So earlier this week, I was called a shit hot writer. But I think I imagined that middle word.

Anyway, whether I’m a writer or just a fool to myself, I think a lot about this stuff and after so much thinking that I successfully put off writing for hours, I have a strong opinion about characters being killed off in stories.

Let them die.

Please.

I saw a film recently in which a major character was killed and not only did I not feel a flicker, I don’t believe it was physically possible to care at that point. This was a good character, we’ve been with her through a lot and of course she’s well played, so this death should have been enormous and it was played on screen as if it was.

But it just wasn’t.

Because we’d seen her die before. She was shot early on in the film, then we went through that familiar feeling of no, come on, she’s a major character, this is a trick, she’ll be fine, and then we’re told no. We are directly told nope, she’s dead, deal with it.

And then she was fine. It had been a trick. Terrific.

So later on when she is killed and everybody’s is acting like this is really the end for her, you can’t engage because all you can think is that it was really the end for her last time too. By the time it is really sure she’s gone, you’ve been out of the film for long enough that you don’t care. Important character, big death scene, shrug.

Even now, talking to you about a month later, I don’t expect that this character has survived and will be in the sequel, I really don’t, but if she were, it would not be an enormous shock. It would be played as one, but it wouldn’t be it, you wouldn’t feel the shock.

But that possibility aside, at least this film killed her. I am wondering when we got so we couldn’t just let characters die. The name Lazarus is coming to mind, but then only slightly more recently there is Star Trek, in which I think every major character has died at least once and is always back next week.

I know the reasoning is that you have a popular character so killing them off will be this enormous thing that everyone will talk about – but they’re also so popular that they’re why audiences keep coming back for more. So kill them off, absolutely, but don’t kill them off, no.

Only, let’s say this particular character I just saw die on screen does come back for the inevitable sequel. As popular as she was, as good as she is, if she comes back and it’s all some trick or dream sequence, I won’t ever quite engage with that character the way I did.

That kills me.

Last week, it was pointed out to me that I started off sounding nicely silly, then I turned a bit serious and possibly a little uplifting. I promised to stop that this instant.

But while I know this is just you and me talking, still I do think about you during the week, I do think about what we can natter about, and yet I don’t think I have much control over the way I say it.

I must do: if I were writing you a news story you would know. Yet it seems to me that unless there is a specific requirement for a certain tone in my writing, my writing is just the way it is and I can’t do anything about it.

Which I would have been fine about until around seventeen minutes ago when I installed QuarkXPress on my Mac. Quark is the publishing app that conceivably you use, but more likely you only vaguely remember, and even more likely you’ve never heard of. It’s not my first choice for a publishing app, I’ve only installed it now because I need it for a job, I wouldn’t think to mention it to you.

Except.

This app has a tone and I am fascinated.

I don’t think about apps, I think about what I can do with them, and this one has been written over decades by countless developers — yet it has a single clear and actually rather strident tone.

It is proof positive, I think, that the writer’s voice comes out through whatever medium they are working on, and whether or not they’re working alone.

Or maybe it just does when the tone is arrogant.

Yet Quark shouldn’t be arrogant, it should seem like a scrappy underdog, trying to get back to its glory days of the 1980s. The business shot itself in the foot back then and the best you could say is that it aimed well.

Doubtlessly there is a Business 101 class somewhere about how Quark ruled the publishing world and then surrendered it all to Adobe InDesign. I’d take that class.

But today, all I want to do is install the app so I can do a job. And instead installing QuarkXPress was a job itself. Where usually you find an app, click the Buy button and then start working in it, Quark steps you through a 1980s corporate-style installation sequence that says you — oi, you, I’m looking at you – are binding this app to this machine and you’d better not forget it.

If you try to forget it, if you try to do some work in another app while Quark gathers its bits together, tough shit. Quark is a good Mac citizen in that it will allow you to switch to another app — but it’s s crap Mac citizen because it then covers up that other app so that you can’t use it.

Consequently, I read a book while ignoring various warnings, and then I got to wondering. There must be a reason why I actively removed this app some years ago instead of simply leaving it there in case I needed it again.

And just as I thought about that, QuarkXPress was fully installed — and I found out why I had removed it.

Remember, this was a copy of the app I had just now, just right now, downloaded fresh from the official site. But the moment it had finished installing, it immediately told me there was an update I had to download. From the official site.

And then, I promise you this is true, once that updated had installed, Quark told me there was an update I had to install.

I suspect what happened is that the first one was an update to the installer, and the second was an update to the app.

But.

This is QuarkXPress 2019. There have been several releases of it since and there is just no chance that it is getting serious updates the instant I download it or — oh, come on — again now as I talk about it. Seriously. Right now. Fantastic.

QuarkXPress updates when the wind changes direction and maybe you can praise the writer/developers for constantly improving their app. But you won’t. Because all work stops while it updates, I’ve had to wait now while it knocks on the glass of my screen demanding attention over and over again.

I am agog at how strongly you can feel the attitudes and the personalities of the writers of something that is not a story, not a drama, and instead just a tool.

But as I say, I installed this for a job. And now that job has turned in to figuring out how to get the client to ditch QuarkXPress.

Bugger. Now my tone is clearly sarcastic, possibly a little petty, definitely annoyed. So there it is, there is no way to write anything without a tone coming through. I just don’t think that the makers of Quark are any better at controlling their tone than I am mine.

Previously, if you ever told me that you plan writing out in detail before you do it, I mean if you say you do an outline first, I’ve magnanimously said that whatever works for you, works for you.

And when I’ve casually mentioned how I’m happy to write something and then throw it away if it doesn’t work, I’ve doubtlessly also thrown in how I did exactly that to a 100,000-word novel I wrote over lockdown.

Them’s the breaks when you write without prissy little guidelines, that’s what you have to deal with when you’re a real writer.

I seem to remember you saying “bollocks”.

Look, I do really mean that whatever it takes to get you to the finish line is a good thing. Outline, paint storyboards, do whatever you need. But for the longest time I have just started writing and then genuinely been quite fine about throwing everything away to start over again.

To be clear, I have always provided an outline when the commission requires it. But I have been the sort that if I possibly could, I would rather write the whole script or the whole book and then make up an outline afterwards.

Except a producer once pointed out that you can’t have a blank screen on BBC1 on Tuesday night at 21:00. It has to be filled and there is no scope to just write a script and throw it away if you don’t happen to like it. Outlines, argued this producer, get you to the finishing line on time. Maybe you’d write better if this weren’t true, but you might not write better on time and that’s the killer point.

I hadn’t thought of it like that, but the instant it was said to me, I couldn’t disagree.

I just didn’t do it.

Only, last week it looked like I was going to get a commission for a thing and this week I got it. There isn’t a massive amount to it, it’s more that the work is spread out over the next year, and in fact it’s not replacing anything, it is just going to be something extra I do.

But because it’s new, because it’s a producing job as much as anything, and especially because it is over a set period of time, I still didn’t outline.

I project managed instead.

Just before you and I started talking, I sent the people a Gantt chart for the whole year with something like forty points in it. That’s just for them, I know as I work through that project I will be creating many more tasks and the giant majority will be solely for me. But for now, this is where we are, I said, and this is when it looks like we need to do this, this and the other that.

It’s a Gantt chart. This bit of work has dependencies, for instance, so it can’t be started before this other work is done, and I have to finish it before I can start this next thing. And that next thing has to be done by this date, so this other task must be started by another date.

And finally I get it.

All this planning, all this assessing of sequences and balancing of resources, it all does exactly what outlines do.

It lets you feel busy while you put off the actual writing.

An extraordinarily long time ago now, a colleague emailed me a Word document that I couldn’t read. It opened, but it appeared to be completely blank because, as it turned out, it was written in white text on a white background.

Or rather, it was read in white on white. The writer had set her PC up so that Word was in what’s now referred to as dark mode. She set the background to be black, set the text to be white, and it worked perfectly for her — but made the text look blank on anyone else’s machine.

I can’t remember her name, can’t remember the sequence of events, but I can remember the acrimony I got from her. Not only was this a trivial fix once you knew what had happened, but it was something she’d chosen to do — yet it became a stand-up row in which she loudly blamed me for it.

There were other undercurrents, we certainly didn’t get along, but there was also an irony that I did see even then: we were colleagues on a computer magazine, we were both the people who should know how this stuff works.

I think now that she was shaky technically and given what the job was, she was also likely to react badly to anything she saw as criticism. At the time, I was shaky editorially and while later I got used to her, I think that at this point I was still frightened by her.

All of which is back in my mind so many years later because this week I looked up a publisher’s website and the way it was written reminded me of that moment. The way just a couple of words were written told me that this publisher is not competent technically and in overreacting will loudly blame anyone else for even the smallest, briefest hiccups.

I did then find other issues I’m not keen on, but those were just confirmation. Two words told me not to submit to that publisher.

Just to be clear, and to dramatically delay revealing the two words for a moment – though don’t get excited, they’re not worth the tension I’m trying to build – I have no reason to assume this publisher would want me. The book proposal I have is necessarily on a backburner as other projects take up my time, but I do relish it and I had been told that this publisher might be looking for something like it.

Strictly speaking, no, they’re not. They have a submission window that isn’t open yet. But broadly, yes, I could see my book with them — except it won’t be.

You know that every publisher lists requirements on its website and that a shocking number of writers ignore them. The publisher will say they do, for instance, exclusively children’s text books, and some writer will send them a five-volume encylopedia of horror flash fiction poetry.

But the publisher will also say something that I suppose you could call technical, but it hardly feels enough for that term. They’ll say what format they want the manuscript in — and they’ll always say Microsoft Word. Sometimes they’ll accept PDFs, but they always accept Microsoft Word.

Word is the lingua franca of publishers even as — literally, in two senses of that word — millions of writers have left it for alternatives such as Scrivener and Pages.

Which this publisher clearly knows because the two words were: “Never .pages!!” — complete with the two exclamation marks. Another term for an exclamation mark is a shriek and that’s what this line sounded like to me.

Two words tell me this publisher is not technically competent. The shrieks do a lot of that work, and also make me hesitate about the publisher’s writing style, but then the “.pages” bit does quite a lot. The publisher means a Pages document, but saying its extension instead of its name tells me they don’t know what extensions mean. I guarantee they’re on a PC because there you more often have to remember or think about filename extensions than you do on a Mac, but there’s also just something off with it all.

They sound like they’re using terms without actually understanding them. And I keep saying they, but somehow it makes them sound like a one-man or one-woman band. I’m guessing about that, but it feels like one person and he or she is shaky technically. That still shouldn’t be an issue, yet it also feels as if they’d be exactly as acrimonious about problems as my old colleague.

Again, I’ve no reason to presume this publisher would go for this book idea. But you have to be able to work with a publisher and I’m no more likely to submit to this one than I am — sorry — to tell you which one it is.

Still, as writers, we submit to publishers and there’s a lot of weight on the word submit. Maybe I’m just old enough to now see that it’s a partnership and a collaboration, or maybe it’s just that there are so many little publishers these days that you can be picky.

But it is definitely that what you write will tell people more about you than what your words actually say. And now, of course, I’m looking up the screen wondering what I’ve given away about myself. Ah, it’s only you and me here, and you’re nice, you won’t admit you think I’m still holding a petty grudge against that Word colleague.

If you’re going to forget something, presumably there must be a time when you know it and a time when it’s gone from your head. Surely there must, then, be one day in which this change happens.

I think it’s today.

For I heard a joke a few months ago and I can still remember it, but for the all the chocolate in the world, I could not now tell you the name of the comedian.

Which is of course usually a bad thing, and especially as this means I’m about to rip him off. (I do remember it was a he.) But in this case, I want to give you a bad review of a good joke. For cause.

Follow. Here’s the joke.

“I waited in all day today for the doorbell repairman, but he never came.”

Okay, so, not earth-shattering, but it’s a good line, it’s a good joke. Except it isn’t. Because as delivered by this comedian, the joke actually went on further: “I waited in all day today for the doorbell repairman, but he never came. Or did he? Was the bell broken?”

Destroyed.

A nice laugh, eradicated by the follow-up.

It is insulting to presume your audience won’t understand something, but there’s also something here about surfacing the work. You don’t show your working out, you don’t show your various drafts, you present the writing, the finished writing. And in this case, the comedian laid bare his thinking. Not enough people will get this joke, he thought, so he’d best explain it and that way everyone will get it.

Yes, certainly, that’s true. Not everyone will get the joke as it stands and if you add in an explanation, there is not one single person who will fail to grasp the gag.

But I offer that there is also now no one whatsoever who will find it funny anymore.

The comedian thinks the choice is between a few people laughing and a lot of people laughing, but it is not. The choice is really between a few people laughing and nobody. A joke is a precious and difficult piece of writing, a prize and a delicacy, and it can be shot to hell if you don’t shut up at the right point.

I heard the comedian tell this joke, I laughed, then he did the follow-up exposition and the laugh rather died in my throat. I was left feeling a bit embarrassed to be even smiling at something that was now deeply obvious instead of surprising, that was now newspaper-headline-plain instead of leaving you just the tiniest thing to work out for yourself.

But the reason this is back in my head this week is that last weekend, I heard another comedian do a joke that was a similar format. It was another one-liner, it depended on you realising what he wasn’t saying, and it was a good gag. And he did not explain it afterwards.

He did something worse.

He waited a beat and then said to the audience, “take your time.”

I stopped watching.

It was obviously that I didn’t enjoy being patronised, but also if you’re really going to give me time to grasp a joke, it had better be a bit better than this. That’s why I stopped: the patronising tone, yes, but also the instant awareness of cockiness, that this was what he thought was brilliant material. Patronising me about my ability to comprehend something –

– wait, I’ve just realised, right now, talking to you, that I cannot remember what the joke was. It was only six days ago and it wasn’t good enough to stick in my head.

Okay, so patronising is rarely a sought after commodity, but in this case it did so much damage in so many ways. It wrecked the joke, of course, but it also put a spotlight on the relationship between this comic and his audience. He seemed to feel superior, yet the joke just wasn’t remotely good enough to support that.

And then since it therefore shone out from him that he thought this was brilliant material, that also told me there was nothing in the rest of his set to stick around for.

Well.

Listen, if we’re going to be made to think about the working-out of a joke, let’s do it usefully, let’s do it together. Take that first joke again:

“I waited in all day today for the doorbell repairman, but he never came. Or did he? Was the bell broken?”

Obviously we kill that terrible ending, so the joke becomes:

“I waited in all day today for the doorbell repairman, but he never came.”

Much better. Oddly, I think we do need to say repairman. “Repairer” would be more accurate but in this context that could mean some kind of DIY kit, rather than a man or a woman. I think we’d spend just a moment too long unpicking that word if it were repairer. So “repairman” is wrong, but I think it’s needed.

Whereas “today” isn’t.

“I waited in all day for the doorbell repairman, but he never came.”

I think that’s where we should stop. But we could do this:

“I waited in all day for the doorbell repairman.”

or

“I waited in for the doorbell repairman.”

That turns the original 21-word joke into 7 words. Oh! We can do it with one fewer: “I waited for the doorbell repairman.”

But now I think that it definitely doesn’t work. It’s become a statement, whereas the 13-word version — the last one to keep “but he never came” — is a story. That seems to me to be the best, it is narratively complete, with a setup and a surprise.

It’s possible that I’m overthinking this.

I know that in the very best scripts I’ve read, in the very best writing I’ve relished, there is always a confidence. There is never a hesitation, there is always a boldness. It doesn’t matter who the writer is, it doesn’t matter what the topic is or even whether I like it, if it’s well written, it’s always somehow declarative. Here it is, there you go.

Granted, hesitant writing tends not to get finished, so you just don’t get to see it. And then of course by the time you do see any writing, it has fought some battles to get to you. At the very least it’s had a skirmish or two in the writer’s head, but then it’s also had to defend itself with publishers and editors. I shouldn’t make that last sound like a fight, my writing has only ever been improved by conversations with editors and producers. But always, there’s a process and the writing gets toughened up along the way, as much as the writer does.

Again, that’s regardless of the writer or the topic. I imagine even the most delicate gauze of a poem faces some bruising between the first idea and the time you or I get to read or hear it.

But sometimes there is a conceit, too.

I’m not going to name the show I watched that put this in my head. Partly because I just cannot insult writers and especially not ones who were more successful than me in every way that I count. I don’t happen to like any of their work but they achieved what I have failed to achieve and what I want so much to achieve. They also did it in this case with a story about time, which is my obsession, so frankly that’s rubbing it in.

Still, if you compare them to me, they win, they must win. They were professionals.

Plus, if I told you what this show was, you might even watch it and I truly see no reason why your day should be spoiled.

To my mind, yes, it is that bad. It was a 1980s piece so like most things it has dated, but I did watch it at the time. According to Wolfram Alpha, I first watched it 13,073 days ago, and I felt the same then as I did last Tuesday when I watched it again. The whole production is risible and if you’ve just asked wolframalpha.com what the date was then, if you’re thinking of using the BBC Genome project to see what aired on BBC1 at 19:35 that day, that’s on you. I take no responsibility.

There is an argument, incidentally, that the writers of a bad show may not be responsible for its dreadfulness, either. Part of the bruising on the way from idea to finished production is that no one outside of it can really ever know how the journey went. Certainly this was a low point in a series that has had quite high peaks before and sheer towering mountains since, so, you know, context is everything.

Yet thirteen thousand days ago, I was half agog and half repelled by what I saw as risible dialogue, amdram writing and pantomime staging. On Tuesday, I was again. But I also saw what I think I missed back in the 1980s: I think I can see now that absurdly, there is an arrogance to the writing, there is a conceit.

The most specific things I can point to are ones where a plot hole is addressed with one character saying something they would never say, that no one would ever say, and sometimes to somebody who already knows. There’s a sense somehow of how that problem is sorted, then, the audience will buy this and we’ve been so clever they’ll never know it was a last-minute repair job.

But there’s also a more nebulous sense throughout that you’re watching the writer, not the show. All writing reveals its writer, but that writer should be focusing on their story, not themselves. So a sense of feeling clever, certainly of patronising the viewer because the writer thinks they know more than the fools who could’ve been watching Coronation Street over on ITV instead, it rankles. And since you are at no point caught up in the story, you have plenty of time to rankle.

This has been bouncing around my head since Tuesday and I haven’t really got anywhere. But I keep coming back to this business that the two writers of this were literally professionals. This was their job and, again, they were more successful than I am, so I can’t deny that they were professional television writers. And yet I’m going to try: I think — I think — to be confident is professional, and to be conceited is amateur.

By chance, incidentally, I read this week that the two writers of this show refused to listen to their script editor since he was young and so had none of their television writing experience.

You don’t have to know how to spell the word faeces in order to recognise shit.

I keep thinking about surprises. I mean in drama and comedy, possibly most of all in television, because there are some surprises that cannot, cannot be surprising, and yet shows rather have to do them anyway, have to pretend they’re startling.

Take the first episode of “Shrinking” by Bill Lawrence, Jason Segel and Brett Goldstein, for just one example that put this back in my head today. I checked this again and in a 40-minute pilot episode, it takes just a few seconds under six minutes to get us to a certain key point.

Up to then, we’re seeing Jimmy Laird (Jason Segel) have a drunken night, a bad morning, a shattered relationship with his daughter and a clearly increasingly fractious one with his neighbours. At 5’55” into the episode, he walks into a therapy room and — surprise! — he’s not the patient, he’s the therapist.

The way I wrote that to you there, it sounds like I’m criticising the show and I’m not at all. It’s just that this moment is played as a surprise and yet if you have even heard of this TV show, you already knew. The entire series is about a therapist and every promotion for it, every mention of it, begins with that detail.

I suppose in the sea of TV on streaming platforms, you may now be more likely to stumble across something without having seen a trailer before. And “Shrinking” is on Apple TV+ which, while it has some of my absolute favourite shows of the last couple of years, has a very small audience compared to Netflix or Disney+.

And then this stumble-instead-of-trailer way of discovering the show must become yet more likely when “Shrinking” isn’t a new show and instead is a classic.

Except if you go to the series right now, this “surprise” is in your face. “Jimmy, a therapist mourning his wife, takes a more proactive approach with his patients in the hopes that helping them will help himself.”

With that one line, nothing in the opening six minutes is a big surprise, nothing. The detail of what he does, yes, and what happens to him that night and morning, sure, but that it’s happening and why, there isn’t a chance that you have any doubt about what’s behind it. Don’t get me wrong, it’s all done very well and you are enviably quickly into the story and the character, but it cannot be surprising.

So then we get to 5’55” and Jimmy, looking a wreck, sits down in front of a man who asks if he’s okay. And after nodding that he’s fine, he’s fine, Jimmy says to this man: “Steven, what’s on your mind today?”

Jimmy is the therapist, smash cut to main titles.

It is played as this big surprise and it cannot ever be that, yet I think it also has to be played exactly this way. The alternative is to take for granted that people have read the blurb, have seen the trailer, and so the episode skips yeah, yeah, right into whatever comes next.

A show has to exist within itself, I mean I think it has to be what it has to be regardless of any promotion or word-of-mouth descriptions. That’s for any show setting up and revealing its core premise, but specifically it’s for “Shrinking”, I think this unsurprising surprise must be the only way that the series can establish itself and what it’s about. This is a show about therapist who’s had a calamitous time, so we need to know he’s a therapist and while it helps to know what’s been so bad, we really just need to know how bad it was.

We need that in order to be prepared, armed. The comedy is going to see and show us what happens next. So we have to have that surprise reveal, it’s the show and the viewer agreeing to start here.

There is an argument that all of this is throwing away what would or could have been a big surprise. But I think it’s more that drama and comedy series have a certain element that is like throwing a surprise party for the viewer — and the viewer has been told about it already.

The show goes through the charade of jumping out at you with balloons, and we unconsciously do the gasp, hand to chest, you got me routine.

I don’t see that there’s any other way.

Although, you can play with it more. I suddenly remember, talking to you this moment, how Alan Plater had a laugh with us in his dramatisation of Stevie Davies’s novel, “The Web of Belonging. Filmed as just “Belonging”, it’s about someone who walks out of a long marriage — and Alan, knowing we knew that was the premise, opened with the person missing. They’re just around the corner, they haven’t left yet and he’s going to get us to the point where they do go, but it was a nod to the audience and to what the audience knows coming in.

I just remembered that. I might go watch that now, thanks.