat and a kitchen to dine for – but otherwise, Bronte territory. Well, I say her territory, it’s actually the Lake District.

Okay, I’m in a place called Stone Cottage but whirling around outside is a storm the like of which Cathy would feel at home. The view out of the window is the same as the view inside: the night is so dark the windows are like mirrors. And they got that dark around 4pm this afternoon.

It’s only December 15 but since I’m on a holiday that has been planned all year, that is something Angela has been looking forward to all year, and since it’s been a chemotherapy-laden year, I’m now so relaxed that I feel 2008 is over. It helps that I just did an end-of-year edition of UK DVD Review.

For which I’ve got to thank all the listeners who came on: I’ve thanked them personally but they’re so good on the show, they should be shouted about here. Have a listen to them all in the best edition I’ve done all year.

What’s great for me is that while you only hear a minute or two of each person, I got to have a great blather with them all. In each case I could’ve played out twice as much as I did, it was difficult to slice in and out to keep the show flying.

In one such conversation, Richard Smith brought up the topic of how I apparently sound as if I’m talking just to you, not to some large group. I think that’s the greatest compliment I can remember: it’s how I believe radio should be done, it’s how I think it’s best and why radio is so great, and it’s of course what I always aim for.

Can’t bear the zoo format where a presenter has a posse and we’re blessed to be listening in. Even when there is a pair of presenters, it’s rarely good for me. In the eighties there was suddenly a fashion for TV shows to be fronted by two hosts who, basically, told each other what was going on. I could never watch that without thinking the other fella should’ve paid more attention in rehearsals.

Anyway, I slugged this entry Location Aware. Do you know the term? Obviously you understand it but it happens to be what iPhone applications are called when they do something that requires them to know where you are. The great Vicinity, for instance, uses GPS to check where you are and then offers you lists of the nearest banks, restaurants, hotels, endless other things.

And now Blogger is location aware. Hang on, I have to press a button.

Oh. I pressed it. Has anything happened? I’m in Patterdale, Cumbria, and you may or may not see a map of this. I’m not excited yet.

This relaxing lark is so complicated.

William

That’s a quote and a half of full cream milk, isn’t it? You’d put it on a sweatshirt if it didn’t need XXL to get all the words on. That may not remain a problem for me for as long as I’d hope.

And there’s a way to find the words “vast inane” a little insulting. There’s a way to find “dangerous heights” a little cocky. But right now, as I’m working on end of year stuff and so getting all reflective, it’s hard not to think of 2008 as having seen some serious career climbing progression. Normally, I would be shrugging at you about now: my own mother does not maintain a chart of my progress, why would I imagine you’d be interested? It’d be nice if she did. Anyway.

Part of it does involve getting into the finals of the Red Planet contest. And there won’t be news on that until next year so there’s plenty of exciting pratfall potential in any boasting I might do about getting this far. That’s one thing.

And there’s that quote, “mounting to dangerous heights and travelling into the vast inane”, which is an old favourite and which you are a wee bit intrigued about. I like the unintended sense of it that achievement is ridiculous, that perhaps we choose what we call achievement and that this, the choosing, is part of our great inanity.

It doesn’t actually mean any of that. Talk about reading things into something.

The quote is really from Pao Phu Tao by Ko Hung – I can hear you go “Ah!” – and it is believed to be the earliest reference to helicopters, to rotary flight. It was written sometime in the fourth century AD and t’was but a short step from there to Airwolf.

My Red Planet submission is called Wasps and it’s set, primarily, in the air with said helicopters and the police people who fly a lot of them. And I didn’t realise it until the day I got the email about being in the finals that my very first script, the first screenplay I completed, was also about helicopters. In fact, if Wasps ever went to series, the things that have to happen in episode 2 happened in The Strawberry Thief some years ago.

I need you to know that no piece I’ve written in between these two has featured helicopters at all. I’m not, well, strange about them. I have flown them, but rotor time is so expensive I can’t claim the lessons I had amounted to much at all. Still, watching the whole world tilt under your feet, and knowing it’s your cack-handed use of the controls, that’s the most exciting way I’ve ever had to make myself feel sick. And there was metaphor even in lesson 1: my instructor told me I was a natural at hovering.

Anyway. Red Planet means a huge amount to me because it’s precisely, I mean to the nickel, about the type of writing I want to do. I’ve said it before, if the prize also included a bacon sandwich and an iPhone, I’d be convinced the whole thing was invented for me.

So to get some affirmation, even just this amount, that I can do the thing I want to do, is of course a dangerous height. To have it over a piece whose roots go back that far and which effectively charts my progression as a writer more than my mother does, that’s got to have a little bit of a deliciously vast inane.

Funny thing: Wasps is the most commercial thing I’ve ever written, but it’s simultaneously the least. I mean I hope it’s high drama but I think it’s more low cunning, and if I have better characters and dialogue than any helicopter TV show since Whirlybirds, that’s not a bleedin’ difficult thing to do. But just putting a helicopter in is expensive. Doing the things I need them to do, priceless.

And the week my best action thriller script ever got this little spot of recognition happened to be the week I wrote my most acutely personal, non-commercial, bitterly felt stage writing. I wrote a piece that was frightening. Not the subject matter or how I was doing it, really, but having this piece inside me and having to get it out, having to. But simultaneously being honestly scared of it. The phone would ring and I’d grab it, glad to escape the writing. And then if the call went on too long, I was frightened that I’d lose the moment and be unable to carry on writing.

I was honestly feeling pale from the writing. And it’s funny that I should keep using the word “honestly” because I think that was the thing. It’s the most honest, truthful, unpleasantly raw piece I’ve done. All writing is a peek into someone’s soul, or at least into their view of the world, and it’s a good thing if the reader catches you bleeding. What I didn’t really feel until this piece was that you can do this, I can seemingly do this, I can make a piece so raw it is painful and yet it’s fiction. An utter lie.

How can truthful writing be all lies? Ask me last month and I couldn’t have told you. Ask me now and I still can’t, but I can write it.

So this is why I’m unexpectedly seeing 2008 as a year of dangerous heights. I fully accept that as heights go, it’s not that dangerous, that it’s less mountaineering and more an exercise step class, but I’m hoping that means 2009 will entail more climbing.

I’d mentally written 2008 off, right back in 2007: I knew the year would be taken up with Angela’s chemotherapy. And it’s bizarrely great to tell you that now, this moment, she’s in the kitchen sorting out a delivery of fish. I loathe fish, I especially hate cooking the stuff, touching it, smelling it, but I did it often enough during the year. What I mean is that she’s well enough to stand, that she’s doing what she wants to do instead of at times being unable to move. And though there’s a way to go, when I think of what some of the chemo drugs could’ve done, it makes dangerous heights and vast inanes feel smaller. (A single example: one drug she had to take has been known, commonly, to remove all feeling from your finger tips for a decade.)

So. I’m surprised that 2008 went as well for my writing as it has – previously on 2008: Red Planet you know about, this personal honest writing lark too, but also two produced stage plays and one big fat not, also getting new journalism work including on Doctor Who Adventures magazine, which may be my favourite thing of the year.

Now 2009 feels wide open, unbound, unconstrained. If Red Planet would like to hire me on January 1 that would be okay. And, hey, I have the story for episode 2 ready to go.

William