I’ve been using a thing called OmniOutliner to work out a book project that was just so stupidly unwieldy that I couldn’t see the words for the trees. With immense regret, I have to tell you that it worked. I’ve previously been an extremely reluctant outliner, only doing it when mandatory for a contract, and my heart is still not in outlining at all, but my head might be. I realised this yesterday when I needed to figure out something else that I’d ordinarily have just got on with writing and exploring. And instead, I unthinkingly turned to this OmniOutliner.

Here’s the thing. Some writers plan out in immense detail, some don’t. I fixed Alan Plater’s email once when he was having trouble sending attachments and the example document that we batted back and forth happened to be an outline. I didn’t need to read it to fix the email, I couldn’t read it because it was confidential, but I had to ask him. Why had he written an outline? He told me to read it.

It was a remarkably boring document. About as un-Plater-like as conceivable. But the very last line went something like this: “Now can I just go write the bloody thing?”

Outlines don’t kill writers, outlining does. We get the fun and worth of the story sucked out of us. Alan put it better in a memo to a producer – which I’ve got verbatim because it’s in my own book about his show The Beiderbecke Affair – where he explained:

“This kind of story is in part a process of discovery and deduction for the writer as much as for anybody else. I know the A and the Z and have a reasonable knowledge of B to about K… after that it gets complicated and misty.”

As I say, some outline and plan while others don’t. My natural inclination is to explore on the page and I think I’ve been helped or encouraged in that as much by how well it’s worked out and because I’ve written so much in magazines. Once I had the form in my head, once I knew how to write articles, I never planned again. Start at the top, write to the end, deliver. It’s rarely quite like that but it can be and the number of changes I make are fairly few. Or they tend to be nuances and key points, they are never gigantic structural chunks being shuffled around.

Some drama writers call some outlines these beat sheets: you’re listing the key moments in the piece like the beats in music and you end up with the overall shape of the work.

But I could always see the shape of the piece in my head when it was a 5,000-word computer feature or especially a 70-word Ceefax one. Books have proved to be somewhat harder: Beiderbecke was only 30,000 words or so but it was immensely hard to get everything in to that short limit. One of the books I’m doing now is 150,000 and that defeated me: I could not hold that in my head. Especially not when circumstances of when I could get certain research material, when I could speak to certain people, meant that I wrote about 100,000 of it completely out of sequence. I’ve asked the copy editor to please watch out for when I may have introduced someone twice because I first wrote them in chapter 6 and only later got them in to chapter 1. I think I’ve caught all that, but I have lain away at night worrying about it.

That worry was from the sheer weight of words, the sheer volume of the volume. Drama is different. I have a big stage play on the go now and I can smell it, you know? I know the opening pages because I explored them, testing out the idea. And I know the very last line because, I promise, it will choke you up. I even know about eleventy-billion things that will happen, right down to whole exchanges of dialogue between these characters in my head, but the whole eludes me. That’s partly because if it works, if I do this right, it will be the most delicate, gauzy writing I’ve ever done and the faintest breeze will wreck where I’m trying to take you.

That’s why drama is different. I was taught that you should write to express, not to impress. That’s right and great and useless. Because drama needs to express and move and feel and share and transport. Off you go.

I find I’m noodling around this particular stage idea a lot on the bus. I used to do all my best thinking while I took long drives so I am least a tiny bit greener now. The other week I was thinking about the idea as I rode past the Birmingham Rep so I counted the windows: they sometimes put the title of plays up with one letter in each window across the front. It turns out they have just enough for this one, so. Probably not a deal breaker, but.

I’m going to outline it. I just know I am. Desperately broad strokes, please no more than that. Maybe I can do A and K rather than A to Z. I need to explore it too.

But there is a cost to exploring drama on the page, there is a price. I’d heard a thousand writers say and extol and evangelise outlines and they were rubbish at it. All of them. Until one television writer said something like “You can’t have a blank screen on Tuesday night”. It’s true. You can fight about what makes better drama, structured planning or freeform exploration, but you can’t argue that you have to write and produce something. A stunning work of piercing Tuesday night drama is no use if the script is delivered on Wednesday morning. Even if outlining guaranteed you a boring story, at least you’d never type “the end” on a full one-hour drama script and realise you had to throw it away and start a different one.

It wasn’t always like this. It wasn’t always that you’re hired and we’re airing it Tuesday, get writing.

John Hopkins was commissioned over a pint at the BBC once in the 1960s and didn’t deliver. Not on time. Not anywhere near on time. The story goes that he delivered the next year. He wasn’t especially pressed about it, though I understand the BBC did occasionally say, you know, how’s it going? And then he turned in Talking to a Stranger, also known as the Hopkins Quartet. Four television plays set over the same weekend and all from the perspective of a different member of a family. I tell you, I read the scripts and when I reached the last one and realised why it was all done like this, why it wasn’t just a gimmick, I cried.

If you want to tell me that Hopkins could do that from an outline, fine. If you even want to tell me that he did do it from an outline, fine. I have no idea either way. And that’s the way it should be: whether outlines help or throttle a writer, it’s the end result that matters, it’s the audience that matters.

Oh, stop looking at me like that. You’re not an audience, you’re you. We’re just talking. We could’ve phoned each other up first and devised the beat sheet for today. We could’ve decided that our chat should logically go thisaway: “1. What outlines are. 2. Outlines are bad. 3. Except when they’re good.”

But if we were that boringly efficient, we could’ve just left it with that and gone to the pub. And then where would we be? Exactly. I’ll make us some tea.

1. Find kettle
2. Fill kettle with water
3. Switch on kettle…

Human beings are basically good and kind and honourable people – until they get on Twitter. I like tweeting, I’ve had such good times on there, but I don’t know what else to take away from the foul abuse of Caroline Criado-Perez.

The day I heard that the Bank of England was dropping women from its new currency design was the same day that I heard someone was lobbying to get Jane Austen on there. And then when she did it, I cheered.

The thing with writers is that we’re supposed to be able to get into the heads of other people. More than just understanding their point of view, we’re supposed to really get it. It’s necessary in drama, it’s terribly handy in negotiations. I’m just finding it completely impossible today: I can’t conceive how anyone would object to a woman’s face on a bank note. If you can summon up an actual reason against it, I then can’t conceive why you would care enough to object.

And then there’s the abuse.

The shortest, least asterisk-requiring one I’ve seen was a tweet to Criado-Perez that said exactly this: “Stop breathing”.

The mind of someone who would think that.

The mind of someone who would type it.

And send it to her. To anyone.

It makes me shake. Now, I can see that the bile and rage and fury I feel over this is pretty much the bile and rage and fury that these people appear to feel over the issue. I’m going to rise above all this, I am going to be the sophisticated, mature man that I aspire to be, and I am going to say that they started it.

I did want to be mature about it. I don’t like that the fact I am shaking and that I could spit is actually a very male response: I am male but so what? I recoil from issues where I’m expected to respond less because of what I think and more because of my testosterone levels. I think the differences between people as individuals is fantastic and fascinating, but the difference between the genders, not so much. I feel a bit as if when I take a particularly male position, it’s not entirely me.

Similarly, a friend once went through some horrible times striving to use IVF to get a kid and I remember it seeming so unfair: how much of the drive and the misery was biologically induced, how much was her gender and how much was her very self? (She had a child through IVF and then had another one without it. I cheered both times. Actually, the first time, I swerved in the car when she texted me. I don’t use my phone in the car any more now, I promise. Partly because she made me swerve.)

We are all such a gorgeous chaotic mess and our sex is part of it, I just loathe when it’s expected to be all of it or it appears to be the only factor in something. I don’t know for certain that it is solely men who have abused Criado-Perez over twitter but it looks like it and you think it is. Perhaps because I cannot see an actual reason why one would object to a woman on a banknote, the fact that men do object focuses me on the issue that they are men.

If I loathe people assuming that I will think one way or be one way because of my gender, I so much more despise being in the same sex as people who think and say and do these things. People assume that because I’m a man, I like football. Doesn’t matter. They assume that because I’m a man, I won’t admit when I’m wrong. I actually enjoy that one because it isn’t half fun when I do admit it and they everyone blinks at me.

This is so much more. I hope I am never in the company of men who write these horrendous tweets about death and rape but even the concept that I share a gender with them and that I cannot do anything to stop them makes me shake and twitch and spit.

I looked up Criado-Perez’s name online to check how to spell it and – I am not going to give you a link to this – I found a major British newspaper saying that Austen should not be on a banknote because she’s so boring. Jane Austen! Boring!

I’m having a bad week with this. Another thing that has been assumed about me and that is generally assumed about men is that I and they would never read Austen. I’ve heard women say that they have never met a man who has read her work.

Hello.

I’m William, it’s nice to meet you.

By sort-of coincidence, I’m re-reading Sense & Sensibility at the moment. It’s a sort-of coincidence because I’m not doing it as a result of all this, I’m doing it because I just reviewed a radio dramatisation of it for Radio Times and so enjoyed it that I wanted to read the book again.

I came late to Jane Austen and I’ve not read all her work yet. That first bit narks me because I could’ve been enjoying her stuff so much sooner and the second bit irritates me no end because it’s my fault. I so enjoyed Pride & Prejudice that I raced on to Emma and then made myself stop. Made myself.

Follow. Some years ago, I had a job that meant a walk and a train ride to the office. For some weeks during it, I would start reading a Simon Brett novel on the way in the morning and then I would finish that book in bed at night. The same night. Start the next one, finish the next one. He writes funny, interesting but ultimately a bit forgettable novels where I got hooked chiefly because of his great titles. He does murder mysteries, it was his series of books with an actor detective named Charles Paris that I was reading, and the titles are all things like “Cast in Order of Disappearance”. Loved that.

Thoroughly enjoyed the books. But he’d been writing them a long time before I got to any and so I think there were eighteen novels when I started. I read all eighteen, I expect it took me about three or maybe four weeks. And I can never read another one because I have no idea whether I already have or not. I’ve stood there in a bookshop thinking about it: have I already read this one?

They’ve all blurred together and while that is doubtlessly my fault for reading them so fast and so contiguously, because it is my fault, I didn’t want to ever do that again. And especially not with Jane Austen.

And especially since she hasn’t got eighteen novels. I so enjoyed P&P and Emma that I wanted to savour them.

And I admit I’ve gone too far the other way. I’m a bit confused now over which ones I’ve got left to love. So part of the reason for re-reading Sense & Sensibility is that I’ll enjoy it again but part of it is that I give up. I’m not going to try being clever, I’m not going to try eking her work out to make it last, I’m just going to reread the ones I have and relish as I get to the ones I haven’t yet.

If I cannot speak to the issue of why anyone objects to having a woman’s face on a banknote, I can so incredibly easily speak to the point of why Austen deserves the slot and why she isn’t boring. Here’s my entire argument:

Read the bloody books.

She’s fantastic. She wrote this stuff 200 years ago – no, that just doesn’t look enough, let me spell it out: she wrote this two hundred years ago. Seven thousand days after she died, she’s made me laugh aloud.

Everybody quotes her P&P opener about a single man in want of a wife and all that, but the line that sums her up for me is from her letters where she said “pictures of perfection make me sick and wicked”.  I want that on a teeshirt.

If you know her work through films and TV, and you surely must, then I can see that they look pretty perfect. Costume designers and set dressers and lighting and makeup have a very good time. But I see a lot of similarity with Terry Pratchett’s work. His strengths, it seems to me, are in how he tells his tales rather than the tales per se. On the page he is smart and funny and writes with a verve that I admit I tend to forget once I’ve finished a book, but it’s all very much alive and engaging while you read. On TV, it’s people in silly hats.

I’ve met and very much liked some of the people who’ve dramatised Pratchett’s work for Sky and I think they did a great job, I think they did the very best that was possible. But it’s ultimately still David Jason in a hat.

Similarly, while I think Austen’s plots are very good, if a film just does that, it doesn’t serve either us or her terribly well. This is why, I think, you get so many dramatisations of her work and yet suddenly there’ll be one that rises above them all. The BBC’s 1995 dramatisation of Pride and Prejudice is a terrific piece of work by Andrew Davies because he got it. Yes, it’s sumptuous, at least for the BBC. And yes, there’s that bit with Colin Firth all sopping wet that makes women – conforming to their gender expectations – go weak and makes men – conforming to their gender expectations – think it’s soppy and wet. Seriously, don’t we lose out by sticking to expectations?

Davies argued that Pride & Prejudice is really about sex. He would say that. I think it’s really about people and I think that’s so stunningly obvious that I approach being fatuously irritating. Read her books and see how sharp and clear and witty and brilliant she is.

The line of hers that made me laugh aloud earlier this week is a description of the man Willoughby who has swooped in and now “departed, to make himself still more interesting, in the midst of a heavy rain”. Austen does this constantly and yet so delicately. She is mocking and celebrating and framing moments and characters but so much as a part of the novel that you don’t think of her as a narrator, you don’t think of her as the author’s voice.

You just like her.

It’s easy to say that if you don’t get Jane Austen, you’re missing out.

So let’s say it.

If you don’t get Jane Austen, you are missing out.

I wrote a script once called Wasps. It did very well for me: opened lots of doors, got me some of the attention you need and it was also very validating. I wrote that, it was received so well, I thought yes, maybe I can do this.

But one thing that kept being said of it was that it showed so clearly that I had done my research. On a Doctor Who once I was told I shouldn’t be afraid of showing my library card. You’ve learnt all this stuff, use it and show us. Wasps was a police drama in a new setting (yes, there really is one) and was quite apparent that I had spent months with this unit.

In truth, I hadn’t gone farther than my kitchen. It was a spec script, I’m always more interested in characters than anything else, I wrote real people in a setting that I’d research if we ever went to series.

But it did read as if it were true and I’m not saying this to boast to you. Well, I suppose I am, but it’s a pretty feeble boast and if I came in thinking I was great for fooling producers then I’m now uncomfortably embarrassed that I didn’t put the work in and even pick up the phone to the police.

What I think I got right was authenticity. The characters were people. There was also a lot of jargon and I don’t mind jargon, I think having a short techy word for something long and complex is essential in certain conversations and really handy in drama. It’s rare that as a viewer or reader you actually need to know what a spindizzy is and how it physically works. It is the opposite of rare, it is mandatory that you know the character knows. And that it means something, both literally in the sense of the definition of the jargon term and more importantly in that it matters to them.

I’m good with dialogue and I’ve been around enough jargon that I can hear it both as the rhythms of someone’s speech and as the technical words. So for a placeholder, I made up some terms for these police characters. It was a helicopter unit and I’ve flown helicopters – now, doesn’t that sound like a boast? It wouldn’t if you knew how little I’d done. Man, the cost. Rotor time is the easiest way to burn cash outside of an Apple Store.

But did you see what I did there? I admitted an interest, an effort, a failing and gave you a glimpse into my financial state – and I used the term ‘rotor time’. Odds to onions, you hadn’t heard that before. Doubtlessly you can work out what it means but you didn’t bother, you read it and accepted it. It sounded real, it sounded authentic.

It was. It is. I knew all the helicopter stuff so all my characters knew it too. Whereas I have not one possible clue where the phrase ‘odds to onions’ just came from but I accepted it, didn’t you?

(Quick aside? Jargon’s jargon, fine, but sometimes it is gorgeous. The rotors on a helicopter spin 600 times per minute and they are attached to what’s called a mast. You can imagine the forces going on there as that machinery spins. It’s as likely to wrench the whole helicopter around one way as it is to spin the blades the other. That’s why you have tail rotors: they fight the machine being spun. And two-rotor choppers like Chinooks don’t need tail rotors because their two main rotors are spun in opposite directions.

Still, imagine that torture on the helicopter. Pounding, pounding stresses.

And there is a nut and bolt that keep the rotors attached to the mast. Pilots and engineers call it the Jesus Nut – because if it ever fails on you, the next person you’ll see is Jesus Christ in heaven.

Isn’t that wonderful? That’s what you get from real research. So I’m not knocking real research at all and therefore I really am not boasting that I fooled a few people by making up onions.)

What I am saying is that Wasps was authentic.

Authenticity: if you can fake that, you’ve got it made.

This is all on my mind and I wanted to talk it through with you because I was in a conversation last night with a friend who had a play on at the Rep Foundry, a night organised by the Birmingham Rep theatre. His piece is a true story and, wow, you can tell. It really takes you somewhere new – new to me anyway – and into a slice of recent history that is teeming with drama. But in chatting afterwards, he was arguing that writers have to be true.

I completely agree.

What I couldn’t quite articulate with him last night, because I don’t think I realised I thought it, was that there’s no reason you can’t lie about being true.

There’s truth and there’s reality. A key reason I prefer drama to journalism is that in journalism you try to make things simple: this person did that for this reason at that time. In drama, you embrace the fact that there are no facts. That this person or that person may or may not have done this or that. And if they did it, they may not know why. The world is an utterly delicious mess and drama gets that.

I was watching an episode of the US legal drama Suits this week and something bad happens to a key character. I don’t know if Suits is technically and legally accurate, I do know that it feels authentic, but this bad thing – I don’t want to spoil it, sorry to be vague – cut into me. Lawyers in New York, it cut me even though it could not be a more alien world if it were Star Trek.

Though, that’s a thought. There was a gimmicky Star Trek once where Scotty came back and guest-starred in The Next Generation. Fine, whatever. Gimmick. Only, here was this starship engineer recalled to life through transporter technobabble and facing intergalactic peril yet it was moving. Nuts to all the Starfleet uniforms, all everything did in that setting was get us to where the story really was. This Scotty had been the ace engineer – “the engines canna take it, Captain!” – and here he was decades in the future where his skills have been superseded. Where he is a curiosity at best and a danger at worst.

He wants to help save the day in whatever the story of the week science fiction threat was against the USS Enterprise. That was the plot but the drama was that he couldn’t. This science fiction trope of a character was suddenly an old man burning to recapture glory days that had ended so soon and before he’d noticed. He was worker who could no longer work. Everything this character was and needed now wasn’t.

It was desperately moving. I think it had a Starfleet-happy ending and naturally the Enterprise survived whatever it was. Can’t remember. Don’t care. But twenty years since I’ve seen it, I remember the feeling.

Because it wasn’t real, but it was true.

July 19 On this fine morning, I was squatting in a flat in Ealing, and looking out at the people going past. Across the busy street I saw two workmen, one a young lad and one a broad old hand. The older man was picking up a plank and grinning at the gangly youth for a moment before saying something and setting both of them laughing. My heart warmed at the sight because I realised that while I, as an outsider to those men and unfamiliar with their terms of reference, could never truly appreciate their joke, it was a rich, and personal vein of laughter in a sorry world.

And in the shop next to them there was another universe to which, yes, I was closed away from, but which nonetheless had the promise of the same kind of laughter. All over the world there was friendly banter, friendly jokes, showing us that we are all part of this human society. And that surely, with laughter as plentiful as it was, society was a good, warm, welcoming, and downright funny place that we should be proud of. The two men had vanished now, and a smaller gentleman was describing the planks to a police officer.

So I’d say that I’ve lived in only three different To Do applications but I’ve written about many more, tried even more than that and alpha tested some. Most have one thing in common: they encourage you to say that the report for your boss is Priority One, High, Flagged, Five Stars, something.

Bollocks to that.

Oddly enough, the To Do app I use now, OmniFocus, doesn’t bother with priorities. I’m sure it has its reasons. I want to show you mine and why this stuff looks handy but just gets in your way.

I do believe in lists but lists are there to be worked through, not worked on. Time spent writing myself a clear task is worth it: “Call Jim re new date for pitch meeting” instead of just “Call Jim” or even “Jim”. Good. I want to open my list, see what I’ve got to do and not have to think about it: do what with Jim? Call Jim what? Jack?

That’s useful. Choosing which shade of red to have the text in, not so much.

Let me prove it. This is your To Do list today:

Get aspirin
Reply to Tom
Buy veg
Research chapter 3
Phone re bill
Read Pride and Prejudice

If I asked you to put those in priority order, I doubt you would: we’re just talking here and your tea is getting cold. But you know that you could do it and I know that you could do it very easily. You’d haver a bit because you don’t know who Tom is but you reckon he’s on the list, he must be important enough, you’d bung him near the top. Equally, you probably put Pride and Prejudice at the bottom. I’m trusting that you did so because it’s something you can read for pleasure after work and, besides, you’re not about to interview Jane Austen.

So depending on the ferocity of your headache, the odds are that your sorted, prioritised list looks like this:

1. Get aspirin
2. Reply to Tom
3. Phone re mistake on bill
4. Research chapter 3
5. Buy broccoli
6. Read Pride and Prejudice

You’re happy now: you can use that, it’s a clear sequence and you’re getting the important stuff done. But you seem to have forgotten that boss of yours and he or she is on the phone now, demanding whatever they demand and by god they’re demanding right now or else.

Seriously, are you going to write out this:

1. URGENT HIGH PRIORITY BOSS STUFF
2. Get more aspirin because boss really shouted
3. Reply to Tom
4. Phone re mistake on bill
5. Research chapter 3
6. Buy broccoli
7. Read Pride and Prejudice

I’m a smartarse and you’ve already gathered that I wouldn’t prioritise that list. But, as I say, I’m a smartarse so while we’ve been talking, I bought some aspirin – and I did it at the supermarket so I could pick up some broccoli at the same time. I regret that as now I’ll have to carry veg around all day. But I also remembered that my Austens are on the shelf back at my office so I downloaded the free ebook version to be ready to read on my iPad when I get the chance. I haven’t done that task but now when I get to it, I can actually get to it.

It’s not as if these are the highest priority items on my list but now I’ve only got five things left to do and you’ve got seven.

Similarly, it’s not as if everything is equally important or equally quick to do on your list.

But it is that your To Do list needs to be useful or you won’t use it. The job is get your tasks done, not to end up with a perfectly numbered list with a rainbow of priority colours.

I’m irritating, I’m sorry, but it’s become a hobby horse. Plus it’s all on my mind because I did have a very full day today – and now it’s doubled. My mind is on what I can do, what I have to pass on, why in the world I took this extra gig on – answer: because it is huge fun – and why I keep talking about broccoli when I don’t like it. That’s a different issue, I grant you, but I can ponder it and I can have this mug of tea with you now because I’ve got my priorities right.

A version of this blog without the words bollocks and smartarse appears in the forthcoming family-friendly book The Blank Screen: Productivity for Creative Writers.

Hello, I’m Flavour O’Themonth, the roguishly handsome runner-up from Strictly Come Dancing who is a real man’s man as well as appealing to a broad demographic of women with my casual but highly made-up stubble and these blue eyes. So very blue. Look at them. Look at me. Don’t listen.

I want to find out why all modern documentaries are more about their presenters than their subjects. Join me on my personal journey. It’s a journey that will shock you. It’s a startling story that starts right here, just about one extension lead’s distance from a TV studio.

And it’s a story that will end by changing the face of documentaries forever.

The truths you and I will uncover tonight are going to shake the entire world, though obviously they won’t make a difference to anything or get a pixel’s worth of coverage on the TV news.

But they will shock enough to get us a feature in Radio Times and tomorrow there’ll be a nasty feature and extensive photo gallery of me in the Daily Mail by a writer who didn’t watch either but needs my celebrity name to drive traffic to his website.

[SOFT MUSIC: CURRENT BOYBAND BALLAD]

When I was a little boy, things were a lot simpler. BBC showed documentaries like Jonathan Miller’s The Body in Question. Dr Jonathan Miller took us around the world but he also just talked to us. Lectured, really. Huge long sequences that – [QUICK: THEY’RE LOSING ATTENTION: SHOW A RUBIK’S CUBE] – just had him telling us things we didn’t know. Crazy.

And yet, demonstrating how I’m intelligent but in a non-threatening way, I watched that show agog, completely lost in it and even for a brief while forgetting the Rubik’s Cube I had in my hand.

INT. YE OLDE 1990S TEENAGE BEDROOM – NIGHT

Caption: “Reconstruction”

FLAVOUR O’THEMONTH (15) watches a 1950s-era TV set showing a copyright-free clip of someone who looks a bit like Jonathan Miller. Flavour drops his Rubik’s Cube.

And I here I am, the impossibly handsome adult, catching that very same Rubik’s Cube as it falls from nowhere in particular but looks fantastic in slow-mo.

Coming up, I’m going to find out how Rubik’s Cubes were made and look at why they were so important to me. Not to you, to me. This is my personal journey, I don’t know why you’re watching. Why don’t you change channel to BBC99 where Vacuous Poorly-Paid and Insufferable Know-It-All are delving into exactly how cars work?

[flick]

[MUSIC: MADNESS: DRIVING IN MY CAR]

VACUOUS: It’s very exciting, isn’t it, Insuff?
INSUFFERABLE: It certainly is, Vacuous! We all drive, don’t we?
VACUOUS: Some of us worse than others!
INSUFFERABLE: Naming no names! But seriously, we’re all very used to cars and we all have opinions, but how many of us actually know how they work?
VACUOUS: Certainly not me.
INSUFFERABLE: We just don’t need to, do we?
VACUOUS: Er – so why are we doing this show?
INSUFFERABLE: Ha, ha, very good. But seriously, it’s a complex feat of engineering – that’s a kind of mechanical type of work, everybody – and truly fascinating. Here’s the science. Watch this footage now as we see the “engine” being put into what we call the “car”. It’s really like the body of the car. It’s the bit that looks like a car but without that engine, it won’t go anywhere!

[MUSIC: GARY NUMAN: CARS]

VACUOUS: Truly fascinating.
INSUFFERABLE: And I bet you didn’t know any of it before, did you?
VACUOUS: Well, I skimmed the script the work experience researcher wrote for us but I zoned out a bit during our rehearsals, so yes, it’s all new to me.
INSUFFERABLE: And I’ll bet you’ll drive that little bit more carefully now you know, won’t you?
VACUOUS: Why don’t you go f-

[flick]

I set out on this personal journey to uncover the truth about documentaries and their fatuous, nervous need to appeal to no more than one of your brain cells at a time and I’ve ended up learning a little bit about Rubik’s Cubes.

I don’t know about you, but that Rubik’s Cube took me back to my childhood. I presume it didn’t take you back to my childhood too but perhaps yours was similar. I don’t care. This isn’t about asking questions, it’s about showing me looking terribly serious and yet still roguishly handsome.

Here’s a montage of me nodding seriously, looking a bit shocked, giving a gasp, laughing – because, don’t worry, it’s all okay really – and now I’m talking to someone who’s obviously a scientist. What do you mean, she’s a woman? Get a man. Get him a white coat. And a clipboard. What do you mean, he doesn’t wear glasses? Find me someone more socially awkward to reinforce stereotypes. I want a Bafta out of this, I need to look handsomely patient and show I’m able to speak to the little people.

Science, yeah, yeah, let him go on for ten seconds. Make sure he pushes his glasses back up his nose a bit while I slap him on the back like a real man.

INT. YE OLDE SCIENCE LAB – NIGHT

Caption: “Reconstruction”

YE OLDE SCIENTIST (100, bearded, dusty clipboard and stained coat) repeats what the real scientist just said but does it standing in a much better set borrowed from CBBC and pro-nounc-ed ver-y slow-ly and port-entous-ly be-cause he’s an act-or.

And has a Rubik’s Cube.

[MUSIC: THOMAS DOLBY: SHE BLINDED ME WITH SCIENCE]

[STOCK FOOTAGE: BEAUTIFUL SUNSET]

Caption: “Beautiful Sunset”.

I set out on this personal journey of personal, deeply all-about-me investigation knowing you’re watching because of me and because I need something worthy to go on the CV as I’m actually getting just a bit too old for decent acting roles. Thank God I’m not a woman, my career would be over by now. Wouldn’t even get voiceovers.

But I’ve learnt a lot on my personal journey about the anti-aging benefits of moody back-lighting and I’ve really discovered just how much we can repeat the footage of that sodding Rubik’s Cube.

I hope you’ve learnt something too. I don’t really, I just hope that you’ve stayed watching for the entire hour and that I can now tell you to press the Red Button, to go online to our website or switch to BBC3 to watch the inside story of the making of my personal journey.

I’m Flavour O’Themonth. Next time, the winner of Strictly Come Dancing takes you on a personal journey of discovery into some topic or other. Doesn’t matter what. We’ve just got this charter that says we have to cover factual stuff, blah, blah, we don’t actually watch this crap, and anyway it’s cheaper to make than drama.

Maybe you have too much to do. Maybe it’s the opposite and every project you had out there has just been rejected and you feel like you’re having to start all over again. You are. So one quick way to slightly alleviate a certain type of bad day is to always have something else out with an editor or a producer. You can’t do it every time and the chance of book schedules, magazine lead times, Cannes and offers rounds means you will sometimes get that massive pile landing at the same moment. But reduce the odds by taking your breaks midway through projects rather than in between them: it’s not the greatest bandaid in the world that you’re deep into the next thing when a rejection comes, but it is the only bandaid in the world.

Starting over from nothing is similar to having too much to do: you can be overwhelmed with the certainty that actually there’s no point. You think that you cannot get everything finished and you’re certain that you can’t do another giant writing project today.

As a species, we writers are also a bit prone to depression. People who don’t have this seem to believe that it can be fixed by a tickling stick where of course you can really be paralysed by depression at any time. There isn’t a connection between depression and how happy you are yet there is a connection the other way. You can’t make depression better but you can readily make it worse. Depression on a bad day is like an anvil with a knife on it.

So maybe you’re facing this busy mountain or this empty valley, maybe you’re low and if you are depressed then you’ll be feeling it physically too, so everything screams at you that it is impossible to get through this. That it is impossible to get this work done.

The knife is that it’s true.

You may not be in the mood to hear this and you may be under such pressure that you don’t have time to hear it, but you will not magically get everything done because of what I’m going to show you here.

Sorry. I’d like to give you two aspirin and tell you to call me in the morning but you’re a writer, I can’t fool you. And the sooner that we can accept that overwhelming impossibility is impossible for a reason, the sooner we can start whelming.

So here’s the thing. You won’t get it all done but you will get it all started and the time you’re spending now in a tizzy or having to hold your chest to stop the anxiety will be much better spent starting the work. Just starting it. At the beginning, that looks pointless enough to make you sick: the walk of a thousand miles ends with a million steps. But getting started in any way is like ignition: it takes more power to start an engine than to keep it going. And once the engine is going, it wants to keep moving forward.

And what’s more, you may have these pressures and burdens because you’re a writer but you have certain advantages too. You’re a writer: you can fool yourself. I just need you to fool yourself in the same way I do.

You know how parents who also have demanding jobs – so they’ve really got two demanding jobs – can actually find the office work relaxing? There are all these issues of balancing work and life, family and career, and if you have kids you want to be with them and every ignorant bastard seems to blame you if you’re a woman who’s not at home. But in the moment, day to day, when you get to the office, it feels relaxing. That’s because you’re supposed to be there. This is exactly what you are supposed to be doing and there is no option about it for the next eight to ten hours. A gigantic amount of misery comes from constant struggles over whether you’re doing the right thing at the right time: you burn up the day churning instead of doing anything. So that clock, that salary, those office hours, they may dump incredible stresses on you but they take that one away and it’s gigantic.

It’s not as if all this is strictly true, either. If your kid had an accident you’d be out of that office meeting at lightspeed and bollocks to anyone who complains about it. But there is enough truth in it, enough reality to the timetable and the contract that it works. What you need to do is conjure up that same truth for yourself today. Especially if today is a bad day.

So if you’re having a bad one today – whether with your writing or at any job holding you back from writing – just do exactly this right now:

Write down the first five things on your mind. Doesn’t matter if it’s a writing problem or it’s fixing your boiler or a task your non-writing employer wants, just make a note.

Now spend the next hour doing the first thing you wrote down. No debate, no pondering. You wrote it, you do it. You do that and nothing else.

In an hour, put that work away mid-thought.

Spend the next hour doing only the second thing.

Rinse, repeat. But don’t look back. You can have tea. But don’t look back.

The trick of it is only that if you accept that for the next hour you are solely and exclusively doing this one particular thing, it stops you thinking about all the others. Those other things are not your job, not your concern, this is. It is a trick and it isn’t automatic or easy, and it also has the kicker that somewhere around 40 minutes in you will long to get out of this bloody thing and go on to the next or anything else. But if you make yourself work on for those last 20 minutes, it helps make this feel real. It also makes you deep-mine yourself and you can end up writing your best material in the last stretch.

Which you’d think would mean you should then carry on until you finish.

No.

At the end of the hour, stop it and move on. Don’t look back at that last hour, don’t pat yourself on the back or criticise yourself, it’s done. Gone. And now don’t plan the next hour, don’t look ahead to the rest of the day, just take that next thing from the top of your list and now that is solely and exclusively what you are doing for sixty minutes.

The odds are that you will finish some things in each of these hours but it’s almost better when you don’t. Because it’s like novelists who end the day by writing the first line of the next chapter and so know that will get them started tomorrow morning. You probably don’t have time to walk away from all of your writing for a day, but doing this brutal cease-and-desist at the end of the hour means you’re leaving that project with energy and with it all alive in your head. And it means you’re ending the hour before you fade away. All that energy goes into the next project and then at the end of that hour, you’re out before you burn out.

I’m not saying you have to be Sellotaped to your keyboard for the hour, all writing is fueled by vices and on a bad day you need that caffeine or sugar more than ever. But bring the biscuits and the coffee to the desk and get on with it. Sod crumbs. Clean up the mess later, you’re working now.

At the end of the five hours, you will not have completed your work, you will not have met all your pressures and deadlines, you won’t have magically launched an entire new writing project.

But you will be so far ahead of where you were at the start. And typically you’ll still have time left in the day to finish some of the five.

You would imagine that the aim of all this is to get these things done but really it’s about the immense psychological benefits of being that far forward. You had these five things that were impossible, paralysing mountains and now you have these same five things but you’re energetic and alive to them all – and you have made substantial progress too.

Substantial is a relative thing. Stephen King does 2,000 words every morning. James Joyce used to say that “three sentences” was a great day. If you do all this productive concentrating and the product of each hour’s productivity is a single page per project then yes, so, and? That’s a single page you didn’t have at the start.

All of which sounds good and is good but there’s a bit of you bristling at the idea of following steps and procedures and rules and orders. We’re writers. We don’t like any of that.

I’m a writer who doesn’t like outlines and hates writing treatments because I feel I’d rather explore the story on the page. But when I do a Doctor Who audio for Big Finish, for example, I have to do a treatment because that’s what determines whether I get to go on to write the script. Similarly, I’m not a big fan of Robert McKee’s rules but without my trying, the drama I write does tend to fall into the three acts he says it should.

Then within a story we set up certain rules for ourselves and our characters. For example, you know that audiences would feel more than a little cheated if the blind watchmaker with his seven sons – sure an’ they all have a tale to tell – gets out of trouble because he can suddenly see.

We don’t like rules, we don’t like constraints, but we use them. We make them. Writing on a bad day, writing when we don’t want to but we have no choice, is just making some rules for ourselves and sticking to them.

Listen, I don’t know if this will help or even interest, but I started this blog earlier in the week when I was having one such very bad day. I did exactly what I told you here and at the end of the first hour, I had a draft of all of this and moreover I went running energetically into the next hour. That one was a horrible mountain of phone calls and contracts and politics that I wanted to run away from but instead I boomed through the lot and out the other side into a deeply-needed lunch.

Man, it was a good lunch. Bacon sandwiches are loud and they never taste better than when you’ve earned them.

Excerpt from the forthcoming book Productivity for Creative Writers, published September 2013

Hello, you recently met with the West Midlands police: do you have a few moments to answer some questions for me today, please?

I see, you have a lot of time. Okay, thank you. I need to tell you – no, it’s not the same as that. No. All I need to tell you is that these customer calls are recorded and will be reviewed by senior police staff who take your concerns very seriously.

You bet they do. Yes. Well, indeed, that’s very good. Now, thinking of only your most recent meeting with the police, would you say you were happy with how you were treated, unhappy with how you were treated or not sure?

I’m afraid it has to be one of the three.

Happy, unhappy, not sure.

I’ll call that unhappy, is that okay? Thank you.

Now, thinking only of this most recent event, how happy, unhappy or not sure would you say you are about the time you had to wait for the police?

I’ll call that unhappy too, shall I?

And how long did you have to wait?

I’m afraid I can’t take comments about the, ah, ‘snitch’. I’m only asking about the police. They were waiting for you, I see. I’ll put that down as ‘under an hour ‘.

Did the officers call you by name?

Did they make you feel welcome and valued?

Thinking only of the moments before they shot you, then, did the officers seem fully engaged with your needs?

They haven’t provided a helicopter and an iPad mini, I see. But in terms of the transaction you were expecting – I’ll just put that down as no.

On a scale of 1 to 10 where 1 is definitely not and 10 is definitely yes, how likely are you to recommend the West Midlands police force to your hostages?

This was only meant to be a joke. I write the blog to talk to you but a couple of weeks ago the Birmingham Rep reprinted one entry, then the Writers’ Guild did another one and I could see numbers going up. It was nice. As ever, my mind wandered to getting us all biscuits. But then last week I dissed Star Trek Into Darkness and within the day had doubled the number of people who’d read the blog in the whole week before.

Well, I said. Next time I’ll write about sex and see what happens.

And that was about as far as the thought got. I did ponder being serious and giving you advice or maybe even reaching deep down inside myself to reveal some of those desires we all have. Possibly even admit a fantasy to you. I’m not ashamed of this: there is a sexual position I’d like to try. It’s nothing very kinky, it’s just that maybe one day during sex, I think I’d like to be present.

But then writing that line made me think about how you’d have to search really hard to find any sex in anything I write. This could well be because I write Doctor Who audio dramas and, please, it’s a family show. And there’s not a huge amount of sex in Radio Times magazine.

Only, even thinking back through my script pile, sex doesn’t feature much at all. I do remember a friend complaining that nothing happens in a particular script of mine – ooh, it was called Other Women: I like that title, I must use that again somewhere; oh, look, I just have – and he moaned that it was just people talking or having sex. We’d swapped scripts at that point and his had nothing happening either: just the end of the world, or the universe, or something. I remember alien tentacles. And he was right about Other Women: unless you were interested in the people, they weren’t interesting and nothing happened. Similarly, I wasn’t interested in his characters so let the world end, or the universe, or something.

Sex isn’t interesting. Not in TV or film.

I mean it. Will they/won’t they tension is remarkably powerful but once they do/did, it’s all over. Certainly the tension, often the series, always the movie.

Equally, if someone takes their clothes off in a film, I don’t think you’re watching a character any more, I think you’re noticing the actor’s body. Even if only for a moment. I don’t know. It could be a male thing, it could be a me thing.

But Dar Williams said something especially smart once. I haven’t been able to find the quote for you so I’ll have to paraphrase – and I’ll also have to set it up less eloquently. She wrote a tremendously moving and deceptively simple song called When I Was a Boy. I’d quote you the whole thing because it’s as intricate and powerful as a poem but the key lines for today are:

I was a kid that you would like, just a small boy on her bike
Riding topless, yeah, I never cared who saw.
My neighbor come outside to say, “Get your shirt,”
I said “No way, it’s the last time I’m not breaking any law.”

Notice the ‘small boy on her bike’. It’s not a mistake. It’s another case of a writer using the wrong word and thereby making a far more powerful point. But you need to hear the whole song for that. For now, the story continues.

Some years after writing this song, Williams was performing it at a festival. I want to say Lilith Fair but I’m not sure. I want to say that it was an all- or a mostly-women event. The Lilith Fair concerts didn’t exclude men from the audience, did they? I adore the music from those concerts. Anyway, whatever the festival, this particular gig was at least very much mostly women in the audience and Williams says she thought about taking her top off during that song.

But she didn’t.

Because there were cameras.

And here’s the thing I think was so smart, so perceptive: she said that cameras are male.

It could be ten years since she said that and I still think about it.

I can’t let you out of a story. If I’ve actually managed to get you into a tale or even into this blog’s nattering, the idea of deliberately chucking you out is abhorrent. And I think sex, shown on screen, does exactly that. I suspect that if I looked, I might – might – just possibly be able to find you a dodgy photo on the internet. I know, it’s unlikely. But if I ever did manage to do it, you know that posting it here as some kind of an example would change the blog totally. You would see that image before you read a word and this would no longer be about drama or even sex, it would be about Page 3 porn and the like.

Sex increases the ratings but it changes the content and it decreases the drama.

For me, anyway.

But this fascinates me because one reason I write about people instead of the universe ending in tentacle-based peril is sex. Let me pin it down more precisely: I find immense, seismic drama in the instant before sex.

We are all this cauldron of desires and fears and for most of the day we go around hiding both from everyone. We cover ourselves in clothes and an awful lot of pretence. I hesitated over telling you that gag about my favourite sexual position being “present” because for it to work at all, I needed you to believe I could be telling you the truth right up to that word. That was difficult. But then it’s supposed to be. Drama is difficult, drama is telling the truth. Not necessarily telling you something real, but telling each of us something true even as we are lying.

And so there we are, wrapped in our clothes and our culture and our neuroses and we are so practiced at it all that it would surely take dynamite to break through to the real us.

Yet there is dynamite. Thank god there’s dynamite.

There’s a reason I think we use the word naked. It does mean nude but it also, to me, means more than clothes being opened or shed, it means us being opened. Revealing our skin is revealing what’s under that skin, what’s inside us. It means revealing our desire. Our hope. Fear.

Desire is the dynamite. Wanting someone in a way that’s more like your very body and soul yearning than it is your mind thinking or being at all rational. The complete need for this person. The need that makes you blush, makes you incoherent.

And if it’s dynamite for opening us up, it is primacord explosive wrapped around your waist because of the risk. Admitting your desire to yourself is one thing, but admitting it to this other person is geometrically, exponentially, infinitely harder. You’re laying yourself bare and all of the power of your cauldron is irrevocably put in their hands. In every physical and emotional way, you are giving yourself to them and in that instant they may reject you.

There’s no going back from that: you can try saying you were kidding, but nobody’s ever kidded.

It is do or die inside.

So I find romances and romcoms deliciously tense. That’s silly, even preposterous of me because there surely has never been a modern romance tale that didn’t end happily. But as the couple tentatively lean in for that first kiss, I feel like they’re playing with live ammunition.

These are terribly male types of analogies and metaphors, aren’t they? I’m not trying to be masculine writing about romcoms, I just don’t know another way to convey the totality of the damage done by rejected love and desire.

Also, I’ve just realised why I wrote the qualifying word ‘modern’ back there. Wuthering Heights. Oh, my lights, the power in that novel. Emily Bronte knew all this stuff, even if she did write weird narrative structures and never thought to include tentacles.

When I watch a romance, a romcom, a drama, I am truly edge-of-seat until the first kiss. After that, I’m not fussed. Sex, nudity, cor, phroaw, whatever, do what you like. Have an orgy on screen for all I care. I’m not saying I’m either prudish or even trying to claim that I am somehow immune to body parts, but sex on film isn’t explosive, it isn’t story, it just isn’t drama.

I started writing this to you as a gag and yet I’ve actually learnt something about myself: I’ve learnt that although I have mocked films before for cutting to rippling waves on the ocean or whatever, it turns out that I am actually quite fine with a kiss and –

FADE TO BLACK.

There’s a contrived, gratuitous underwear scene in Star Trek Into Darkness and I didn’t notice. I saw the film on a giant screen and in 3D and I am male but I did not register a scene with Alice Eve as Dr Carol Marcus wearing considerably less than a Starfleet-issue uniform. I keep hearing references to it now but it was only when some review included a still from it that I remembered it was there at all.

I obviously saw it, I have zero doubt that I shook my head at the whole thing when it happened. And you can bet that one reason it all left my head instantly was that we see so many women characters wearing so little in so many films. It’s just because full costumes are expensive. That’s the reason. Austerity.

But the other reason that it left my head a frame later is that Carol Marcus is just not a character. There’s nothing there. She ultimately provides a plot point but what’s then meant to be deeply emotional is just a bit of a shrug because after most of the film is done, I still have no interest in her. I do remember having that brief kind of half squint, half blink you get when you’re trying to work something out: I remember thinking ‘why are they doing this?’ during her introduction scene. I’ll accept anything in a film, anything at all, unless it throws me out of the story and I was a little thrown.

Part of me doesn’t want to tell you why because I’m reluctant to spoil a film, but that’s silly of me as I’m about to wreck it. And I’m wrecking it because by the end, I wasn’t thrown, I was drop-kicked out of the movie. Star Trek Into Darkness has myriad problems and they are all well reported online, but there is one writing issue that I think is a knife and I’m not seeing that mentioned anywhere.

So I’m mentioning it. Alongside mixed metaphors about drop-kicked knives.

Here’s an amusing list of the film’s head-scratching moments: you’ll laugh more if you read it after seeing the movie, but you’ll save money if you read it before.

And here’s Star Trek writer David Mack exploding about the failed science in the movie. For all that I think science should always be correct in a story, I’m really against the science in this one because it makes so little sense that it damages the tale. You know that Star Trek is all about these spaceships flying around where nobody’s yet got to and you know it’s all about whether Captain Kirk can save the day against impossible odds and whether he can even live to fight another day though you suspect he just might. By the end of Star Trek Into Darkness, there is no need for any spaceship ever again and nobody can ever die ever again. Ever. And you will swear that the filmmakers didn’t notice they’d done that.

I noticed it. I also noticed the time a lot. The 3D process makes films considerably darker and that was a problem because it made checking my watch really difficult.

I didn’t initially see this writing issue that now so bothers me but that was because it came at the end. Up until then I was just getting progressively more irritated in general. I really enjoyed 2009’s Star Trek and hadn’t expected to: it made me a Trek convert and I came to this one very enthusiastically. But there’s a bit early on that’s a nice little nod to something in the old Star Trek movies and TV shows.

And then there’s another nod.

And another.

Then there’s a contorted speech that I could hear went down really well with the fans sitting behind me because it referenced a popular episode I do remember seeing some time. Okay.

Only, then there was another.

And if there is one reason that next time I’ll wait for the reviews before seeing a Star Trek movie, it’s because these references and homages built and built until whole scenes, whole sequences of scenes were remakes of famous moments from old ones. It gets so bad I was thinking “And… cue Spock…” just as he did precisely what you expect him to do. With the very dialogue you expect him to have.

It’s a giant emotional scene toward the climax and it is stunningly irritating and empty because all you can think of is that you’ve seen this before somewhere and it was alright then. The sequence revolves around the death of a major character and death has no impact in Star Trek anyway: I’m sure a real fan could tell me when a character has died and not come back to life next week but I don’t know of one. This time it is especially empty because of this pastiche sequence but also because it comes after a risible scene where Kirk abruptly and insanely interrupts an interrogation to ask Dr McCoy “What are you working on that will save my life later?”

He doesn’t quite say that but it’s only a pixel more subtle. I laughed and the wall of fans behind me growled. I like to think they were growling with me, not at me.

So anyway, we’re into the final parts of the film and I am no longer in the story, I am also completely out of Maltesers and having a rotten time, and then they do this. They have a very exciting end sequence and it is completely destroyed because of what happened in the film’s very exciting opening sequence.

Follow. When the film begins and we’re on some planet or other, the USS Enterprise has been hiding under the ocean. You know in your heart that this doesn’t make sense somehow but it’s still very exciting as the ship rises up from the sea and flies off across the sky before heading out into space. It’s very well done, it looks real, you could clap.

Only, then the end sequence is all about the USS Enterprise starting off in space and, damaged, now falling toward Earth. It’s going to hit atmosphere, this spaceship is going to be flying through the sky.

Yes? And? So?

We’ve seen that, we know the ship can fly really realistically across the sky, it’s great. But now we have to buy that this is suddenly a Calamitous Bad Thing when it was Perfectly Fine Before.

Writers Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman try to turn this into a devastatingly, heart-stoppingly thrilling moment by having some character or other actually say: “This bit’s exciting, I know we did this earlier but now it’s completely different and we’re in such danger, I can’t tell you, man, we could even die and everything”.

There’s a writing maxim that you should show rather than tell and I don’t agree 100% – there’s a fantastic example in Battlestar Galactica where the telling of a tale is riveting and the later showing of it it is a bit boring – but I think I agree 98%. Star Trek Into Darkness has what should have been and really could have been, actually was, a huge finish with little emotion but buckets of spectacle. Telling us that it’s exciting is like trying to put a bandaid on when you really know you should’ve thrown away that opening sequence.

In television, if the start doesn’t grab or seduce you into the story enough, you’ve changed channels. In films, you’re there to the end and it’s the end that’s in your mind and heart when you leave the cinema. I don’t know, maybe I would’ve walked out of there thinking the film had problems but was exciting. But instead I just walked out of there irritated.

The opening sequence unquestionably cost more millions of dollars than I can imagine, and I can imagine quite a bit, but the film was hurt by it. And if they’d cut it at the script stage, the cost would’ve been no more than wear and tear on the delete key.

I don’t go to films to get writing lessons, I go to be in the story but when you’re not, you take what you can. And I’ve taken away a writing lesson: don’t give the goods away too soon.