Brevity. Soul. Wit.

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If there is one thing I wish I’d written, then I’m a rubbish writer who pays no attention to how much fantastic writing there is in the world. But definitely one of the things would be this line of “Brevity. Soul. Wit.” which used to be on my favourite mug, which made that mug my favourite, until I lost it somewhere.

It was a mug from the Royal Shakespeare Company and maybe you need that context to recognise what it’s after saying, but I think you get it. This is the six-word quote “brevity is the soul of wit” reduced to three words.

You can always reduce anything. I once read a commissioning document that, by way of an example, cut the whole of Hamlet down to about 100 words. Small problem: if you read those 100, you would never take a single look at Hamlet again. You can edit text and make it more effective, you can edit text and make it crap.

I was in a discussion this week about whether one should edit one’s writing at all. Ever. That if you edited it, maybe you could ruin it.

Intellectually, I get the argument, and I could even make a decent fist of arguing that uninhibited stream-of-conscious writing needs protection.

Except it’s bollocks. People who don’t want to edit for fear of ruining their work really just don’t want to edit. Editing is hard. It’s heavy lifting, it’s deep examination instead of just merry typing.

There’s an older, if similar argument that asks whether writing is an art or a skill. I’m just not sure how this can count as an argument when the answer is yes.

Not quite true, or not quite the full answer. I was once in a pub discussion where the answer was actually “Yes, and it’s your round.”

Of course, if I really wanted to edit this down to its core, I’d just point out that the mug concerned is not the RSC one.

Stop-Time, I want to get off

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It’s the Baader Meinhof Effect again. This week I heard a term for the first time, a term that you may already know because you’re smart, but I didn’t because I’d not noticed it before. And then it took me hearing it for the first time twice for it to get in my head.

Stop-Time.

Des Tong mentions this musical term in the deeply interesting interview he did for my 58keys series on YouTube last Wednesday. Then Kirk Hamilton’s Strong Songs podcast spent a sliver under an hour examining Billy Joel’s “Scenes from an Italian Restaurant”, and dwelt on it. (Do listen to the whole thing, but stop-time segment comes in from 26’40”.)

You’d think, then, I’d know what it was, at least enough to not ask you to check out Wikipedia’s definition. Well.

So it’s a beat, a particular rhythm that’s different to the rest of a piece of music and it feels as if it’s made that music stop, as if it’s made time stop. I don’t know how a regular beat can do that when it’s a beat, it’s literally a series of sounds that come one after another in time, but it does. In “Scenes from an Italian Restaurant”, it comes between one of that song’s many dramatic changes in tempo, even in form, and it’s like it holds you in the air for a moment, just before you drop back down into the time of the song.

There’s a moment in WG Snuffy Walden’s thirtysomething soundtrack where the music pauses for the smallest breath that feels like a chasm. It’s a pause, an ending, yet you know it hasn’t ended, you know you’re falling to the next note and when that comes, it’s like it’s caught you and is bringing you along to something else.

It’s also like I wish I knew any musical terms whatsoever.

Well, I do now, I know stop-time.

And somehow I’m going to use it in my writing. Er. I mean, other than this, writing to you about it.

Thrown for a closed timelike curve

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Last night, YouTube offered me up Cyndi Lauper’s “Change of Heart“, a song that comes from – and instantaneously took me back to – about 1986. The music did and I can see your face, you’re not exactly looking surprised. Music does this, of course it does. I don’t know how, but of course it does.

Only, the video didn’t take me back one inch.

That song, and the True Colours album it comes from, are part of my skin but I had never seen the video before last night. I don’t think it’s an especially brilliant one, it’s not that I’m urging you to see it, but I can’t stop thinking about the disconnection of music and video, skin and surface. Each note, each syllable, as familiar as if they were my very own, and the video completely alien.

It was riveting, somehow like suddenly seeing the back of your head and realising you’ve always had a bald spot.

Presumably the video was filmed in 1986 and these people were doing that filming, were performing, no more than shortly before I was first listening to the album. So that video shows reality – I mean, okay, people don’t tend to run over London tourist spots singing, but those spots looked like that then, those crowds were there, this was reality.

And from the perspective of 35 years later, that reality seems so innocent.

It makes me feel old, not least after I just worked out that 35 figure on my fingers, but I can’t decide whether I miss that time or not. Knowing all that was to come after it, I don’t know if would like to be able to step back to then.

I just know that I cannot avoid stepping back when I listen to the music. And that this – to me – brand new video for it has thrown me.

Maybe I’m wondering what the next 35 years will bring and, time being what it is, also thinking of just how soon it will be 2056. I’m definitely thinking about whether we like or dislike music, we assess it now, in the moment we hear it, and we entirely miss that is forever welded to that same moment.

Sometimes I’m wondering whether we can actually assess whether something is good or not, assess it at all, because nothing is entire of itself, everything is bonded to its time. Except screw assessing anything, it works for you or it doesn’t.

Maybe I’m just saying that it would good if everything old were new again.

No answer

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There must be something awkward about me because last time I fair raged at you about how writers shouldn’t ever ask questions in articles and now I want to at least enthuse about not writing answers.

It’s a different rant. Questions in articles and features tell me the writer couldn’t do their job whereas answers in a script tell me the writer isn’t great at dialogue.

This is very specifically something I feel about scriptwriting, but I feel it so strongly that I apply it in fiction, I apply it anywhere I remotely can. And it’s this: I will eat glass before I allow any of my characters to answer a question.

Respond, yes. React, absolutely. But actually answer what they been asked, as close to never as humanly possible.

Here’s an exchange of dialogue from a script. I need you to play the first part, I’ll play the second.

FIRST PERSON: What were you doing in Tesco this morning?
SECOND PERSON: Um, buying bacon.

You read that very well, thank you. I need you to do it once more, maybe with just a tiny bit more anger.

FIRST PERSON: What were you doing in Tesco this morning?
SECOND PERSON: Were you following me?

You see the difference immediately. The initial exchange about bacon was domestic at best, flat at worst. In the second one, these two characters feel like they’re on their feet, that there is some life and verve and history here, that they’re going to fight.

I grant you, we’ve lost the information that I was buying bacon. It’s possible that bacon plays an important part in the story, but you suspect not. So what the bacon line really accomplishes is confirmation that I was in Tesco. We already knew that from the question, so that answer was in all possible ways worthless. It was a dead line of dialogue. Dead and therefore deadening.

When you see an answer like that in a script, it is alway deadening, and it always means the writer is trying to write naturalistically. In a real conversation, it’s more likely that I’d say bacon than I would get in your face about it all, but this isn’t a real conversation. Drama does not have natural, real-life dialogue, it has dialogue that sounds as if it’s natural.

That’s a gigantic difference and it’s how dialogue carries infinitely more than the information in the words. You delivered your line about why I was in Tesco with some gusto there, but I could’ve asked about your following me in a light, jokey way. I didn’t, though, and you knew I didn’t, even without my writing it like this:

SECOND PERSON: (Angrily) Were you following me?

Last week I said that to me, a question in an article is a brick wall that stops me reading on unless I have to. An answer in a script can be a stumble, to my mind, and it breaks the flow, it takes me a little out of the story, because an answer is usually a bit of dead air.

If I feel strongly about this, though, it’s not that I’m against writers having their characters answer. It’s that doing so without being this dead pause, without reminding me that this isn’t naturalistic dialogue, is beyond me.

Whereas the reason I’m a writer at all is a show called Lou Grant which basically had an ensemble of journalist characters constantly asking each other things, and then spending half the episode interviewing people. Back when I was a teenager, I watched five years of that show without once realising that it was all question and answer, it is done that well.

It’s not very often that something you used to adore stands up a couple of decades later, but in this case I now admire that show even more. I just don’t seem to have learned from it how to ask questions without answers being rubbish.

No question

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An editor told me this week to not write questions in a feature and I overreacted. Not at all because I disagree, but because I was appalled at the idea I would ever do this dreadful thing. I explained that questions in feature articles were a pet peeve of mine and then decided no, that’s not strong enough, it’s a pet peeve, a hobby horse and a religious tract.

I feel so strongly about this that it is honestly difficult for me to write you an example. Honestly. But here goes.

So what is a question in a feature?

God, the willpower required to not delete that before you saw it.

A question like that in an article comes loaded with a lot of information and all of it is bad. When you read a question, you know the feature is moving on to a new point, which is fine –– but you also know the writer didn’t know how to do the move. You can suspect that the writer is lazy and you can know for a fact that the writer isn’t very good.

If an article isn’t one of those bullet-point lists, a listicle in which number 6 will blow your mind, then it’s known as a read-through. You’re meant to read it through from the start to the end. That means the text starts somewhere and the writer takes you through to the end.

Each point has to follow on from the one before. The piece has a whole has a lot to say and the job is to say it all in such a way that the article flows, that it carries the reader along without any bumps in the stream. The job is finding the right sequence of points and making it seem inevitable, obvious, easy that they go in this order.

You also have to write well enough that someone bothers to read on, but that’s another story. The reason poor writers include questions in their text is because they can’t take you to the next point in a way that feels inevitable, obvious, easy.

When I read a question, it feels to me as if the article has stopped in a panic. I can see the writer, I can feel the writer, realising they don’t know how to keep the text going. I can feel the weight of the word count on their backs, the pressure of the deadline. I can feel that they don’t read much. And I can sense that they don’t give very much of a damn, either.

A question in an article is a brick wall and if I ever read on after one, it’s because I have to for some reason. I then resent having to, because I already know the writer isn’t any good and so the chance I’ll find what I need is suddenly dramatically lower.

Don’t get me started on questions in headlines, either. Actually, no, do get me started on that because it’s quick. So quick that there’s even Betteridge’s law which states that any headline that’s a question will be followed by an article that answers no.

“Can you declutter in one hour?”

“Is Elvis really teaching PE in Cardiff?”

It’s possible, just about barely possible, that you’ve picked up on how questions in articles and headlines make me a teeny bit unhappy. I told you I overreacted. But I can’t help it: when I see a question in a feature, I am affronted that I’ve been wasting my time reading this crap. So to be told not to do it, and by implication have it suggested that I ever do, it was pet peeve hobby horse religious effigy burning time. And then some.

Stupid count redux

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I’ve read 2,000 scripts. Well, yeah, no, I’ve read an awful lot more than that but in my current reading of at least one script per day, I’ve just read my 2,000th and this was both later than expected and then sooner than calculated.

Not sure there’s much you can say to this other than big deal. I’m curious why I clearly have to tell you this trivial thing, but if I can salvage something useful, let me also tell you this. Of the 2,000, some 361 were on the excellent TV Writing site, which is simply a favourite corner of the whole internet for me. And 117 were from the script library at the BBC Writersroom, although note that their collection includes some post-production scripts that are cut-down documents, made less to read and more for some admin purposes.

The rest, by the way, were predominantly plucked from countless other sites and links, were sent to me directly, or were in the couple of hundred script books I own. Which reminds me, I’ve been meaning to recommend a couple of books to you.

Five Screenplays by William Goldman and Four Screenplays by William Goldman.

I’m a little torn over Goldman. I was a fan until his profoundly, aggravatingly awful non-fiction book Hype & Glory. (Goldman is famous for huge, huge surprises in his novels, really eye-popping revelations that make you want to go back to read the book again. Something like 90 pages into this tripe, he tries to pull off the same thing by suddenly announcing that his wife has left him. Rather than surprise, rather than eye-popping, it’s a moment that leaves you eye-rolling and realising that’s why this is all so bad.)

Then he regularly described critics as failures, which is harsh but I’ve been a critic, I could see his point, and allegedly called one woman critic a whore, which just pissed me off against him forever. Or nearly forever, I think it was a few years after this that I read his two books of screenplays and enjoyed them as much as I have again in the last couple of weeks.

Except, as well as superb screenplays, each book has thousands of words of background detail about the writing and production of these films. Fascinating, illuminating, compelling, it is like having a friend sitting there telling you these things. These essays of his were so good that a few more years on, I was actually eager to read his non-fiction book, “Which Lie Did I Tell?”

Unfortunately, I already had.

The majority of that book is a reprint of the essays from the screenplay books. I know few people read script books, but you could be pretty certain that everyone who did would read this. I remember flicking through and through and through thinking I bought the hardback of this.

Anyway.

Five Screenplays has All the President’s Men, Magic, Harper, Maverick and The Great Waldo Pepper. Four Screenplays has Marathon Man, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Princess Bride and Misery.

They are two tremendous collections and on the page, Goldman’s scripts fly. Some day I must actually see Waldo Pepper; I’ve read it a couple of times and yet never got around to watching.

Howay. That’s nine of the 2,000 scripts I’ve read in this run and if I don’t shut up now, I’ll be telling you about 1,991 more. Well, yeah, no, there have been some incredible stinkers that make you feel a) great that you can probably write better than that and 2) regret the time you spent turning those pages.

Although then there are others that are so good that 3) I want to give up writing.

Also, though, a fascinating number where either the script was a huge slog to read yet the show was great, or the script was incredible and the film was boring. I keep thinking about that.

It might be that a script is just the first, if biggest, if most crucial, part of a production. Might be.

Time series

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Tell me you do this too, look serious and say it isn’t just me. I measure the passage of time by TV series. I don’t mean to say that you and I should meet for a coffee at a quarter past “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” or on July “24”.

I mean Buffy lasted for seven years. Thriller “24” ran for eight years in its original run. The remake of “Hawaii Five-O” has just ended after a decade. It’s not even as if I followed these shows –– I like Buffy and 24 a lot but didn’t stick with either, I didn’t like Hawaii but the remade theme was fantastic –– yet I am conscious that they came and they went. I talked about “Hawaii Five-O” in my 2005-2010 podcast UK DVD Review and since then, I’ve talked more and they made 240 episodes.

Then “Doctor Who” is heading very close to its 60th anniversary and I remember vividly running across Birmingham because I’d booked the wrong cinema to see its 50th special. Realising that there were two Odeon cinemas and I was not in the most right one, feeling the skin on my lungs as I ran across the city, that was ten minutes ago, not most of a decade.

And speaking of most of a decade, the reason I am thinking of all this yet again now is that “Leverage” ended in 2012 after five years. It’s back today, after what WolframAlpha.com tells me is 3,118 days. What in the world have I done in the last 8 years, 6 months and 14 days? Well, I’ve watched “Leverage” again, I can tell you that.

Otherwise, television drama comes and goes, time ticks on. I think of the immense effort that goes into creating a series and keeping it going for years, and then I think about how quickly that is gone. One moment “Leverage” is a series on US television, the next it was a series on US television.

And now it’s again a series on US television, albeit now called “Leverage: Redemption”. I don’t know when I’ll get to see it here in the UK, but I do know that however successful it is, however many years it runs, it is going to be over astonishingly fast, before I get around to doing anything.

Now we’ve moved from broadcast television to streaming, I don’t get the same thing of seeing a pilot episode one day and hearing the series finale is on ten minutes later. But I do get the discovery that while I was looking away, entire series have come and gone. The other week I came across the script to the pilot episode of “The Last Ship”, for instance. I’d not heard one syllable about this show but it turns out to have run very successfully for five years.

Five years of work and I missed it. But can now watch it anyway, which is what I’m doing while I wait for “Leverage: Redemption” to come to the UK.

We get so little time. I think people who funnel that time into television drama pull off a gigantic feat and I think they make something that lives and lasts beyond its time. In this case, so much so that demand brings it back for another go.

I think you and I should make some television. Waddya say?

Owed to a fallen iPad

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You’re looking different today. Brighter, sharper, somehow higher resolution – it suits you.

And that is you, all you, it is not anything to do with how we’re talking over my 2021 iPhone instead of our usual 2015 iPad Pro.

Ah, I remember those days as if they were just last Friday. Before a long and sometimes extremely long day at the keyboard in my office, I’d sit right here, just here, with a mug of tea, my faithful old iPad and you. I thought we’d last forever. I mean the iPad.

Instead, we lasted 2,007 days. Two thousand days in which I doubt more than five or maybe at the very most ten went by without my entirely draining the battery from so much use. Two thousand days since I bought it despite not wanting to.

I don’t want to think about the cost of iPads just now, though inescapably I know that my one worked out to 40p per day and I’m suddenly harking back further to when we just used pencils that cost so little we can’t remember.

I’d rather think about how we met, my iPad and I, even if the start was a little unhappy. I hadn’t wanted it, I didn’t have the money to casually spend on something that I didn’t realise I would use so much. That I would both spend so much and depend on so much. But it was directly tied to work and a client that I needed. Plus, I paid for it in monthly instalments and if I did the work at just the right time, invoiced at just the right time, and the client paid at just the last possible minute, I was covered.

I can still remember how incredibly nervous I was carrying a 12.9-inch iPad Pro around for the first few weeks. What I can’t remember is quite how quickly it became indispensable. I keep saying 12.9 inches because that was in the name, it’s not like I measured it. The slightly longer-winded way to describe it is to say that it was exactly like having two regular iPad screens side by side. You’d be working that screen with both hands and it would feel like you were inside it, that you were kneading bread, that you were really getting work done.

I remember the day when it first went wrong. It was certainly after more than four years of very heavy use and travelling a lot around the UK with it in different bags, but one day I touched it and it didn’t respond. It was like a partner who has already decided to break up with you and just hasn’t said it yet.

Over time, whole sections of that 12.9-inch touch screen stopped responding to touch. It got so I would very often have to rotate the whole iPad in order to get an online button under an area I could tap.

But if it were awkward and peculiar, well, so am I and this is how you and I have talked on Fridays. Actually, on every weekday morning, I got into the habit of being on it in my living room, writing ahead of the day’s writing, getting things done, talking with you, reading, working. And then in recent months stopping after two hours because a) it is important to take breaks and 2) the iPad Pro’s battery died.

On Tuesday this week, the whole thing died too.

I sat down right here, had an idea for a title for something, and never got to tell it to my iPad.

You’d have liked my iPad, I just know it. And when we can all get out to travel as freely as once we did, I will take it to Apple and look at them with puppy-dog eyes. From all I can find out, though, when they’ve gone the way mine has, they’ve gone.

So.

Here’s to 2,007 days, here’s to something of the order of 20,000 hours, and here’s to my old iPad.

I don’t remember being this sad about a typewriter. I don’t remember noticing a pen or a pencil running out. But there was something so good about that huge screen and then there was something so charming about how the screen wouldn’t always work.

Anyway.

As I say, you’re looking brighter, sharper and in higher resolution on my phone. Specifically 460 pixels per inch instead of 264 ppi. And 900 nits of brightness compared to something like 500.

It suits you. But I miss rotating the screen in order to push your buttons

Unguilded truth

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Let me say something that’s really for me, then some things I think are for you, too.

The thing for me is partly that as of next week, I will no longer be Deputy Chair of the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain. But its mostly that I’m not going far. (For my entire writing career, people have told me I won’t go far.) I’ll still be involved with the Guild, I mean I’ll obviously always be a member but every possible way I can continue doing anything for and with them, I will.

I haven’t broken that news to them yet.

But here’s the thing for both you and me, here’s the thing I think is more important. Four years working with the Guild has been a lot of things I thought it would be, it’s certainly been everything  I hoped, but it’s also been one thing I don’t think I could have expected.

Frightening.

You may know that the Writers’ Guild is our union and that it is because of the Guild that writers have the rates of pay and the working conditions we do. I never tire of marvelling that the Guild has done this for all writers, whether or not they’re members.

The frightening thing I didn’t know and I don’t think many of us can see from outside is just how constant the fight is. I’ve never been in any of the rooms where negotiations take place, but I now doubt there’s been a day where there hasn’t been such a meeting, where there haven’t been battles being fought for us

I don’t want to make it sound as if studios and networks and producers are the enemy, they’re hardly that. Yet I now know that if it were not for the Writers’ Guild, studios and networks and producers would be able to pay us fantastically less. Up to you whether you think any of them would.

I feel I’ve spent my time holding the coats of the Guild’s tremendous team as they’ve ceaselessly done this. I’ll obviously know much less of what’s going on when I leave, but I will leave deeply glad the Guild is there. And actually, profoundly relieved that it’s being run by the current team. The Writers’ Guild has a long history of excellent people –– I aspired to become a member in part because at one time Alan Plater was President –– but the current team is special.

They’re the right people at the right time and having had this glimpse of our industry, I leave the Deputy Chair role reassured at who we’ve got.

If you’re a member of the Writers’ Guild, you’ll have had all the Annual General Meeting details so come see for yourself. I’m leaving solely because I have to: four years is the maximum term for a Deputy Chair and my time is up at the AGM next week. You won’t especially notice me going since the meeting is on Zoom so there’ll just be some point when my little video face will sink, but you will get to meet the officers who are working for you, for me, for all of us.

More cents than money

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Yesterday my YouTube series 58keys qualified to earn money. You need over 1,000 subscribers and overall people must have watched more than 4,000 hours of your videos in the last 365 days. It’s been quite tense this week as I’d near the magic total one day, then the next it would drop back because another 24-hour period had ticked by.

But now it’s over the 4,000, the bells have rung, the lights have flashed and I am in the start of a long process that will see me registered to rake in cash. As best I can calculate it, I can look forward to 55% of $3 for every thousand views I get in the future.

My most popular 58keys video has had something like 8,000 views. In nine months.

Tellin’ you, raking it in.

Just to be clear, I don’t understand at all what really constitutes a view in terms of whether YouTube will hand over money. I think you skip as many YouTube ads as I do, but I’ve no idea when that still counts and when it doesn’t.

Doesn’t matter, not really. It’s not like I’m expecting to run a media empire.

The difference it will actually make, I believe anyway, is that YouTube will promote the series more. That’s always an aim, to reach a bigger audience, and I’m doing it through writing. I present the videos, yes, but I script almost all of them. So since the end of January 2020, I have written about 70 short scripts and they’ve all been produced and they’ve all been watched by someone. Strangers have watched.

Actually, I can tell you this even as it entirely confuses me. It’s true that my most successful video has had 8,000 views, and it’s also true that most range from 200 to about 1,500. But still, YouTube tells me that in the last 365 days my videos have been watched by 49,669 people.

I have to assume 45,000 took one look and switched off, but let’s not go there.

Fifty thousand viewers, however briefly, is simultaneously big to me and I realise also small too. But I’ve profoundly slowly come to realise that what satisfies me is thinking of something and making it happen. Seventy episodes, an unbroken weekly run with some extra specials, fifty thousand viewers.

And my writing is better because of them.

That’s the thing, that’s the difference. Writing does not have to be read or seen, but when it is, I think writers write better. Certainly I do. It’s partly from direct things like comments from viewers, which have seen me doing more visual gags than I realised I was capable of.

But chiefly it’s just the focus. Each week, one video, thought of, written, made, and then seen.

So as small time a YouTuber as I now am, please raise a mug of tea with me to mark the occasion.

Possibly as well to commiserate that yesterday was also the first year anniversary of my finishing the hardest drama script I’ve ever done and it is not one pixel closer to production. And to mark that thanks to BT, I am without internet and I’ll be writing on a website today using the same tin can and piece of string tethering connection I’m using to talk to you.