I’m not here

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When you get this, I’ll be in France on a trip that took detective skills and twenty years of work.

It’s my 20th wedding anniversary on 3 August and I will be with Angela Gallagher in Paris. We honeymooned there and that’s where the detective work came in.

I was sure the hotel had changed its name and anyway, I wasn’t certain what it was. I remembered a shop on the same street, though, so I got out Apple Maps and Google Streetview and I searched Paris for where we had honeymooned.

Hours of searching, phoning hotels in the city, struggling with my schoolboy French, I did it all and booked our room.

Then, late one night, Angela couldn’t sleep. She went into our living room, crossed to the shelves and took out a book to read. A piece of paper fell out. A letter she’d used as a bookmark.

Twenty years ago.

The letter was the original booking confirmation for the hotel.

And with my detective work, I had got us a room in the right part of Paris, the right hotel, the right floor and just two doors away from where we were in 1994.

Weird to think that the hotel had stayed there all this time. (It has changed its name but only slightly; it’s old name is now prefixed by a different company’s one.) Very strange to see the place from Apple Maps and Google Maps, neither of which were imagined or maybe imaginable back then.

And very weird to think that amongst so much change in the world and in my life, Angela is still with me.

Just Say Yes

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Look, this is just you and me, right? I can tell you something and it won’t go any further?

One day this week, I was working at a college. The weather was very, very hot, the food was terrific but I ate too much, too quickly, and I’d had everyone working such a lot that they were flaking out. I’d got them all flying off around the college doing these things and when I could manage to keep my eyes open, I could see that the students in front of me were struggling. There was just no question but that the ones everywhere else must be the same.

Right.

On your feet.

I got the three or four students in my room to stand up and follow me. I strode out of that room, across the little campus – it was the most gorgeous 1900s home converted to a college – and led them through the building. Picking up the other students as we go. Right, with us. Come on.

One of the students commented on how well I knew the college. This was my first time there and by chance everyone on this residential writing course had done at least one other project there. So they knew this place and knew exactly where I was now leading them all.

I didn’t.

Not one single clue.

Didn’t know where I was going and most definitely did not know what we were going to do when we got there.

But the sheer surprise of how Pied Piper I’d become, coupled to how anything was better than staying in front of screens in hot rooms, meant that the entire group followed me.

Tricky.

I saw a door out to the college’s garden. That’ll do me. This way.

Across the garden. Saw a huge tree. That’s where we’re going, I said, having decided that during the very sentence when I said it.

Here’s what we’re going to do.

Nine people facing me in a beautiful garden. And I stole a writing exercise. Can I just quickly tell you this one? Because it’s good. And I only learnt of it about a week before. Learnt is a writer’s euphemism for “I’m having that”. And the moment writers Polly Wright and Mandy Ross showed it to me, I knew I would use it somewhere. Didn’t expect it to be a few days later.

You need a big group. Nine is just about enough. Stand in a circle and create a character together. The first person says whether this character is a man or a woman. The second says whether they’re tall or short, perhaps old or young. You go around the circle adding details and there are two rules. First: whatever you say, that character is. No going back, no changing, no replacing. He is an old man with a peg leg. Deal with it. And the second rule is that you can’t repeat anything.

The result of the rule is that people get more and more detailed and therefore so does the character. Eventually you name him and our one was Cornelius. He is a hunchback with a peg leg, a distinguished moustache, he could use a bit more deodorant, he loves animals though he has a phobia about cats, he is in love with a prostitute and keeps documents locked away in an old antique safe. There was a lot more.

And there was a bit more to do.

Having got all this about Cornelius, you go around the group again. This time each person announces who they are in Cornelius’s life. So I can say that I’m his brother, for instance, though we haven’t seen each other since that time in Nam. Or something. Our group this day included Cornelius’s estranged wife, long-lost son, hang gliding instructor, postman, drinking pal and Jezebel, the first prostitute he slept with.

That’s usually where this ends. You’ve created one main and detailed character, you’ve created a life really, and you’ve populated it with many more characters. When you do this in a circle, you can’t help but leap to connections and stories and when this was first shown to me, the group I was with bounded off to write tales about these people.

I didn’t want that this time. I just wanted my group to step away from their current work, think in detail of something completely different, and to do it on their feet in the garden. That’s post-rationalisation, that’s what happened and what I then told everyone was the plan all along. Really all I’d wanted was to shake us all awake.

It did that and I’ll admit to you that I rather enjoyed leading this group across their campus like that. And I’ll admit that most readily because they then led me.

They didn’t want to go back to their work. They wanted to continue this circle. So we did. I should ask Polly and Mandy if this happens to them, but for us they really wanted one more go around. Easy, I said. Definitely, I said. Good idea, I died inside, having not one clue what to do. “It’s that antique safe,” I said. Immediately. As if pre-planned. I don’t know how I was doing this that day but I’d like to do it again, please. “What does Cornelius keep in that safe?”

I can tell you that it turned out to be a big safe. It’s actually a beautiful oak box with a diary listing his previous lovers. Out of date condoms. (Please, this is a family show.) Bed sheets. What appears to be kitty litter but is really… something else. Mysterious. And there’s a will, covered in melted jelly tots and Spangles.

We did not use one pixel of that in our work for the course but clearly we could have. And clearly the exercise was a true boost. We all of us, myself included, went back to work then really alive and alert and ready.

And that’s not what I meant to tell you.

Sorry, got excited.

Here’s what I want to tell you and here’s why our natter this week is headed Just Say Yes.

I want you to say yes. I recommend yesness. All the time.

One day last week, it was very hot and I was driving around somewhere, lots of meetings, oodles to do. At some point racing back to a carpark, I scan-read my emails and saw one from Polly about a college. She’d sent it hours before, I didn’t read it properly until some hours later, but it was about how a certain college suddenly needed a replacement tutor. I can’t remember now but I think Polly had emailed a dozen of us. Something like that. She’d been asked to do the course and couldn’t, so she told us and explained how it was so urgent that if we could help, we should phone right away.

I must’ve read that properly five hours after she sent it and what she said of the course and the college was so interesting that there was no question but that every other person on the email would certainly have phoned by now. Plus, hand on heart, I wasn’t sure I could do what they needed.

I’m sitting now in the same seat I was when I rang them and I can picture how it had felt. No point ringing, far too late, can’t do it anyway, let’s have a quick mug of tea and get on out to the next meeting.

You already know I rang and that I got the gig, it’s a wee bit late for me to try building suspense here. But you also know how well it worked out. For me, at least. I don’t want to claim great success for the students and the college though it all felt marvellous to me. You can feel the enthusiasm in me. I think I sound as if I’m on my feet, pacing around, striding, gesticulating, sparking.

I had a lot to do this week and I am now about five days behind because of this. (It was a three-day course, the longest I’ve ever taught by about two days, plus I had a lot to do planning it and meeting with the college staff.) But just as the garden exercise invigorated us on a hot and heavy day, so doing this, being somewhere new and having to get people the best experience I’m capable of, it has invigorated me.

I’ve done a lot of things that didn’t work out, I’ve done even more that were a shrug. But sometimes I get to do things that I love. And they all come from closing your eyes, crossing your fingers and just saying yes.

Okay, in this case, it was phoning someone up first and pitching. But I could’ve far more easily have just said no to myself and not had this bounding, bouncing, glorious week.

So when someone asks if you can do something, you say yes. Okay?

So you haven’t done it, so what?

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This has come up a couple of times recently. I have a natter with someone – because they asked, come on, I don’t accost people in the street with productivity advice – and it seems to go well.

I think they get a good idea of what’s really on their plate and which of it matters to them. There’s usually a new project that they want to do and after a hour or so with me, they tend to have a plan. And most importantly, I think, that new project has turned from a nebulous, unwieldy thing that’s overwhelming them into something they can do. And will do. Talking it through invariably leaves you physically no further forward yet in every other way extremely far down the line. The intangible is at least well on its way to tanging.

But.

What’s happened these couple of times is that armed with their own new plan and, I believe, fully enthused at what they’re going to do, they haven’t done it.

They tell me this with something approaching guilt and I feel terrible. I like people thinking of me as someone to account to if that is what helps them, I loathe it when they think I’m judging them, damning them.

So here’s the thing.

Bollocks to me and what you think I think of you. What I actually think has not changed at all: I think you had this great idea and it wasn’t working out but now you have a plan, now you know you can do it. Whether you do or not almost doesn’t matter.

I want you to do this thing: it is exciting and it’s you, only you can do this and I want to see how it turns out. But what I needed, if we’re to get all personal about this, was to help you go from this stage of it being a mountain ahead of you to your seeing the path you need to take.

I promise you that I will never think badly of you for not having started on your path yet. I’m struggling to think of a situation where I would think badly of you. Come on, it’s you. How could I think badly of you?

And here’s another thing.

That plan you came up with, that simple set of steps to get this project of yours started, it’s still there. You may have changed: your interest in it may vary, your ability to fit it in with everything else you’re doing may very well have varied, but the plan is true and you can start it any time.

Are you reassured there? Because I’d like you to be. I’d like you to feel better about not doing the things you wanted to do, I’d like you to bounce off and do them. And I would not like you to read on.

Because it would be great if you still thought I knew what I was doing – and that I was doing it. And unfortunately this prevarication has been happening to me, too. In one small and one big way.

The small is that this week I’ve fallen off the OmniFocus wagon: it’s been a week of racing around – almost literally, I’ve driven a couple of hundred miles since Monday – and more than the average number of meetings. Hang ing, lemme count this out. Say it’s been a week of short days, working just nine hours a day. Monday to this morning, that’s 36 hours. I spent 21 hours in meetings and getting on for 7 hours driving. Plus I’ve somehow watched 15 episodes of Community, but that was overnight, honest.

I feel better. I feel anoraksic for working this out and for being able to work it out, but the fact that I’ve officially had just 8 hours regular working time makes me feel a smidgeon better for not being on top of all my tasks in OmniFocus just at the moment. Hang on 2. Ulp. There are 26 tasks in my OmniFocus inbox, 43 overdue ones in my Forecast calendar. Hang on 3. Just at a quick glance, I can tell you that of those 69 tasks I’ve definitely done 38.

Blimey, you’re good for me today. I almost feel okay about the small way. Plus, I’ve only glanced now to count for you but I’ll fly through an OmniFocus review in a bit and be back on top of absolutely everything. It is a great place to be: you feel so much better when you do this.

But back to the big way. How good are you at helping me with this big one? There is a project I was first approached about around May 2013, I think. That was just a whisper of a possibility and I was in the middle of two books, so. But by at the latest August 2013, it was on. I was committed to it, I had plans, we had meetings, I’d created a shared Evernote notebook for us all and was chucking lots of research detail in there. And it’s not as if I then stopped, but I then stopped.

I will be telling you about the project when it happens – and it’s going to now, otherwise I might not be telling you even this much – but the kicker is that I dragged my feet for months and I don’t know why. It did seriously irritate the other people involved: their patience was tried and convicted.

I could point to problems we have to solve and there are things about the project that were terribly nebulous that I needed to focus on. To think about. Sometimes in the rush to be productive, I lose thinking time. It’s quite a hard thing: today I will Think About The Project.

All of this is post-rationalisation, it’s just bollocks: I dragged my feet and I failed to do the work because I was crap. Can’t find reasons, shouldn’t look for excuses. But yesterday a friend, the main other guy on the project, invited me round to his place for a mug of tea and a natter. There are other things we’re doing and have to discuss, it wasn’t anything like I was driving to my doom at the headmaster’s office. Plus I just like the guy and enjoy tea with him.

But.

With that ahead of me, I got back on the wagon for this big thing.

I looked at what the next step I could take was. The next action that I could do before going to see him. It was a hard one for me: it was a phone call. Not just a call, a cold call. Not just a cold call, but a call to an organisation I didn’t know and could not determine who I needed to speak to. I find cold calls tough but the way I cope with them is being really clear in my head who I need to speak to, what it’s about and what my aim for the call is. This time it was all about the nebulous stuff and it was to this unknown possible person in this unknown possible department. It was going to take a good few goes to just find the right person.

Except he was the one who answered. The fella I needed picked up the phone, listened, and explained how he was the one I needed. He then un-nebuloused the idea, gave me answers that totally defined the project: we can do what we like but if we do this, we get support and if do that, we don’t. Hang on. My iPhone says I was on that call for 4’56”. By the end, I knew what I was doing.

One call got me back on the wagon. I still feel I’ve been letting down the others in this project, most specifically because I have, and I’m afraid of it happening again. Very much afraid, in fact. So as soon as we’re done here today, I’m getting on with it. Well, after I’ve driven out to a meeting about another thing.

Thanks. You’ve helped. And without my intending this to be about my taking my own advice, what I wrote up there for you about it being okay to have not started, it being fine because you can still start again whenever you like, it was very nearly okay that I hadn’t started and it is fine that I am starting again now.

Do you need tea now?

Appy anniversary

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This week is the sixth anniversary of the original App Store: the iPhone app store that is now responsible for how I spend a significant portion of every working day. Before then, apps were known as applications and not really that well known at all, not per se. Your mother didn’t ask you what an application was. Mine has asked me what an app is.

Mind you, before then, phones were known for being phones. And for being hard to use. I remember trying to read the manual in a theatre: I had a small production on and guests were coming, I needed to have the phone on but muted. Never worked it out.

Now it’s preposterously easy to do with an iPhone but actually calls must be the least thing I use it for. Because I run my life through the apps on it. The iPhone came with apps – the Phone is an app, but there was also an email one, music, calendar – and there are ones from that set that I have used every day since 2007 when I got my first iPhone. Right this minute my phone’s front screen has 20 very, very well-worn apps of which 10 are Apple’s.

That’s more than I expected. Look at the other 10, though:

OmniFocus – my beloved To Do manager
Fantastical 2 – my newly beloved calendar
Pocket – for reading saved articles from the web
Drafts – for jotting down text and then deciding what to do with it, whether to send a text or save to Evernote
Evernote – speak of the devil
Reeder 2 – for reading a lot, I mean a lot, of news every day
Wordpress – for doing some twiddles with this site
HulloMail – a replacement for iPhone voicemail since I’m on 3 that doesn’t support this naturally
LocalScope – for finding restaurants, companies, ATMs, bookshops, anything nearby
1Password – all my passwords and logins at a tap
AwesomeClock – my bedside clock
Concise Oxford English Dictionary (with audio) – what the words mean and how to pronounce them

There probably hasn’t been an hour of daylight in six years that I haven’t used one or more of those.

But.

Six years.

It’s a long time.

I wanted to know what the first was.

The first app I ever bought.

If you want to do this, the quickest way is to open iTunes on your Mac or PC, go to the App Store and check Purchased. You can’t tell a date from that, unfortunately, but the apps are stored in order. If you have more patience and a steady hand, you can get approximately the right date by going through your Accounts section and slogging, slogging, slogging back through the listings there. Very slow, very long. And the date is the invoice date, not the download one. So it can be the same day, it can be the day after. But as near as you will ever be able to determine, that’s when you got each app. Including your first.

My first ever app was… actually, it was two, I bought two at the same time and can’t tell which was first. But the two were NYTimes – Breaking National & World News and Yulan Mahjong Solitaire. I bough them on 11 July 2008, so that’s six years ago today, and together they cost me £2.99. I’ve just checked and the New York Times one is free, Yulan Mahjong is now £1.19.

They’re both fine but neither lasted on my home screen and I know this for certain because of this. This is what my iPhone home screen has looked like for the last six years.

The music there is “Last Week” from Green Wing’s soundtrack by Trellis.

There is one advantage to slogging, slogging, slogging through your iTunes Store account: you get to find out when you bought everything.

So I can tell you that the first book I ever bought through Apple’s iBooks Store was a free copy of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park. The first one I paid for appears to be some psychology thing called 59 Seconds by Richard Wiseman. I bought those both on 28 May 2010 and have only read the Austen. The first paid-for iBook I bought and read – and loved, incidentally – is Mapping the Edge by Sarah Dunant, bought on 29 May 2010.

The first TV episode was the free pilot to Damages: never watched it. The first paid one was The Mighty Boosh’s The Nightmare of Milky Joe, which I’d stumbled across on TV and it silenced the room, we all got so engrossed. I bought that on 2 March 2008 and I must go watch it again.

Films came to the iTunes Store before TV but my first wasn’t until 7 June 2008 and The Paper Chase. It cost me £6.99 and I’ve not watched it. I’m feeling bad about all this now. But the second film, the first paid for and also watched, was Searching for Bobby Fischer, aka Innocent Moves aka the subject of this blog by Ken Armstrong.

And all this buying from the iTunes stores started with music. On 15 June 2004, I spent £3.16 buying In Between Days by The Cure, Always the Last to Know and Be My Downfall by Del Amitri, and Jokerman by Bob Dylan. The first album, two days later, was Greatest Radio Hits by Bruce Hornsby.

None of which has had the impact that the apps I’ve bought this way did, but all part of this peculiar sea change that saw me move away from CDs, move to phones that work, move to actually the life and the career that I have right now. I like telling you that my working life would not be recognisable to me if all this hadn’t happened but I don’t like wondering what I’d have ended up doing.

Full circle

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You’re supposed to know when you’ve come full circle, you’re supposed to notice it happening.

And most of the time, I have. I can look very easily at how I was a Doctor Who fan as a child and now I write Doctor Who radio dramas. Actually, there’s a famous Doctor Who story from Tom Baker’s years called Full Circle and now I’ve worked alongside its writer, Andrew Smith.

Then there was Lou Grant, the television drama that is responsible for my becoming a writer. I watched it in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the very names on the credits becoming as familiar to me as I understand football players are to sports fans. I haven’t completed that circle by now writing understatedly brilliant television drama, but once in a while those names on the credits are now names in my email inbox.

I can vividly see myself buying the new issue of Radio Times one week in 1996 when it announced it was going online with what would become radiotimes.com. I can vividly feel how I felt I’d missed a boat there, that I should’ve been involved somehow, that I wanted to be involved somehow. Shortly afterwards, I started working for them and Radio Times magazine plus radiotimes.com became probably my biggest single and consistent freelance writing gig throughout the 2000s.

Same thing with BBC Ceefax. I wrote for the teletext service on the Paramount Comedy Channel and was very glad to get to do it but really it was BBC Ceefax I was aiming for. Actually, I remember pranking my mother with a news story that looked like it was on Ceefax but I’d written up on a BBC Micro. (This was in the days of BBC Micros, it was before the day that pranking became a word. I was a rebel.) Not very many years later, I was leaving messages for my wife Angela Gallagher hidden in pages of the real Ceefax.

But.

You knew there was a but.

Easily the biggest, most marked, most rattle-me-to-my-core full circle happened this week and I did not know until it was too late.

I ran a trio of writing workshops at Newman University. (My sister went there when it was Newman College. I thought that was the circle for the day.) It was at Newman and it was for the University but it was with school children. The university was recruiting, really. There was an open day, there was a tour and then three of us local writers each ran three of these workshop sessions.

There was an extra fun to this in that the school groups were divided into three and they each stayed in their room all morning, it was we writers who had to race around the campus. There was an extra eeek to this in that I’d run into a room that had just had a workshop run by storyteller Cat Weatherill or poet Alan Kurly McGeachie. Follow that, William.

I think I did. I know I had a good time, I hope the schoolkids did. At the end, when everyone was gathered in a lecture hall, I had a quick count and I reckon there were 100 kids. I think they were mainly from three or four schools and I hadn’t actually heard of any of those.

Until.

When it was all done and half the pupils had headed out on their guided tours of the campus, I was standing near some staff planning the next day.

And I saw the name of my school on the page.

My old school, the one I nearly named here but have spent so long decrying that a decent Google search and a bit of elbow grease could even build you up a picture of me libelling that place, allegedly.

Let me tell you quickly. I had fights at my school, not just fistfights with the other pupils but a political one with a member of staff whose oncoming nervous breakdown somehow made him want to have me kicked out. I had a careers lesson in which the teacher did not just laugh at my saying I wanted to write, he got the entire class to laugh with him. I should own up to having been a poor student, but this was a bad school and all I got from it were the kind of bruises that did help in journalism but let’s not give them any credit. And I also got a bucketful of embarrassing memories of just how much and just how many of my year I fancied, but fortunately that’s not the point here.

The point is that I’ve now visited a lot of schools as a writer and I have never come so close to my own one. They were going to be in Newman University the next day and I wasn’t. That was so close that I felt jolted.

So it was really more of a kick to hear “No, that’s today’s list”.

I turned to the students left and asked if any were from this school that again I just began typing the name of, you’ve got to stop me. But there were none. As I understand it, only a very few came from this place, it wasn’t one of the main schools who were there.

But.

Without question, without doubt and unfortunately without knowing it, this week I taught some kids from my own school.

I’ve come full circle. I’m rather excited by this, I am certainly more than a little freaked. Maybe if I’d known it would happen, if I’d known it was happening, that would’ve been easier. But knowing I have done it and not being able to know which kids had been from there, it’s on that borderline between tantalising and disturbing. I’ll admit, since it’s just you and me here, that it did also make me feel old. It did also make me feel a bit strange. I’m wondering if this makes me square or loopy.

But.

You’re supposed to know when you’ve come full circle, you’re supposed to notice it happening.

 

 

You need good people

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It is shockingly hard to get good people and so when you do, you hang on to them. I was in a phone call just now with a producer who admitted that this is a thing with him, that loyalty is precious. Now, I liked that conversation because I am loyal to this guy and he’s been loyal to me back. But it’s weird that it should’ve come up now because I thought I knew this yet I think I re-learnt it this week.

I’ve been doing a bit of work with the Royal Television Society, popping in to some of their school education days. They’re there to show kids that there are more careers in media than you would imagine, that there are skills you need for media work that help you in every type of job. I go in as a writer, I mock my own old school and praise the one we’re in – as invariably, just invariably, these schools are better than mine was – and I help out during the day’s main exercise.

Oh, you would wish your school had done this exercise. By the end of the day, the kids present a pitch. This time there were 65 kids and they were divided into 10 groups. There have been more, there have been fewer, but that’s the usual group size. All of the kids are typically aged around 14 so they’re just at the point where they’re really looking at their future career prospects.

The pitch is for an eight-minute feature to be made for City8, the forthcoming television station for Birmingham. Des Tong from City8 and Jayne Greene from the RTS brief the kids on the types of ideas needed and how to pitch. Each group of kids has to come up with an idea, then assign roles – writer, producer, designers and so on – then prepare and present a pitch to a little panel of judges. Des is always the head judge, on the days I’ve been there I’m chuffed to say I’ve been a mini-judge too.

But for me the kicker, the thing that makes this not just a fun and good idea but a vividly great one, is that it’s for real.

This is not some paper exercise, it isn’t some classroom contrivance, it’s real.

If your group has a good enough idea, if it’s viable and workable for television and if you present your pitch persuasively enough, City8 will do it. Now, they’re committing to doing one – I think it’s only if there is one that is good enough – and with the RTS they’ve been talking to a lot of schools. Each school’s best idea goes forward to a final next month and after that, City8 will produce and broadcast the feature.

Do this right and you’re on air.

I know adults who’d kill or at least maim for a shot at doing this, so to have it offered to schoolkids along with help to get it right, I’m deeply impressed with the RTS and City8. I’m deeply proud to sometimes be there and I take this seriously. I speak to the kids at the start, I go around every group listening to the ideas and asking questions.

But this time, on the last of these sessions and for the first time, I interfered.

There was this one group that at first were so clearly on the ball that I sat down and practically got right back up again immediately. They hadn’t got an idea yet but they were discussing it like a professional production meeting and I thought the young woman acting as the group’s producer had a real handle on all this.

There were ten groups today so it took me a time to get around all of them but on my way looping back, I stopped by that first table and things were very different. On the good side, they now had an idea but on the bad, it wasn’t going to happen. They were not going to win this because they were not going to be ready to pitch.

I need to be a little circumspect here because this was a school and I don’t want to identify anyone. But what had gone wrong was this particular group. There was a small set of kids who didn’t want to do anything at all, there was a small set who wanted to work but refused to pitch. It was nerves and shyness and you see this, you understand it, you try to help these kids along. Sometimes – fortunately rarely – you recognise that there is nothing you can do in the time, so you just have to leave them to get on with it or not. There are groups you can help, who will take the help. Naturally, then, you help them.

But this time was different because the young woman producing was doing so well. That’s an odd thing to say when she’d lost control of her team but the unfairness of that rankled with me. The school picked the groups and there was a specific plan to break up friends and thereby get everyone working with new people. That’s more than fine, that’s a good idea but in this case, it just seemed strongly clear to me that she was saddled with a tough group. I could see the frustration in her and it was just wrong.

So I took her to one side for a chat and we discussed what she was doing so well, we talked about the problem with the team.

As she gets older and if she wants to do this more, she will need to learn how to control a group better. But for now, I split her group up into two. Her one had all the kids who were willing to work and I created a second set for all those kids who didn’t. That splinter group didn’t get to pitch an idea, I have no clue what they did for the rest of the session and actually I didn’t even think about that until right now. Talking to you, I wonder what they did. But at the time, they were out of my head because they were out of the game.

That’s what happens outside school, that’s what happens when you are pitching for real. You can cut yourself off from consideration, you can waste opportunities.

It’d be great to tell you now that this young woman’s team won but they didn’t. It’d be great to tell you that she has a career waiting for her in the BBC if she wants it – and she does. Except she doesn’t want it. She’s set on a completely different career and I know she’ll get it.

The group that did win deserved to. I voted for them and it was right that they came out top. They had a good idea and I’ve seen before how that can carry you over many a bumpy hurdle, but they also just worked together very well. They rehearsed well, too: got the idea on its feet and used the time they had, used the space they were given to perform in.

You can’t be sure what teams will and won’t work well together but you can be sure what a difference it makes when they do.

Lots of people are involved in this Royal Television Society work but for the days I’ve contributed, it has felt as if I were part of a good team myself. You often don’t get that as a writer, you often don’t get that feeling because you can be finished with your work before anyone else starts, because you can hand over a script and be on to the next project. So I’ve enjoyed this a lot and it’s mattered to me. I hope I get to do it again next year.

This was not written by a woman

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I’m a man. It’s difficult to think of a reason this could matter or be of any interest to you. Okay, yes, I think what you and I have is something special but you’ve never given me the idea you’re, you know, shall we say, thinking of me. Like that. Though if you were, if you ever do want me to put some shelves up, I can do it. Otherwise, I’m stumped. No reason I can conceive of that you would pay my gender any mind.

And yet, I guarantee that you read that paragraph and you knew, you knew for certain that I am a man. It will be because I actually told you I was a man and then I hit on you so you’d be sure. But apparently you didn’t need either clue, you would’ve been able to tell simply through any of my non-gender detailed and non-pronoun-using writing that you’ve ever read or I’ve ever written.

Is it male that I itch to have a topical reason to bring this up today? I think it might be a bit male that I can find a reason and that it’s got something to do with sport. I don’t say that, “something to do with sport” in an offhand way, this is really about the level of my understanding of it. But there’s this Andy Murray guy, he plays tennis, he’s hired a coach and she’s a woman. This would not have penetrated my noggin but for how a man I know mentioned it and rolled his eyes.

Two seconds before, I barely held the word tennis in my consciousness, but now I really want whoever she is to coach this fella to win whatever it is. I’m that invested.

So that’s a topical reason to mention gender. There is also last September when author and literature lecturer David Gilmour said:

“I’m not interested in teaching books by women. Virginia Woolf is the only writer that interests me as a woman writer, so I do teach one of her short stories. But once again, when I was given this job I said I would only teach the people that I truly, truly love. Unfortunately, none of those happen to be Chinese, or women. What I teach is guys. Serious heterosexual guys. F Scott Fitzgerald, Chekhov, Tolstoy. Real guy-guys. Henry Miller. Philip Roth.”

Canadian author David Gilmour sparks furore over female writers – Liz Bury, The Guardian (27 September 2013)

There is a kneejerk reaction to this jerk who should be kneed and it’s that one just starts rattling off a list of all the women writers one admires. But on the one hand, that feels as patronising and oh-how-generous of me as this Gilmour’s allowing one Woolf story does. And on the other, come on: we’d be here forever if I started doing that.

So instead I just dwell for a moment on the age-old question: is this guy a git or what?

Only, none of this is really the reason I’m writing about it to you today. It is all a depressing reminder that there are forever stupid people in this world, but it’s not the reason. The reason is VS Naipaul.

I’m only three years late to this.

In 2011, this fella disparaged women writers and said:

“I read a piece of writing and within a paragraph or two I know whether it is by a woman or not. I think [it is] unequal to me.”

VS Naipaul finds no woman writer his literary match – not even Jane Austen – Amy Fallon, The Guardian (2 June 2011)

He is very specific.

He means it. No woman writes as well as him and it is because they are women. He talks about their sentimentality, how – I don’t really follow this bit, but – “And inevitably for a woman, she is not a complete master of a house, so that comes over in her writing too.”

I hadn’t ready any of VS Naipaul’s writing before this and there’s obviously no point now. I don’t see how I could now ever get through a paragraph without thinking “Seriously? This is supposed to be superior to every woman writer alive or dead ever? Excuse me?”

That Guardian article does the kneejerk list of superb women writers. It also quotes the Writers’ Guild as saying they wouldn’t waste their breath on Naipaul’s comments, which I like.

But I don’t think this fella thought it through.

Well, okay, of course he didn’t. But I mean, even within his own worldview, he didn’t see what this claim means.

Follow. He believes women writers are inferior because they are women. Therefore, men writers are superior because they are men. Our talent, our skill, the very heart of our lives that we strive for as writers comes down to nothing but whether anything dangles between our legs.

That means all writing is bollocks.

There’s no point striving to improve if you’re a woman, I can relax because I’m a man. Nothing to do with me or you, nothing to do with your or my talent, our efforts, our hopes.

Naturally I don’t want to conclude that writing is bollocks as I am a writer and I’m afraid there is truly nothing else I can be. So I’m going to stop a little short of thinking this, I’m going clear my head of this man and of this topic and merely reflect on how fascinating we men can be.

When we put our minds to it, we men are capable of what I really thought was impossible: we can simultaneously be pricks and arses.

 

Fortune and glory, kid

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I’ve only been thinking about this for two weeks. There was a book event at the Library of Birmingham and I was listening to the speakers, half wondering if I could steal how funny and charming they were, when a guy asks a question.

Actually, no, it was more that he stated a fact but added a question mark. He said to these authors: “But the point, the aim of it all is to write a bestseller, isn’t it?”

There are two answers to this and they are both no.

You can have the very short ‘no’ or you can have the longer, more considered, let’s have some tea, kind of no which you already know is what’s happening here. He stated this fact and every part of me thought no. It was that immediate, that certain, and it has not taken me two weeks to think about it. Because I haven’t finished thinking about it yet. I’m hoping that talking it over with you will sort out my head.

I think all that I’ve been churning over comes down to a split between people who write and people who don’t. There are two types of people in this world and they both intend to write novels. I suspect that when you don’t write and therefore don’t know what heavy spade work it is, you only ever hear about writers when they are interviewed. Writers are interviewed almost exclusively only at the point when they have a new book out. This would be because perhaps the only thing more boring than watching video of a writer typing is watching a video of the much longer periods where they aren’t.

But still, the result is that we see writers when they have something new out and inescapably, then, it looks pretty easy to have something new out. They were only on the telly the other day with the last thing, weren’t they?

Then because news wants facts and because there isn’t a gigantic amount you can ask a writer about their new work that won’t spoil their new work, we get the topic of money. This is especially true when the writer has earned some amazing amount.

So.

It’s easy and they make a lot of money.

Maybe it’s natural, then, to think that the point of writing is to make money.

Now, certainly, I write for a living and I like to eat occasionally, I prefer sleeping indoors. And actually I have very often been described as a commercial writer because I like thrillers and Doctor Who and magazines. But I used the word ‘like’ there. I could’ve said “because I write thrillers and Doctor Who” but I said ‘like’. I am a commercial writer but it is because that is where my tastes lie, it is not because I have a spreadsheet saying these are more lucrative jobs than publishing five lines of poetry every ten years.

I do make a living and writers can still make a lot of money, even today, but the answer is still no.

If you go into writing to make your fortune, it is conceivable that it will work, but it is bloody unlikely. So unlikely that doing this for that reason is simply stupid.

Plus, it’s a funny thing, writing: your secret intent has a way of becoming very apparent to the audience. If you’re doing it for glory, we can tell. I interviewed Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight the other week and he was talking about how he as all these film and TV projects that mean a lot to him but there are also these many others where he’s been the writer for hire. But, he said, whatever it is, you have to do it as if it is the most important thing to you.

That’s not a definable thing. You can’t have a formula that says 10% more effort equals 10 times the success of a piece. Yet hack work stands out very clearly.

So you have to write what matters to you and you have to hope that it works out enough that you can survive.

Maybe the real barrier between writers and non-writers is that the nons can’t comprehend that anyone would be so stupid as to do this. They’re right. There’s no question but that writing is a stupid thing to do.

Yet I’m okay with being stupid. I’m used to it in everything else, I might as well enjoy it here. And it’s not as if I seem to have any choice in the matter, but I am glad that I am over here on this stupid side. Because it pains me, it actually causes me pain, when I hear someone being surprised that, say, JK Rowling has written another book. The genuine incomprehension you hear sometimes, the idea that she’s daft when she’s done all those Harry Potter books and made her fortune.

She is daft. We all are. Of course she keeps writing. How could you not?

Finishing lines

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Apparently:

“Happiness is typing THE END after writing a short story or novel”

I was searching for some quote along those lines because I’ve heard it said a lot and reckoned someone must’ve said it cleverly. I found an entire website whose every entry begins “Happiness is…”. I’m thinking that’s a hard site to keep going and sure enough, there are signs of desperation: the next entry I saw read:

“Happiness is, snowman”

I can just feel the writer’s wide-eyed, blank face as he or she hit that comma and wonder what in the world could possibly follow that bloody, cursed, seemed-a-good-idea-when-I-started-the-site line of “happiness is”.

Perhaps comma snowman isn’t the most flawless piece of writing, but there is one thing that you have to say about the writer of it and the site FunHappyQuotes.com: he or she finished the line.

(Incidentally, I would never have gone to a site called FunHappyQuotes if I weren’t searching for something for you so I’d like to say thanks a bunch. I’d also say that I will now put its toxic saccharine style out of my mind forever, but apparently “Happiness is, remembering”. I need tea.)

Finishing is the thing. It’s the thing I want to talk to you about today, it’s the thing that matters. It’s the thing that makes the difference between a professional writer and an amateur. There are other things, like at an extreme level the ability to form coherent sentences, that’s generally handy even if mine tend to go off the rails during paragraphs where my mind is still on the insane idea that “Happiness is, a family reunion” and how I burn to delete those wrong commas in all these things.

But finish.

I don’t know if you like my writing. You’re very nice, turning up here for a read, but I do wonder if it’s really for the tea and biscuits. Nonetheless,  even the doubting writer in me has to say that I am a professional: writing full-time since the late 1980s, freelance since around 1996, literally millions of words published, yeah, yeah. If I took a commission from you to write something, you’d be taking your life in your hands over whether it would be any good, but you could bet that life I will finish and I will deliver on time.

Nobody says you have to be a professional writer. Everybody says there are jobs that are a lot harder than writing, which I agree with but just once wish these everybodies would realise that there are jobs that are a lot easier too. Writing is a funny thing in that the skill and the requirements for professionalism are the same whether or not you’re commissioned. Nobody does brain surgery for the catharsis and relaxation. Plenty of people write for those reasons and without any intention of getting published.

I think I’ve said this before but I need that intention, I need that aim. It transforms my writing if I know that there is an audience because I’m commissioned or because I hope there will be an audience. I’m looking at you right now. This is such a part of me that I don’t honestly grasp how you can write without it. Many people tell me they don’t want an audience and I have no reason to think they’re making this stuff up.

But I do have reason to wonder why they then send me their pieces. Unfinished.

When you start writing something, you don’t know if it’s any good so getting someone’s opinion seems like the sensible idea. It isn’t.

Anything you write down on paper is better than the greatest thing you haven’t yet got out of your head. But you have the whole piece in your mind. You probably don’t have every word, every corner of the piece, but you know what it’s about, you know what it’s meant to be. And I cannot see that from an opening page or a chapter from somewhere in the middle of the story.

I can tell whether you can form a sentence but we’ve already recognised that mine aren’t paragons of grammatic structure. Plus, very many writers are extraordinarily poor and random in their first drafts, it’s like the ideas are bellowing out of them and they’ll worry about punctuation later. I worry about punctuation now, I worry about spelling now – because I know the power of a comma in the right place, I know the breath and the beat pause it gives and I want that. I know that if I’ve misspelt something you might not know what I mean and you’ll probably think I’m an eejit. You’ll form an opinion of me and what I want is for you to form an opinion of the writing.

What a new writer wants is for me to reassure them and instead I form the opinion that they are new. Not because of what they write, but because they haven’t finished. Writing may be a sprint or a marathon but it is never a walk and there is the issue of whether you are capable of finishing. I can’t know that, you can’t know that, until you do. But it’s the impossibility of forming any useful opinion about the writing, that’s what I’m obsessing about today.

It’s partly because I feel guilty. I met a woman at a workshop a year or so ago and she sent me the starts of a couple of different plays. It took me months to reply to her because I had no clue what to say. I think there is a spark there but I thought that when talking to her, I only agreed to read anything because she was clever and interesting – and because she was finishing so many things. She’d planned to start a company, so she did. She’d planned to do a show, so she did. I hope that having planned to write a script, she does. But she hadn’t and I don’t know that there is anything in any way useful I could say.

There was one guy who sent me a script start where I could see it wasn’t going to work but – I feel awful here – he needed to find that out for himself. Am I a right git or what? I just knew that it was true. I didn’t tell him to carry on regardless, I tried steering him. But I knew that he’d figure it out for himself, I knew that would be infinitely better than me telling him – and I also wondered if I were right. If he could actually pull this thing off, he’d be a better writer than I am and who’s to say he isn’t?

Right now, me. I’m the one to say he isn’t because he hasn’t written it yet. I’m looking forward to seeing the finished piece.

But it has to be finished. Are you getting that this is a thing with me? And are you getting that it really is a thing? Because I’m finding it frustrating that I feel I can give you these examples and I can urge you to finish, but I can’t specifically define the reasons why it is essential. Especially since even the word ‘finish’ is a bit vague.

I’m now sure I’ve said this to you before but back in January I had a coffee with a colleague who had finished writing her novel. I congratulated her, we enthused about how great that feeling is, and then we spent an hour talking about how she was going to finish it. She meant she was editing and rewriting, she was developing it further, but we were both saying ‘finish’ so we really did have sentences that went thisaway: “Now you’ve finished, how are you going to finish?”

Listen, the thing is that crossing the finishing line of even a first draft is a separator. Think of all the people who say they’ll write a book or a script one day. You know most won’t, you know some small fraction will start. But then you know that of those who start, most won’t finish. Some small fraction will and you are now one of those. It isn’t easy to finish but that’s part of the point: finishing a draft is an accomplishment and it is a hard-earned one. So there is the psychological punch that you’ve done it, you can do this and there’s the evidence.

I just think it goes further. When you’ve finished a draft, you are in the game. Not before.

I was going to try being clever with you today. I’ve known all week that I was going to write this to you about finishing and endings. I’ve been thinking about how you do hear this line of how typing “the end” is great and yet I never do. I usually write ‘ENDS’ in caps. It’s from my journalism training. Probably an unbreakable habit now. I was also thinking of how you might know something I don’t: journalists, especially American ones, used to end their copy with “– 30 –”, the dashes and the number 30. I have not one single clue why. Do you? I’d be grateful to know, I’ve wondered for a long time.

But I was going to be clever with all this, that was my plan. I was going to burble on at you about finishing and then not finish. Yes. Good, eh? I couldn’t decide whether I’d find some way to fizzle out or whether I’d do the battery-dying gag. You know:

Listen, I’ve got to tell you something urgent. Wait, my battery is dy

You had to be there.

But I can’t do this, I cannot fail to finish. And especially not when I can end by telling you two things that make me look stupid.

The first is that while I will never again read the start of someone’s unfinished work, I am today, this morning, reading two unfinished works. One is a book that I’m editing so, come on, that’s different. The other is a book by a friend and he’s given me something like 20,000 words of the middle to read. That sounds like it’s contrary to every single thing I’ve just said and that would be because it is.

But he did give me the first 20,000 the other week. And this is not a new writer. I know he will finish because I’ve read his work for years, he’s done far more than I have, there’s just no question that he’ll finish. There is a question that this is a horror book and dear god in heaven, I am the sort who finds the Muppets scary. He knows this. But he needs a reader, he needs several readers because this is a live project with a publisher waiting.

So I only look as if I’m going against everything I say.

Except that I actually am going against one thing.

I too have a novel and it’s far from finished. But I partnered with a writing buddy earlier this year and showed it to her. It is vastly better because I did. And next month I am trying out a writing group to whom I will send the start of that same novel.

I just truly don’t know what they will be able to tell me from it. I fully expect six people to say “Happiness is, typed nicely”.

 

UPDATE:

I’ve corrected something: I originally wrote that journalists used to use the term “- 33 -” but Jim Swindles has put me right. It was “- 30 -“. I knew this. I have known this since I learnt it in Lou Grant in 1977. But plainly TV drama gets into me because “33” is the title of an especially well-written episode of Battlestar Galactica. As to what it means, Jim sent me this quote from AJR, the American Journalism Review Archive:

‘Some say the mark began during a time when stories were submitted via telegraph, with “-30-” denoting “the end” in Morse code. Another theory suggests that the first telegraphed news story had thirty words. Others claim the “-30-” comes from a time when stories were written in longhand – X marked the end of a sentence, XX the end of a paragraph and XXX meant the end of a story. The Roman numerals XXX translate to 30’.

 

The Evil 2

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This is just a thought, but I think we don’t really want sequels. We just believe we do.

Film studios used to know this one fact: a sequel will make a certain percentage of whatever the first film got. Whatever that figure was, they knew it and they knew it was less than the original movie but so what? It was as close to a rule, a bankable certainty, as anything could be.

We now know this for a fact: no movie is now made that cannot have a sequel, that probably will have a sequel, that might already be filming the sequel.

We also suspect that no movie will ever be made now that isn’t based on a Marvel comic, but that’s a different concern.

You’ve already thought of The Godfather Part II being better than the first one. You’ve probably thought of The Empire Strikes Back being better than Star Wars. You can take that as being proof that sequels are sometimes superior and that therefore sequels can be a good thing. I’m going to take that as being a very short list.

The thing is, though, that I am not against sequels even as I go to them and even as I suspect that they’re going to be weak. (I do so clearly remember the thrill when The Bourne Supremacy and The Bourne Ultimatum were both as good as the first one, The Bourne Identity. But then I saw The Bourne Other One, Thingy, Forgotten Already.)

It’s the same with books I like, it’s certainly the same with television series. I’m there for the long haul and if I’ve liked the characters, I want to see more of them.

Except I don’t think that’s actually true. I don’t think it’s true for me and I don’t think it’s true for you either.

What we really want is the same thing again. I don’t mean a repeat of the plot, we get those all the time, I mean we want exactly the same thing again. We want ourselves to be the same as we were.

We want to open that book or go to that cinema or turn on that new TV show and see it for the first time again. To be taken to that new place with those new people and to experience that great experience again. To be who we were then too.

It can’t happen but we can hanker for it. And if our hankering means we get good sequels as well as the ordinary ones, well, it’s something.