Passing on experience

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That’s passing it on as in hopefully giving it to someone. Not as in no, thanks, I’ll pass on that. Though it’s up to you whether you receive or give experience and we’ve all failed to take advice before post-rationalising that we learned more from making mistakes anyway.

Listen, four times this month the same thing has come up: four times people have called me very, very old. Okay, the words they used were euphemisms like “thanks for helping out a new writer” and each time it was meant as a compliment. But I didn’t need my world-class ability to disassemble and reverse engineer praise into criticism to see that what they all really meant was that I’m the old writer.

Clearly.

I don’t want to think about that: I haven’t done anything yet and an approaching Really Serious Birthday is just magnifying my regular terror that time is ticking by. When I’m in this mood then stopping to eat is annoying, relaxing is betrayal and going to bed at night is defeat.

But of course I’m going to help someone. If I know something they need, and they tell me, of course I’m going to help. I’m experienced enough to know, though, that what I do in this way and what I argue Birmingham and West Midlands writers do more than most, is not usual. Writing is an isolating job and it is to the media industry’s advantage to keep that true so what’s more usual is that we believe we’re in competition with each other.

Are we hell.

Yes.

Okay, let me try that again. Are we bollocks.

I’ve been in situations where another writer was pitching for the same work as I was and that is the purest, most undeniable competition there is yet I deny it. It was poet Jean Atkin last year and we were both after a terribly interesting gig working with libraries but she walked in and even I thought yes, I’d hire her over me. I do think she’s a more powerful writer than I am, but it wasn’t a question of quality per se: we could both have done the job but we’d each have done it differently. And one of us would be more suited to the job than the other. That time it was her and if she hadn’t been picked, I’d have been disappointed in the whole process.

That’s the closest example I can think of to writers being in direct competition. Otherwise, it’s me pitching X and you pitching Y and the commissioners going bankrupt after choosing Z.

Otherwise, I do my thing and you do yours. I can learn from you but I can’t ever write like you and you can’t ever write like me. (You could have a go: say bollocks a few times, write ‘not so much’, mention OmniFocus and collapse into a stutter at the sight of dark chocolate. You got me.)

This is going to sound like I work for Hallmark Cards. (Wait, there’s another one: write ‘this is going to sound a bit Hallmark Card-like’ and be sure to say it in an English accent. You could play me in a movie now.) But honestly, I do believe that a rising tide raises all boats. If you have a great idea and something I do somehow helps that get made or produced or just progressed then that is in all ways brilliant. Of course it is: it’s a great idea and it’s yours, it’s you. I want to see what you do with it, I want to see or hear or read the final result. Hurry up.

There’s a thing in writing: inescapably, you reveal yourself through what you write. Even when it’s with fiction and different characters, even if it’s in a news story or an email. You can’t fake this: you are there on the page and astonishingly easy to see. If you can just put any idea of competition behind you, if you can please forget this idea of new writers and (especially) old writers then your writing and my writing and everyone’s writing becomes visibly the better for it.

You know the Yiddish word mensch, meaning someone who does a good thing. You also know that writing is a job, amongst all the many other things it is and that writers claim it to be, it is an industry. Helping new writers, refusing to accept that we’re old writers, supporting each other and working better: I think that makes writers and non-writers, men and women, all of us into a businessmensch.

What writing gives you

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One thing that writing and being a writer has given me is that I got to speak at the launch of this year’s Birmingham Literature Festival – and I got to say something that matters to me. I got to explain why the same company’s year-round programme of Young Writers’ groups gets me invigorated and just a wee bit passionate. Some of these groups are for 8-12 year olds, some for about 14-16 and with two minutes to describe what they were all like, I got to say it like this:

Just let me say that first that I feel privileged to be the one who gets to talk with you about this tonight. With 21 groups, that means there are 21 professional writers like myself running them, then there are 21 assistant writers plus everyone at Writing West Midlands. Each month we must work with something like 300 kids between us.

We all do it differently but we all want the same things and – actually – we get it.

We want young people to be able to explore writing and reading. We want them to express themselves. Sometimes we’d like them to be a little less exhausting.

Two of my Burton kids told me – about a year after we’d started – that they’d been afraid it would all be like school.

It’s not like school.

In our sessions they write underneath the tables. They write while actually running around the room. They write stage plays that we then stage. Really, we get in actors and we stage them. Forget the kids: can you imagine how exciting that is at my age?

They write film scripts – that we all then film. They write books, poetry, short stories.

They write.

No exams, no Ofstead. Writing. Creating. And talking. So much talking.

I want to give you one example. Well, actually I want to talk to you all evening but I am allowed one example. I worked with such a quiet, shy little girl once. Eight years old, very scared. Wouldn’t speak. Wouldn’t. If she ever did, you could barely hear her.

Yet a few sessions along… The last time I saw her, she was on her feet, calling across the room, horsetrading with other kids: I’ll write this bit if you write that. Imagine this: she was the shyest little child I’ve ever met – talented, I think, but shy – and I watched her say… No.

No, she said. I’m not writing that bit, I’m writing this bit.

So proud of her. And I do hope she becomes a writer. But whatever she does, writing has given her this. The Young Writers’ Groups have given her this.

Confidence, expression. Now you can give her that too. You can help the next shy little girl or shy little boy. In fact, you can help the next kid who is just like you and me: interested in writing and only needing a little encouragement to bloom.

The Young Writers’ groups are by Writing West Midlands, a charity which you can – and I do – help by becoming a Friend. This is a particularly good time to do it if you’re near the West Midlands, too, as you also get discounts for events and October’s Birmingham Literature Festival is replete with performances, readings, workshops and countless things happening.

Plus if you’re nowhere near it and can only dream from afar, bung Writing West Midlands some cash specifically to fund these Young Writers’ groups. Text WWMS15 £2 / £5 / £10 to 70070.

Writers and technology

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The writer and poet Jonathan Davidson said this to me ages ago and I have stolen it regularly since: writers went digital first. Everything is digital now and if you’re a writer you can feel like the world is changing – but we’re not left out, we’re not left behind, we just went digital so long ago that we’ve been here, we’ve done it. The world is finally catching us up, that’s what’s happening.

It was back in the 1980s: word processors came out, we saw them, we said we’re having that and we never went back. Not one of us. Not ever. There are writers who prefer pen and paper but there are no writers who don’t have a computer and a word processor.

Yet we do keep this strange duality in our heads: it’s as common to find a writer who is genuinely afraid of technology as it is to find one who isn’t but is actually a rubbish writer. Stop looking at me like that.

I’m in pain here. Four days ago I agreed to take off my Apple Watch for a week and write about what happened. This is for MacNN.com and next Tuesday there will be a feature and it will tell you what I missed, what difference it made. It just might not include all of the wailing. I’ll want to at least try to look professional there.

Here, I’ll tell you. I’ve wailed.

The thing is, more is going on. I don’t have my Apple Watch – well, I do, is right next to me on a stand but I’m not wearing it or switching it on for another THREE ENTIRE DAYS – but I do have a new iPhone 6. Only, I didn’t want to buy it.

I didn’t buy the iPhone 6 when it came out last year because I couldn’t afford it then and I wasn’t sure what it gave me that my existing iPhone 5 didn’t except for a larger screen that is more difficult to hold. This is the first time since 2007 that I wasn’t interested in buying the next iPhone and I still wouldn’t be. But my iPhone 5 finally died, a trooper to the end but a trooper that had been through wars. I try to take care of things but I don’t half use them too.

I can’t run my business without a phone and it can’t now be run without a smartphone. I’m hardly going to switch to Android: it’s cheaper but you really do have to be interested in technology to enjoy those. So where buying a new iPhone has been genuinely fun and even, I’ll say it, exciting, this time it wasn’t. This time I left one speaking engagement, went into the Apple Store, spent the minimum time and the minimum money, came out with an iPhone 6 and went on to my next meeting.

Technology as a writer’s essential tool but no more than that. And that’s probably right. Technology is a bit boring. I am glad to tell you that eight days on I’m coming to really like this phone but I have this second, this very instant, realised that I’ve left it in my kitchen. Hang on.

Right, I fetched it and a mug of tea. Do I go on as much about tea as technology? Nearly.

But there is something else. I’m working with a company on a thing and just seeing how they work and some complex problems they’ve got, I know a software tool that would help them. For their size company, it’s free too. Yet I don’t know how to convince them to try it: it’s more software on top of the tools they already have and don’t especially like.

Nobody there, I don’t think, would rush to try it just for the fun. Most would loathe the idea of taking on something new when they are stretched to a limit already. Some would be actively against using yet another piece of software.

There is an attitude across companies, across people who like this stuff, that here is a tool, it does this, you need that, it will work, off you go, what’s the problem? Perhaps usefully, perhaps empathetically or perhaps just pointlessly, I think software is amazingly personal and that no size fits all. What works for me won’t for you and vice versa.

I said you need to enjoy technology to like Android phones. I think that’s true and it’s the same with PCs. If you enjoy fiddling and setting up something or other and solving problems then it’s all hog’s heaven and a for a short while that was me. I clearly remember the feeling of true accomplishment when I got a new hard drive to work in my PC. Every night for a week, that PC open on my desk and my working hard to understand it. I learned a lot about jumper switches, to this day I swear it’s where I learned to swear. But the satisfaction when it switched on. That was great.

Only, not long afterwards I installed a new hard drive in my Mac and it just slotted in, worked right away and I got back to what I was writing.

You can tell that I preferred the Mac, you can guess that I preferred writing to fiddling and you can assume I never bought another PC again. But sitting there that day, so long ago now, I think what I realised was that writing is down to me. My effort, certainly, and my talent, hopefully, are what make the difference between the blank screen and something to read, something to perform.

Whereas fitting a hard drive and installing Windows drivers is down to following other people’s instructions and learning to swear because those instructions are wrong. At the very best, there is a creativity in puzzle solving because Microsoft or whomever can’t be bothered to write down what you actually have to do. But it’s not a creativity that satisfies me in the long run, it’s not a creativity that counts.

I’m going to tell that company about this software but I’m going to tell them what problems it will solve rather than how it works or what you do with it.

After all, nothing else matters. It’s a quick shorthand to tell you that OmniFocus is an application that I depend on, that my working life runs through my iPad, and I will discuss the difference between Microsoft Word 2016 and Drafts 4 at length. But it is our work that matters and whether these digital tools help us do it. The right ones just help me so very, very much that it’s hard not to be enthused by them and it’s impossible not to be glad I tried them.

RIP iPhone 5: 2012-2015

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The last thing I expected Self Distract to become is a diary. But I just looked up a piece from September 2012 and you could argue that it’s not a Dear Diary entry, but it is. J’queues Apple was about buying an iPhone 5 and it was a proper enough, standalone enough, non-diary-enough entry that a magazine bought it. I remember their buying it paid a bit toward the cost of the iPhone 5.

But there’s the thing: I read the piece and I remember that. I can remember the face of someone I describe in it, I can feel the coldness of the day. I didn’t actually buy the phone that same day, I came back the next I think, chiefly because of the queue. I can see that queue: 1,600 people in a line. Do take a read some time: I think I make some good points about how yes, it is silly to queue for a phone but it’s the good kind of silly and no, it’s not the result of marketing hype. The summary is that maybe, maybe you can get 1,600 people though a marketing effort but you can’t get them twice. They won’t come back if the thing isn’t worth their queuing. This was the fifth time people queued for an iPhone, we’re not that stupid.

Only, the reason I looked this entry up is because yesterday, that iPhone 5 of mine died. If you have even passed me in the street during these last three years, you’ve seen me using that phone. Given the figures from once when I wrote about how often people use their phone and researched my own usage one day, it looks like I probably used my iPhone 5 in some way 233,220 times from its purchase to its death.

That’s 9.6 times per hour. It’s once every 6.25 minutes.

And I’m sure that’s wrong. I’m sure that is far, far too low a figure. My business ran through that iPhone, my life ran through it.

And I think what makes me sad about the iPhone dying is that it represented a particularly key slice of my business and life. Also a little growing up for me: I can see in that old entry that I was no longer automatically updating each time an iPhone came out, I was judging it, assessing the money, I was thinking about it. I was buying, but I was thinking about it more first.

Which all grew to the point where I did not buy an iPhone 6 when they came out even though my two-year phone contract was up. I couldn’t afford it, the price next to what difference it made just wasn’t worth it. Plus for the first time there were serious options in the iPhone: there were two models, each much bigger in your hand than my iPhone 5 and lots of reasons to go either way. I looked into it and I realised I simply wasn’t enjoying looking into it.

So for the first time since I think 1997, certainly the first time since 2007 when the original iPhone came out, I finished my two-year contract and did not go on to another one. It was the most financially astute thing I’ve ever done because I was paying about £42/month for the phone plus (sort of) unlimited 4G. Once the two years were up and because I specifically went in to say oi, why do you think I’m going to carry on paying you for the phone that I’ve now completely paid off, I got a new (sort of) unlimited 4G plan for £18/month.

I felt like a hard-hearted, cold negotiating businessman and it felt rather good. That plan is the least I have ever paid for a phone and there it was, all the data I could use, more talking minutes in the monthly plan than there are actually minutes in the month. Plus it was using my now beloved iPhone 5.

For beloved, do read beloved but also read used. Heavily used. Say excessively: I don’t mind and I wouldn’t disagree.

But heavily used does come with a price. The very day I bought it and the Apple sales man or woman put it in my hand, I dropped it. I dropped it because was so unexpectedly light that you had to adjust to holding it.

I don’t know how many times I’ve dropped it since: I didn’t and I don’t think it was very many, but it did happen. It just didn’t happen recently and yet for the past two months, I’ve been seeing big problems. The front glass presses in where it shouldn’t. The whole phone has taken to randomly restarting – and when it did that, I felt lucky because in a few minutes it would be back. Other times it would just lock up entirely. That was a giant problem when I was driving somewhere I didn’t know. Better that the phone crashed than the car did, but still.

Yesterday morning my iPhone 5 randomly restarted – and never stopped. It stayed on the restarting screen for an hour. It would be more but I had a gig to go to so I drove off to that and got lost without Siri. Checked the yes-still-dead-dammit phone a couple of times during the day, set up a thing for a friend on his iPhone 6 – and held it rather lustily, a working iPhone, imagine that – and worked out how many calls, emails, texts, Facebook messages and tweets I was missing. “I just tweeted you,” said another friend at this event. “MY IPHONE ISN’T WORKING” I replied, calmly.

I drove to the Apple Store after the gig and I bought an iPhone 6.

Reluctantly. There are still reasons to choose one model over the other but for the first time buying the phone wasn’t pleasure, it was entirely business. A business necessity rather than something fun. Striding in to the Apple Store and saying hello to the first person working there. (Her name is Davinia, she was smart and clever and funny and I enjoyed the 40 minutes or so I spent talking with her.)

But for the first time there was no savouring the purchase, there was no pondering which model and which size to get. I need that one in this size and I don’t like white, I’m not keen on gold, I’ll take the Space Grey one, please.

If you think it odd to write one Self Distract about excitedly buying an iPhone 5 and another about reluctantly buying the iPhone 6, I’d pretty much have to agree. Given that this is a eulogy to the 5, you have more of a point. Given that I’m also sounding right miserable about doing it, your point knows no bounds.

But the eulogy is fair, I think. I’m not the man I was in 2012 but I am a man who has been having the creative time of his life since then. That’s not because I bought an iPhone 5, this isn’t a commercial, but work and career and life have become radically more fulfilling over the time I had that phone. Not always paying enough, I am freelance, but creative and fulfilling in spades. Since September 2012 I’ve done 186 public speaking events of various kinds and my iPhone has been at the lot of them.

That 2012 Self Distract entry got bought by Macworld magazine – or iPhone World, I’m blank now, sorry – and in 2015 I am writing for MacNN.com. I just delivered my 293rd piece for them since December last year and it was the first that I’d done using an iPhone 6.

I’ve changed and so have iPhones. This 6 is even lighter than the 5 – I did exactly and precisely the same thing when Davinia handed the box to me and I got the phone out, I dropped it because it was so much lighter than my hands expected. It’s also faster than I expected. The screen is rather gorgeous. I had a fun time last night remembering what apps I had on the front screen and getting them back there again plus adding another row.

And when we’re done talking, I’ll be using this iPhone to direct me to my first meeting of the day. I’ll make notes on the way, I may make notes during the meeting. There’s a strong chance I’ll listen to Apple Music en route – that’s another change since the 5, I haven’t put any music on the phone at all this time yet I’ve got 30,000,000 tracks on it.

And there is unfortunately the very greatest of chances that I will set up the damn health and exercise stuff on this bloody machine. It will count how many steps I take, it will count the number of times I go up and down the stairs. It will not notice how much tea I drink or chocolate I eat, though, so there’s that.

I didn’t want to buy the phone now, I at least wanted to wait until I could enjoy choosing one and I particularly didn’t want to buy when we’re at most two months away from the next model, the iPhone 6s. That will be better in some way or other but I will never know because I won’t look. So there.

Yet it is a startlingly fast and fun phone to use. I feel bad about being reluctant to buy it. I feel rather good that this is what will be with me about 10 times an hour from now on. And I’ll tell you that the pleasure of being back with a working phone is tremendous. So tremendous that it isn’t even dented by the sheer bleedin’ volume of emails I’ve got to answer.

Keep me from them, just for a little longer. Can I buy you a coffee?

Gone from a Burton

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I’ve just finished two years running a monthly writing workshop for children aged 8 to 12(ish) in Burton-on-Trent. From September, I’m replaced by writer Lindsey Bailey and as we were talking about the group the other day, I found myself suggesting what she could do with them next – and I’m glad to say I stopped myself.

“No,” I said. “It’s your ship now.”

There are things I would love to see that group do, ideas we’ve done that I would build on if I were coming back, most definitely issues we’ve not touched that I want us to. And, oh, do I want to know what these kids write next. But it is her group now: she’s running it, she’ll be planning it, she will have myriad things she wants to do with it.

By the way, I adore telling you this: for my final session the Burton gang scripted and filmed a Doctor Who regeneration scene for me turning in to Lindsey.

They did that after writing and recording a radio play. They don’t hang about in Burton. Did I mention they did this after finishing writing a book? Are you picking up on the teeny clues that I adored working with this group?

I could go on about this. I’m surprised I haven’t before, though doubtlessly things I’ve said to you here have been influenced by these sessions or how Burton has seeped into me. The sessions are only 90 minutes a month yet the time you spend thinking and planning is huge. How do teachers plan for day after day? I like storming in, causing a ruckus and getting out again.

I do want you to know that I wouldn’t have chosen to leave Burton this year. I wouldn’t have ever left. I do very much want you to know that as upset at losing the group as I was, I actually felt an awful lot better when I heard who my replacement is. And for the sake of my ego I’m quite keen for you to know that I’m leaving because I’m replacing someone somewhere else.

These sessions, properly known as Write On! Young Writers’ Groups, were created by and are run by Writing West Midlands which is a charity that commissions us writers and decides who goes where. (Do support them if you can. If you’ve got kids, exploit this organisation as much as you can: they’d like that.) I think the current total is 21 groups across the region and in each case there’s a maximum of 15 kids, all of whom have chosen to come work with professional writers one Saturday a month. I’ve now run or assisted or nosily sat in on seven of these groups. So I can tell you that the format is broadly the same, the logistics are identical, but the groups are astonishingly different.

A lot of that difference is down to the kids who’ve joined and a lot more is down to where the sessions are held: my Burton ones were in a library and that’s quite common but others are in art galleries and even an Abbey. But I believe the greatest difference is in the lead writer. We’re all there to do the same thing, we’re all there to do the best we can for these kids. You should see the online chatter between us after a Saturday session: it’s exhilarating, you race back to that Facebook group to beam about the things your group got up to.

I see this in the other groups and in the other lead writers so I must accept it about mine and about me: Burton reflected who I am. I may have discovered who I am while doing it, but that group functioned the way it did because of what I ran there.

It is time they had a different lead writer.

It’s better for the group to get a change and I think it’s equal parts thrilling and daunting for any writer who comes in to take over such a bunch. But these new lead writers are there to take over, that’s what they have to do. I know this and I believe it but I felt it anew when I was in that conversation with Lindsey and stopped myself suggesting things.

That phrase, though, “your ship now”. I must’ve got that from somewhere. I can’t remember where but I can remember how often I’ve thought it and I can well remember why.

I may not say it all that often but I think it a lot because I’m a man. I’ve been in work situations where a team has had a new man come in and, right or wrong, good or bad, he’s forced a change in the dynamic. I say right or wrong, good or bad, but it’s always been wrong and bad. Equally, I had a thing once in radio where, as it happens, I was the only man working in a small group of women. I didn’t register that until another woman joined and she made a point of it. “Don’t you feel awkward, surrounded by women?” she asked in that kind of question that isn’t a question, it’s a bullet.

I remember that from an astonishingly long time ago. I remember seeing in that instant that she was creating lines within this team and actually that she was going to succeed in getting me out of it. I remember how clearly and immediately I could see there was nothing I could do. You think of a team as a collection of people, in the best cases a group of friends, but it is a body in and of itself: it’s a single entity and it changes, evolves, stops in ways that have little to do with how the individual members are together. Maybe today I could’ve been more astute, more aware of how to game a team but it’s not my thing and I’m no good at it.

Although I was okay when a similar thing to that radio experience happened in front of me many years later. That was with a group of men where the pivotal issue was that one guy wanted this other man’s job. It was a management post and to get it, he was inserting himself into decisions, was taking charge wherever it didn’t matter if he were in charge so nobody stopped him. I saw it and I saw what he wanted, I also didn’t care as I was just freelance there, but I do then also remember the exasperation I felt when I realised I’d have to do something about one of his decisions or I’d be collateral damage.

People, eh?

I don’t want to be people, not in that sense. I also don’t want to be a man in that stereotypical pushing way, not just by being a man, not just by being male. If I push for something, it’s me, it’s not my gender.

So I admit that when I said to Lindsey no, it’s your ship, I was conscious that I’m a man and she’s a woman. I would’ve thought the exact same thing with any replacement but I was conscious of our sexes. I had felt the same thing when I started as an assistant to lead writer Maeve Clarke and it’s not about joining or replacing or being replaced by a woman, it is about how there is a type of man I don’t want to be. There is a type of man who sees it as necessary to be alpha and are we really still that bothered? Alpha Male stuff surely shouldn’t still be here when we’ve stopped being hunter-gatherers and become shopper-clickers.

Yet I’ve seen men entering teams, I’ve seen men asserting authority that they don’t have and don’t need but believe they lack. I don’t need you to believe I have authority.

Then it sounds like a joke, it should be a joke, but I’ve seen men be incapable of listening to a woman and, God in heaven, I don’t want to be that. In fairness, I’d like to tell you that I recently had to ask my wife Angela to repeat something I’d said because a woman we were with simply would not listen to me. It’s not universally a male thing.

But it’s big. Maybe it’s galactically a male thing.

So when I went to learn from Maeve, it was important to me that she knew I understood it was her show, it was her ship. Now that Lindsey has replaced me at Burton, it’s important to me that she knows I understand I’m gone and that it’s her group. I hope she’s thrilled at how she can now do anything she wants with the group; I imagine she must be as daunted as I was that this means she has to do something, she has to do everything, with her group.

She’ll be great, the kids in Burton will have the very best of times and maybe some day I can come back to visit. That will be up to her although, Lindsey, hello, I’m always available.

And in the meantime, I’ll be off running a Young Writers’ group in Rugby.

That’s my ship now.

I’ve got one word for you

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Bollocks.

That’s the word. It’s not personal. But before I ask you to come along for a reasonably strident ramble about something, I want to examine that word.

Bollocks. You read that and you know I’m not an academic, I’m not writing a paper, I’m just talking to you. You don’t need to know me well to recognise that I say it quite a bit too, it’s part of my ideolect. (Countries have languages, towns have dialects, people have ideolects.) I think you read the word ‘bollocks’ and you have an idea of my age as well. Maybe you can’t pin it down to the month and day but you don’t think I’m 15 and you don’t think I’m 70. It’s a broad range, I agree, but it’s there.

You might get that I’m a man. It’s hard to judge this from in here where I said the word, but it feels more like a man saying it than a woman. It feels more British than it does, I don’t know, Indonesian.

There’s a tone in the word, too. It’s not exactly serious but it isn’t playing about either. Bollocks is a firm word, said with intent, it’s not a filler word like ‘well’. Nor is it strong like ‘fuck’. You can argue with a man who says bollocks, there’s often no talking to someone who’s saying fuck.

I did have a worry that you could think I was saying bollocks to you, somehow about you, but that came more from the headline up there where I said “I’ve got one word for you”. It’s possible to interpret that as meaning I have one word to describe you. On its own, though, if you’d just come in on that word bollocks then I believe that you would unthinkingly, unconsciously but immediately have thought this is a non-academic, firm but not overly serious, debatable point being made by a British man who isn’t a teenager and isn’t a pensioner.

I believe that but I know this: you would not have got any of that if what I’d actually written was “Insert Word Later”.

I have regular arguments about dialogue, especially dialogue in drama, and the short summary is that I’m right about it being vital and anyone who thinks it isn’t, is wrong. Told you I was strident. I’m struggling to think of anything else that I am so irrevocably black and white certain sure about. Tea and dark chocolate come close, but this is more important to me.

What previously I’ve said to you before and what I have argued in countless pubs is that if I don’t believe the dialogue you give a character, I don’t believe the character. It’s common for dialogue-haters to be plot-fans but what they miss is that if I don’t care about the characters, if I’m not interested in them, the plot is just the thing I have to get through before I can go home. Characters facing grave peril, I’m in. Characters whom I don’t believe in facing the same peril, well, let them die. What do I care?

The reason this is all on my mind now, though, is partly because it is always on my mind. I am a dialogue man and it’s one of only two things I will accept I’m good at. (The other is typing. Can’t touch me for typing.) I am immeasurably pleased and relieved to say this to you because my dialogue writing is responsible both for everything I get to write and for how successful any of it has been.

Dialogue is obvious in scripts but I’m really writing dialogue to you right now. Didn’t I just say bollocks? That’s dialogue.

Emails I write are really dialogue and so are articles. I can’t do it when the house style of a magazine is more formal but the rest of the time I can because I’m always doing the same thing. I’m trying to convey something to you. Talking.

That’s what dialogue is in scripts: I’ve heard arguments that say dialogue is pretty speeches when actually no, it’s people talking.

The other reason this is all on my mind now is that I recently went to a couple of sessions of the PowWow Writers’ Group in Birmingham. I don’t think the word dialogue came up once. We certainly didn’t have this bugbear argument, I could write you an advert for how interested the group is and what they’re doing. Yet there was something.

I think it was in the way that one thing which did come up was the idea that when you’re writing, you should just get the stuff written. Get it down, then you can work on it. All true. Writing is rewriting, editing is critical.

Hours later, I joined a dot. The people I’ve most argued with about dialogue, the ones who are plot fans and believe dialogue is pretty speeches, also reckon you can do it tomorrow. Get down the story and the plot, then just before you’re finished, you can go back to do a dialogue pass. You can make the speeches prettier later, it’s a tasty extra that you can worry about just before you print the thing out and look for some pink ribbon.

Can you bollocks.

Everything you’ve just read sprang from the word bollocks at the top. I could’ve begun with Insert Word Later and then gone on to all this but it wouldn’t be the same. The bounce, the rhythm, what I wanted to say to you and when would all be different. I’ll bet money it wouldn’t have been so strident, for one thing.

So let’s say you’re writing a character who is strident. A character who is also a non-academic, firm British man who isn’t a teenager and isn’t a pensioner. At one extreme, you end up writing dialogue like “Hello, William, my old British friend who I think should have gone into academia but I’ve been saying that to you since you were a teenager back in 1989”. At another extreme, you end up writing a narrator. Shudder. Or the single worst descriptive prose novels have ever known.

Or you could just say bollocks.

Setting things right

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Listen, I don’t know where I’m going with this but I want to noodle about something you. It does slightly concern a TV show that remains a favourite of mine despite tailing off. It also concerns a film that will always be a favourite, no tailing off possible.

beforesunrisecommunity

So, here’s the thing. In the very closing moments of the film Before Sunrise, we get a series of daytime shots of various locations around Vienna. They’re the same ones that we have just spent the film seeing but during most of the film we saw them at night and always, always with Celine and Jesse in them.

Usually talking.

It’s a quiet yet startling ending that I think speaks to how much we create within spaces: the locations are the same but without the characters they are different. Because they’re now in daytime it’s like the lights being switched on, the reality of the stage revealed. It’s reminded me of parties where really no matter what you do setting one up, success or failure is really down to who comes and what they’re like when they do. The party is an excuse for people, locations are a canvas for characters.

I think about this more than honestly seems feasible but I was minded of it particularly this week by the last episode of Community. It’s been a weak season and I don’t know if it is the last-ever episode but it probably is and there was something of that Before Sunrise feel to it.

Specifically the episode did show us some of the regular sets now empty of people and it had that same canvassy feel for me.

It seemed to be saying both that we’re done here – and look at what we did.

Six years ago this was a study room in a library and these were the characters we didn’t yet know. Now the same room is the site of epic paintball battles, the table is a replacement replica because they destroyed the first one with an axe. It’s like those stories are still in the room, even though really they’re still in our heads if we’ve seen them. I want to think that you sense them whether you know the show or not.

I’ve often thought of it the other way around, of looking ahead to what potential a set has.

I love that television series have specific recurring sets for basically economic reasons yet they become dramatic ones. It’s cheaper to film on the same set each week and even if you have the budget to be on location all the time, you need somewhere indoors to shoot when the weather is bad. But you also get what used to be called the familiar locale, a place for viewers to want to go to. These days it’s called the show’s precinct, presumably after all the cop shows that were set in actual precincts, but the principle of it being somewhere familiar persists.

The famous example is in Star Trek where in theory we all aspired to be on the Enterprise. Certainly the Coronation Street tours exist on the fact that people want to visit Weatherfield. When I first heard of the Harry Potter studio tours I couldn’t get it: it’s just a set, why do you want to visit a set?

But then I was thrilled being shown around the sets of new Crossroads Hotel back when I got to write for that series. I liked seeing the replica TARDIS sets in the Doctor Who Experience.

Place matters. I think it matters most in television.

Films can go anywhere and despite all the sequels we get now, it’s still generally following recurring characters more than recurring locations. Radio can go anywhere though Ambridge feels real to listeners now. Theatre will often establish a specific place but it doesn’t feel like something we return to, it’s a frame for this specific play this specific evening.

In television I think places become characters. The Enterprise was often called that by the writers. I just rewatched Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip and while it’s irritatingly flawed, one thing that is exceptional is the massive set. It’s a completely constructed theatre studio that creates a complete world yet allows for every possible combination of big and intimate scenes, large groups and pairs of people. Also huge movement: the set constrained characters and it let them loose too.

The set has the last word in Studio 60 too. The final shot is of someone switching off a lone lightbulb. It’s never been there before, it exists only to be switched off, it is visual reference to the end of a play, it is in all ways contrived. But it works: I forget the character problems, the creepy romance, the unfunny comedy sketches and instead I’m left wishing we could stay in that set, in that world for longer.

Dammit. The hardest thing in drama is creating a character. Then you have to create another one for them to talk with. Now we have to create somewhere for them to go too?

Fail wail

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Now this is a distinction. I am proud of this, though even typing those words to you I just paused to scratch my head. I am proud, it’s just possible that I shouldn’t be.

For it turns out that I am so good at failing, at completely screwing everything up and at being rejected and fired that I’ve just been interviewed about it.

The American podcast series The Successful Failure podcast has a new 45-minute episode devoted to just how badly I do things. Me. The whole show.

Okay, also to how I cope, when I do, and what coping mechanisms I have, when I have any.

The Successful Failure is really about taking bad things in one’s career and learning from them. Before I went on it, I listened to the previous episodes and the recurring theme is about specific failures that have then directly led to specific successes. Maybe I’m lacking in specific successes but where do you want to start with the failures?

I’ve known the producer/presenter Gigi Peterkin for years so she knew to steer me away from topics like my dress sense and hair style which will come back in to fashion, they will. Instead she focused on a few key writing failures and I will tell you she got more out of me than I’d intended to reveal.

I won’t tell you what. And you know how usually when someone writes to you like this, you know they’re going to end with a link and they’re trying to get you to listen?

Not this time.

I will include the link because I get twitchy if I don’t link you out to somewhere more interesting and The Successful Failure podcast is more interesting.

But I am truly fine if you never listen to the episode about me. Seriously, I’m good with that. Forget I ever mentioned it.

The Successful Failure podcast is on iTunes and also at its official site. One thing I can tell you from having done the show is that I’ve been told who else is lined up for an appearance. The show’s got some truly interesting people in the next few weeks.

Constraints are good for you

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There was a fashion once for novels to have subtitles – not as in “Pride & Prejudice II: The Revenge” but “Frankenstein, or, The Modern Prometheus”. Please consider the following to be called:

Constraints are good for you, or, What’s Wrong with Community?

There is unfortunately a lot wrong with the new season 6 of Community but constraints and the lack of them is a big enough issue that you can identify it.

Community used to be on NBC television in the States and all network television shows have mandated running times. They’re getting shorter, but they’re mandated. To the second. Here in the UK, Russell T Davies once argued that he really needed a longer running time for a particular episode of Doctor Who and Julie Gardner persuaded BBC schedulers to allow it. But as good as she was, she could only pull that off because the show aired on Saturday nights. If it had been during the week there was no possibility whatsoever because the six o’clock news hour will always finish at 7pm and you’ll never guess when the ten o’clock news is on. Saturdays don’t have those two bricks in the schedule so there was room yet it was still a big job and a big ask to get the extension.

Especially since Doctor Who is sold around the world and every other network has the same constraints. I don’t know this but I’d bet money that Doctor Who episode now exists in two forms: the original UK extended one and an edited version that was shown around the world.

Community has stepped free of these constraints because it’s no longer on television, it’s online. Yahoo Screen made its single biggest splash on the web by buying the show and producing a new season. I think they also cocked it up, mind. If you’re in the UK, go to the UK Yahoo Screen website and you’ll see that you can exclusively watch episodes on that site – but you can’t. You can’t watch any episodes there, not one, because they made a deal with Sony Entertainment TV to air the show on Sky TV a day after its official release each week. Good for them getting some money for the show. But we’re on episode 12, we are three months into this and still the website for their single biggest property is wrong.

I am curious about that airing on an obscure, high-numbered Sky TV channel: from what I can see the episodes aren’t edited to fit the slot, they just take whatever time they take. And I do see that they take more time than they used to.

On NBC, each episode was 22 minutes – and a marvel, just a marvel with what they did in that time – whereas the new sixth season episodes will sometimes run to 26 minutes. I want to say a couple are longer but I can’t prove it.

The show still has financial constraints, its budget is its budget and you don’t get more cash just because you fancy running a little long this week. The length is now entirely an editorial decision and I think they’ve got lazy because they could.

Back in the first season, there was some change that meant they suddenly had to fill a few seconds under the end titles so they filmed little vignettes – if you know the show, it was usually the Troy and Abed routines – and added them to the episodes. They were funny, they were warm, they were daft and you liked them.

In season six, they’re gone but you regularly get an equally unrelated moment. You get a scene with characters who may have been mentioned in the show but usually not seen. You get something that’s tangentially related to the story but if you could have a very tangent, they are very tangential. A couple are fine and forgettable. Some are rather touching. But the rest are just dire.

No, they’re not just dire, they are dire and also very long.

Once when I raved about Community I mentioned that it was an episode about paintball that hooked me. Then I said that I’d just learned there was a sequel paintball story in the next season and it took will power, serious fighting will power, to stop myself from just leaping forward to that story. In comparison, there was a paintball episode in season 6 last week and when I heard it was coming, I actually said aloud: “Oh, no.”

It turned out to be fine. Not brilliant, not on a par with the previous ones, but a definite high point in this season – except the last three minutes are this other unrelated scene and it just made me wince.

Much of this run is liable to wincing. As in the poor season 4, you can see the actors acting and so many of the quirky things that happen feel forced. Chang falls over a hedge in episode 12 because it’s funny to have Chang fall over a hedge, not because anything got him there. Characters now react in a sitcom way not because the show is mocking sitcoms but because it is one.

So there is a lot that is disappointing about season 6, the so very much awaited and hoped-for season 6, but if you tried to fix it, the first thing you’d do is sort out the running time.

When you can’t go over 22 minutes, you have to lose material and that is hard. But it turns out that it is better than keeping that material in. You have scenes and lines you love but still it is better if they go. Maybe all I’m doing is paraphrasing William Faulkner’s line that ‘in writing, you must kill all your darlings’ but if so, then ironically I’m doing so at enormous length.

Next crisis

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Years and years ago, my therapist told me I over-think things. Not a day goes by that I don’t wonder: what did she really mean?

I do know that if you see me lost in thought, it is usually about whatever the next thing is that I have to do. I’ve often got to a party or a meal or a play and consciously thought right, got here, that’s done, what do I need to do tomorrow?

Do you do this too? I also queue up my worries. If I have a big event coming then the single way I have of ever getting it off my mind is to have another big event coming up before it. So I’ll come out of that first one probably feeling great – yesterday was event number 176 of which 10 were meh and 2 were ulcer-bursting awful – and I’m immediately fretting about the next one a week away.

But.

Two things. First, when I’m actually working at an event or a workshop or whatever, I’m right there in the moment for every single moment and there isn’t a whisper of a thought of the next thing from start to finish. I think this may be why I like producing and presenting events so much.

Second, this did happen to me again yesterday. The day was fun, I glowed out of there and through a tea with a friend and colleague from the event, I glowed into joining up with Angela and then right in the middle of a curry, wallop.

Angela looked at me just like you’re doing.

But the reason for saying this to you today, the reason for the But up there a few paragraphs ago, is that this changed. This went away.

We saw Dar Williams in concert at the Glee Club. She’s the artist I’ve said I wouldn’t kill to write like – but I’d maim. I adore her work, her music has meant a lot to me for a very long time and I’ve often seen her in concert. Every time has been good, but this one was great.

Whatever I was thinking about when I went into that concert, she took us all wherever she wanted to go.

I’m going to think about that.