I still wish I’d written Veronica Mars

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You know the deal here: Veronica Mars, stupendous television drama, cancelled young, now revived as a movie via Kickstarter. One year ago, I wrote of the joy that news gave me. Joy. I'm not kidding and I certain-sure am not exaggerating. I tried to explain to you just why I wish I'd written Veronica Mars the TV show and how profoundly thrilling it was for me to once again know there would be more. That I hadn't seen every scrap of this show, that there would be more to watch. And I concluded:

Next year, I’ll be in that cinema watching a new story. Isn’t it simply joyous that a drama can get you like this? That the promise of a drama can be the best news I’ve had all week? I am ridiculously happy and excited and for ‘ridiculous’, just read ‘very’ or ‘tremendously’ or ‘damn right’.

You shouldn’t ever come back to old ideas, you shouldn’t revive something if it’s died. Unless it’s Veronica Mars. You never know, but I’ll lay odds that next year I’ll be wishing I’d written this movie.

I Wish I'd Written Veronica Mars – Self Distact 15 , 2013

It's one year on. Well, one day short of one year.

And I have just come out of the cinema.

I will not spoil this movie for you, I will not.

But.

I wish I'd written Veronica Mars – the series and the move.

Go Cucumbers

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I need to say this to you and I think I need to say it often. Not for you but for me. There’s something I believe and that I also even actually genuinely know to be true, yet I also forget it. But last night I was shown it anew and today I want to say it to you.

Don’t wait.

That’s it. Just don’t.

Especially don’t wait for permission to do something – though, disclaimer, this is a family show, no crime before the watershed please – and very especially never wait for anyone else to do it for you.

Two years ago, I was in a pub with a group of writers who had just completed a Birmingham Rep theatre program called Write Away. (Later I did the same program and you can read my enthusing about it on the Rep’s own website.) It was the last night of performances of plays they had each written and I tell you, there is little in this world so good as post-show nattering when the show has gone brilliantly.

Some of the very happiest memories I have are of being around a kitchen table at midnight, huge mugs of tea, gigantic grins, people having been tested and challenged and won.

This wasn’t my Write Away set, I didn’t belong in that group and actually I both wanted and didn’t want to be there. My wife Angela Gallagher was in the set – and her play Fun-Packed Flat Pack was such a hit that it kept being talked about in my Write Away run the next year – but I’d have waited out in the car all night rather than interrupt this celebrating group.

But it was such a happy group. If you’d walked by, they might have asked your name or they might not, but you’d have been roped in, given a drink and possibly slapped on the back.

I’ve been a professional writer most of my adult life and I had never before been with a group of writers who were all happy. No whinging. Nobody saying they’d been maltreated by a director. Nobody saying their cast should’ve been better. (The Rep uses great cast, I mean, come on, it’s the Birmingham Rep. But the facts never stop us complaining.) I actually found it inspiring and I thought it a huge shame that Write Away was done and this group wouldn’t meet again.

Bollocks to that.

They’ve met, I believe, once a month since then. They call themselves the Cucumber Theatre Group and they write together. That would be enough: that would be plenty. But just as they didn’t wait for the Rep to form some official programme before they could meet and write, they didn’t wait for anyone.

Cucumber writes short plays and then stages them.

They make it seem easy and perhaps if you’ve not seen writers complaining about how hard it is to get their work staged, you’ll think it’s easy too. But I’ll say it again: I’ve been a professional writer most of my adult life and this group is the first I’ve known who don’t bitch about not being staged, they stage it. Cucumber has eleven writers and it brings in casts and directors from across Birmingham: if the logistics of producing a stage show seem easy to you then add in doing it on low or no budget. Casts come to Cucumber because of the scripts. Also because of the people, I’m sure, but it’s the scripts.

Cucumber has staged three nights of short plays in various venues around the city. But last night they came home. The Birmingham Rep gave them space and time for an evening of longer pieces in the Rep’s Door theatre.

I spent yesterday work at the Royal Television Society’s Film and TV Summit in the Library of Birmingham. (I say working, I just had a blast, really.) And the Library is now joined at the hip to the Rep. It’s practically the one building now. So while I was chairing events over on the right of the building, Angela was in rehearsals over on the left. The Gallaghers were in the house. It was a good day.

But it was a good day because everybody made it good. The RTS over on the right, Cucumber on the left, they wanted to do these things and they did them. And they are continuing to do them. I don’t know for certain yet that there will be another RTS Summit but certainly the audience want another one. I do know for sure that there will be more Cucumber and that it will be at the Birmingham Rep.

Have a look at their Facebook page for details and to see who they are, what they do. But a quick heads-up: they’re back on 2 June.

And I can tell you that last night saw plays by five Cucumber writers: Amy Dollery, Rupi Lal, Elizabeth Parkes, Matthew Warburton – who also directed – and Angela Gallagher. I’ve heard of her. And I learnt a lesson or three from her writing last night too.

But with that lot done, it means in June we’ll see works by the rest of the Cucumbers: David Payne, Emma Davis, Khush Chahal, Laura Yates, Louise Marshall and Alex Townley, who assistant directed last night.

Five plays in one night means a lot of cast. Just as an audience member, I love that Cucumber gets such good actors but as Mr Angela, I’m really proud that they keep getting them, that the cast keep coming back. Last night had a mix of new people and returners but this has been going now for long enough that I feel they’ve grown a company of actors: Alan Wales, Bharti Patel, Catriona McDonald, Deborah McEwan, Hadley Brown, John Johnson, Kat Bailey, Nadia Kemp Sayfi, Natasha Cotran, Pardip Kumar, Patrick Bentley, Rupi Lal – hang on, isn’t he a writer too? – and Tom Williams.

Two years after these writers met, they are still meeting and they are still writing and they are producing theatre with a company of actors. And they’re doing it at the Birmingham Rep.

It’s a privilege to get the odd peek into their process via Angela and if they’re all hung over today, that sounds quite right to me. Go Cucumbers.

Software nostalgia ain’t what it used to be

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Nobody calls me Software Boy. Chiefly because it’s a fair while since I was a boy. But it is true that I am software-dependent and I regret that you can’t know me above a minute without hearing the words ‘OmniFocus’ or ‘Evernote’. They’re probably the two things I would rescue from my office in a fire. And the things that I would pine for would be Pages, Adobe Photoshop, Mail, iTunes*, maybe InDesign and Numbers.

*I know I’m in the minority loving iTunes but I’ve got both a US and a UK account so I’m already having a very good time with iTunes Radio. So there.

If this software still came in boxes, I would expect each to have my clawed fingernails on if you tried to take them away from me. (And just as an aside, how in the hell did we go from always getting boxed CD software to never getting it like that? When was the day that happened? I cannot remember the last time I got software in a shop or even from Amazon.)

But.

It turns out that I am a fickle software lover. There are all these things that run my life and which I want to run my life, which I relish running my life. Did I mention OmniFocus? But the other day I found a backup CD of applications. From 2002. It was like a time capsule for the days when I was organised enough to do this kind of thing. (I backup all my data, all the stuff I actually create, I back that up good, but I don’t touch applications. Not when you can just download them from the developer again. Most of the time.) I even split the applications into ones like system utility thingies, a set I called ‘Nice’ for some reason – and then one called ‘Mandatory’.

I was young. Okay, I was younger.

I’m sure the idea of the Mandatory folder was that whenever I would move to a new Mac – these were all Mac applications, I’ve got PC ones somewhere but no compulsion to look for them – I would have to install all of these in order to do my work. Lately I’ve often heard people say that when they go to a Mac that doesn’t have TextExpander installed, it feels wrong. I now have TextExpander and the last time I went to someone else’s Mac that didn’t have it, it felt wrong. I get that now. And apparently I got it then.

But these were mandatory? Microsoft Outlook was mandatory? Surely, surely that was the contractual kind of mandatory. I don’t believe I’ve ever actually liked Outlook. Especially not the Mac versions of it. I think I’ve still got it somewhere: I have Microsoft Office, though I use it less and less, so there must be Outlook but if I’ve installed it, I ain’t opened it.

Also Desktop Printer Utility. I don’t even know what it is now. Virex. Anti-virus on a Mac in 2002 and I called it Mandatory? I’m shaking my head. The folly of youth-ish.

I got a bit wistful at the OED though. The complete Oxford English Dictionary. Back when I was on computer magazines, there was a thing called blagging where you’d boast about what great thing you’d got for free from a technology company. Trips to Vegas, the latest laptop, whatever. My biggest blag was the Oxford English Dictionary on CD-ROM and I treasured that so much that it is still on the shelf above this Mac. But it doesn’t work. Within a year or two of my getting it, computers moved on so significantly that the old OED software simply won’t run. And now you can’t buy it on CD, you can’t really buy it at all, you can only subscribe and the cost is a bit above my pay grade.

This backup of Mandatory software also include many writing tools, naturally, and the main ones were Final Draft 4.1 – I now have Final Draft 8 and I’m not sure it’s really four times better – and Corel WordPerfect 3.5 for Mac. That’s another victim of computers moving on, you can’t run it, but if I were still using it in 2002 then I must’ve been hanging on in there and using some trickery.  Anyway.

The real reason I’m telling you this, the thing I want to talk to you about most is software called Now Up-to-Date and Contact. It had an awkward name but it was a truly powerful calendar and address book. When I opened that CD and saw them, I think I yearned. I know I thought that I would be using them today if I could.

NUDC worked so well that every time I’ve tried an address book or calendar application since, I’ve been unconsciously judging it against this pair. I clearly remember pressing PC Direct magazine, where I was features editor, to cover the launch of the Windows version of Now Up-to-Date and Contact. Nobody really expected much from a small US developer with little Windows experience but I knew their Mac one was fantastic and I got to cover it. But was terribly disappointed: the Windows one was initially far inferior. Features I thought were the life and soul of this software just weren’t there. I even remember asking the developers about it and they said I must be a power user. For some reason I liked that. Why did I like that? I know I didn’t like writing the coverage because I couldn’t recommend that version of this software. I don’t think PC Direct ever went back to it; I know I didn’t. But I presume the Windows one improved over the next few years because certainly the Mac one did.

I particularly remember how great it was at notifying you of when events were coming up. Just a smart and clever alarm system. And the regular calendar view could mix To Dos with events so you’d look at the month and it would be full, utterly full of different-coloured tasks and events. Bursting busy. Loved it. And missed it terribly when, again, computers moved on and NUDC didn’t keep up.

Only…

After I’d raised a mug of tea to the memory of NUDC, I heard an episode of the MacPowerUsers podcast that mentioned something called BusyCal.

I downloaded the trial and it is Now Up-to-Date and Contact reborn.

I think it is NUDC. Feels the same. Looks the same. In truth Now Software was bought by someone in the 1990s and the original developers went off to do other things. But by around 2007, they were back making calendar and address books and every single thing that was great about NUDC is right here in the new BusyCal. Consequently, BusyCal is a highly-recommended application and I don’t know why I bothered with the trial version, I don’t know why I didn’t just buy it right away.

I think I know now.

Listen, this is entirely personal and I’m only thinking about how much one can change one’s mind. If you want a Mac calendar and address book, I have exactly no hesitation recommending BusyCal. But it isn’t right for me.

Because it mixes To Do entries with events and you can fill up your month with brightly-coloured lines of tasks and appointments. Hate it. I’ve wanted it back for fifteen years and now I’ve got it, I switched it off within fifteen minutes. Then I came back to my Mac and found an alarm notification waiting. It is exactly how I remember with NUDC yet something about it made me switch those off too. Here’s this very strong, very powerful software and I have steadily switched off the strong and the powerful bits of it until there’s nothing left.

I’m not buying the full version at the end of the trial. I’m going to continue with Mac OS X’s ordinary Calendar and The Omni Group’s very not ordinary OmniFocus plus a bit of Evernote. But, listen, nothing will ever take any of those away from me. No. Noooooo.

Rest Stop on The Blogging Tour

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Possibly you know this: there is a thing going around called the Blogging Tour wherein one writer answers certain questions and then tags three other writers to do the same. I think the official logic – and I wish I knew who had started this so I could ask – is that this brings new readers to our blogs. I’ll answer the questions below and I do want to say hello, we have biscuits and tea here, pull up a chair. But I really want to exploit this gorgeous excuse to find out what my three tagged writers are up to and, in case you’ve not found them before, urge you to go find them now.

Each of the three will be posting their Blogging Tour entries next Monday, 10 March, but that’s no reason to wait. Go have a look at them all now. And in alphabetical order by first name, they are and they describe themselves as:

annaAnna Lawrence Pietroni

Anna Lawrence Pietroni started writing her first novel when she was training to be a prison governor. She now lectures in Creative Writing at Birmingham City University and is currently writer in residence at the University of Gloucestershire. Ruby’s Spoon was published by Chatto & Windus in 2010. Her blog is on Five by 3 here.

jasonJason Arnopp

Jason Arnopp is a British author and scriptwriter.  He wrote the 2011 Lionsgate US feature film Stormhouse, and BBC audiobooks Doctor Who: The Gemini Contagion and The Sarah Jane Adventures: Deadly Download.  More recently, he has written the terrifying Kindle books Beast In The Basement and A Sincere Warning About The Entity In Your Home.  He lives in Brighton with far too many movies on VHS. You can find him at INT. JASON ARNOPP’S MIND – DAY/NIGHT

kenKen Armstrong

Ken Armstrong’s first produced play was called ‘Hamlet in Ireland. He was fourteen at the time. It was enviably useless. Since then, he was had about eight produced theatre plays and about another eight produced radio plays. He has also written numerous (more than eight) short stories, done bits on radio and film here-and-there, and won some prizes, though mostly he tends to come second in things. He blogs weekly at kenwriting.com

jeffAnd there’s one more. I said you had to be asked to do this by a blogging writer and that lot above is who I immediately ran to. But I was asked in my turn and that was by author and poet Jeff Phelps. He describes himself thisaway: Jeff Phelps was second prize winner of the Stand open poetry competition in 2000.  His novels, Painter Man and Box of Tricks, are published by the award winning Tindal Street Press. And you can read more in his own response to The Blogging Tour on his blog.

Seriously? You’re still here? Unless you are ferociously organised and disciplined, you haven’t yet clicked through to read any of these fine folk’s words. Off you trot.

I’ll just talk to myself for a bit. It’s easier, anyway. My answers to the Blogging Tour questions are going to be a mix of bluffing and lies as I pretend I know the answer and I’d rather you didn’t see that.

You’re going to make me do some work here, aren’t you?

The questions and the kind-of answers:

1) What am I working on?

The moment you and I are done here, I’m back to doing some copywriting for a Birmingham PR firm. I so enjoy this: copywriting uses all the skills for conciseness and getting huge amounts of information into short spaces that I learnt from BBC Ceefax and it uses everything I’ve got from Doctor Who to make it fun.

That work’s come up suddenly and I’ve had to push other bits aside to get it done so officially I am also in the midst of a complicated theatre project. Or at least, if I can get it going, it will be complicated. And to make up for how I can’t say a word about it now, you know for certain that I will say many, many, many words about it later.

I’m also editing Catherine Schell’s autobiography while exploring whether it’s time for a second edition of my The Blank Screen: Productivity for Creative Writers book (UK edition, US edition). The reason for pondering this is that I’ve now done many workshops on the same topic and I’ve learnt a lot of little extras. They’re all tending to go on The Blank Screen website which has just crossed its 200th post since I began it back in December. I’ve a new Doctor Who coming out very shortly – Doctor Who: Scavenger – and love doing those so much that I’m thinking pretty constantly of further stories to pitch. So far this year it’s been all pitching: there are several BBC Radio 4 projects on the go which I’ll know about in the next few months.

Then I’m working with that Jeff Phelps fella on a poetry project and we’re also both on Writing West Midlands’ Room 204 scheme for a few more weeks. That’s a year-long scheme for writers in the region and it’s been ignition for me. Hard to quantify it but everything I was working on this time last year is now greatly further ahead and I’ve added entire new jobs like The Blank Screen workshop and doing a lot in schools and universities.

There’s a complicated thing going on with a novel of mine but while that’s with Paul the Agent Guy, I’m looking at another one. You look back and it’s surprising how many novels you’ve ended up writing in between everything else but I rather like being in the middle of one and this particular idea is exciting me. They all do.

Um. The certainty that I’ve forgotten things. If I haven’t mentioned a thing that you and I are working on, it’s entirely because it’s still secret. Not that I’ve forgotten.

To be truthful, I’m a bit lost at the moment in the mass of things going on. Creatively, it’s very thrilling, but my head hurts. I turned to mind mapping before a particular meeting last week and it worked so well that I’ve since been steadily working up a map of everything I’m doing.

map

2) How does my work differ from others of its genre?

I’d like to cop out of this one as I don’t think my work sits in any one genre. Certainly everything I write turns into a thriller or a romcom, occasionally and unsuccessfully both, but I’m all over the shop with fiction and non-fiction. Which I like very much.

That was easy.

3) Why do I write what I do?

Bugger. Harder. The Hallmark-Card-sized answer is that I write to find out. With non-fiction that is specific and easily described: I want to find out things and rush them back to you like a puppy with a stick. In drama, it’s harder. I’m trying to find out more about us.

Sorry: that’s all I’ve got. I’m going to be thinking about this a great deal. Mind if I pop back some times and say more?

And lastly:

4) How does my writing process work?

Phew. I can do this one. I write from 5am weekdays and I’m trying to spend the first hour on a drama or fiction project that is not connected to the current workload. So if I’m supposed to be spending the day doing Radio 4 proposals then I will but first I’ll do an hour on something completely different. Only check emails at the top of the hour. I’ve scheduled out times when I make pitching calls, times when I work over my OmniFocus To Do list. Otherwise, it’s writing.

Or it used to be. And it still is a lot with non-fiction. With drama, I try to work like that and it often goes okay but sometimes I have to get the hell out of Dodge. Have to step away from the desk. Have to leave the office. And other times I really need to shuddup and sit here writing.

Well.

You see why I said you should go read the other folks?

Thanks to Jeff for asking me to do this, for putting me through it but also getting me chance to point you at fine people.

You don’t say

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I think you know this. I think I knew it, too. But it’s only when I was asked that I vocalised it and really realised how much I mean it: scripts are stories told using only what your characters do not say.

Do not say.

What I was actually asked was “Why do you write?” and this came up because novelist Lindsay Stanberry-Flynn invited me to write a guest post on this subject on her blog. You can read the whole answer here – and I loved being asked, you must see the great set of writers she got to contribute – but the short version is that I haven’t a clue. Never one to shirk, I wrote her twelve drafts of that post and each one got more honest about my cluelessness and therefore also got shorter. She wasn’t expecting a short blog post. She’s read us here, she knows how we go on. So I confessed at the top and then reached deep inside to find some padding. I feel there’s a joke to be had there about my girth but I can’t think of it and you’re far too nice to try.

The thing with reaching deeper in order to pad further, though, is that often you get to something important. And that’s what happened to me with this point: I think I found why I like scripts so much. And that’s what I want to tell you.

I’ve always been a dialogue man: maybe it’s my radio background, maybe it’s just that dialogue has been a thing with all my favourite writers from Alan Plater to Aaron Sorkin and even some who don’t begin with A. I want to say Jane Austen, despite the A, but I think it’s her descriptions that kill me.

Anyway. BBC Ceefax helped too: I learnt to convey a news story in a space so short and constrained that twitter seems easy. It’s the same with characters speaking to each other: lines can be loaded, saturated with plot and emotion and other detail but they have to be natural and they have to be quite short.

I think I’ve mentioned a Russell T Davies line to you before but I’m going to do it again. Or I would if I could find the exact quote. Davies is best known now for Doctor Who and was best known just before it for Queer as Folk. But he started on children’s TV and went through soaps before going on to one-hour dramas. And at some point he said that last move was very hard until he realised something. I’m paraphrasing but what he said roughly was that in soaps, every character says exactly what they’re thinking and in drama, they don’t even know what they’re thinking.

This fits me perfectly as I’ve no idea either.

But I also think that when you have two characters who aren’t telling each other what they think and aren’t even sure what they think, it’s a very potent, pregnant moment. It doesn’t sound like either of them are very relaxed. And whatever is going on, you know it’s important to them. Their inability to talk is infinitely more dramatic than a soap slanging match.

You just have to conjure the characters who are at this point, you just have to conjure the situation that matters to them so much, and then you just have to convey it all to us without them actually saying any of it.

Writing is hard and writing is the best job in the world because you put down all these words and the real writing is in what you don’t say.

Writing is not a lottery

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Word Success menu

I’ve only been thinking about this for two months. Around Christmas time, someone said to me that one has as much chance of writing success as one has of winning the lottery.

My considered, instant, knee-jerk reaction was to say bollocks.

Two months on, having genuinely thought about this a lot, I want to revise that statement and say very bollocks.

He just meant that it was hard to be successful in this and there’s no denying that. But I think comparing it to a lottery is not just wrong, it is ultimately damaging. The wrongness is very easy to point out so let’s do that first. If your numbers regrettably don’t come up on the lottery this Saturday, you don’t get to take those numbers back and rewrite them. You can and people do play the same numbers in the next prize draw so perhaps you could compare that to sending the same manuscript around to many publishers. But, right or wrong, nobody at National Lottery headquarters emails you say that they loved what you did with 3, 7 and 9 but maybe 12, 17 and 43 need a little more work.

Wait, how many numbers do you have to pick in the UK National Lottery? I used to know this stuff: I worked the Wednesday late shift at BBC Ceefax where I’d have to put up the numbers on screen as they were announced. And every Wednesday, the same woman would phone the newsroom to complain that I was too slow – or once that I was too fast. I can’t believe I’ve forgotten. Hang on. I’ll just check.

God in heaven. I am out of touch. There’s now a bewildering (to me, anyway) number of different lotteries and I tell you, looking at the website for it, I can’t work out anything. I’m going to say seven. Okay? Let’s say that you have to pick seven numbers in a lottery draw.

You don’t get to sit there thinking that the seventh number isn’t quite enough, that really you need to add an eighth. Or maybe the other way around, that your third and fourth numbers are a bit of flabby padding, you’d be better taking those out and shortening the piece And that would be because you don’t make anything. You’re not creating anything, you’re just picking. I don’t see any interest or value in the lottery beyond the chance of winning and I don’t really see any chance of winning.

Whereas, when I write something good, it tends to fly. When I don’t, it doesn’t. My writing career has depended primarily on thinking of the opportunity and then writing to fill it. Most of the time, it doesn’t work. And certainly there are rejections that appear random, there are some rejections that actually are random. But the rest of the time, it works. I keep writing, I keep working, I keep writing.

Unlike any lottery or any gambling, the effort I put in to something usually has a direct bearing and a direct consequence on whether it is successful. If you’re a better writer than I am, and there are few people who aren’t, then you might argue that my abilities are more in getting the work to people than in writing anything decent. You could be right. But it’s still writing and it is still directly, palpably tied to my effort. There is no effort you can put into the lottery that will increase or decrease your chances of any one prize draw coming up great for you. (You could enter multiple times and I suppose you could say that there is effort in finding and committing that much cash but on the one hand I would wince at the thought of you wasting money. And on the other, with the odds we’re talking about, i don’t believe there is a statistically significant difference between you buying one or fifty goes at this thing.)

We all have bad times. Yesterday I saw a project that is deeply important to me evaporate in front of my eyes. That was a hard one. Today I was rejected from something else and I’m struggling to remember what it was. Even trivial rejections can add up, though: get enough in a row and you do start questioning your luck.

But that is why I think this comparison between writing and the lottery is actually damaging.

Once you start seeing this as luck, I think you’re screwed. Sorry. I thought a stronger word but this is a family show.

People want to think that writing success is luck because when you get it, luck is easy. When you don’t get it, you’re just unlucky, it’s no reflection on your talent or lack of talent. People get told that successful writers are lucky. I’m going to say to you again that it makes me mad how JK Rowling’s years of huge effort, skill and talent are always reduced to the same two sentences: she was a single-parent mother, she’s now a millionaire. The bit in between was not a swift dollop of luck, it was years of hard work done well. Whatever money she has, she earned it.

People also like to think that writing is luck because it’s easier to see success as a binary thing: it is or it isn’t, you are a success or you’re not. It’s like the relationship ladder: are you dating? is it serious? when’s the date? are you expecting? when’s the divorce? The writing success ladder goes: that’s nice, you play with writing, you’ll be good! can’t you get a proper job? aren’t you published yet? when’s the novel coming out? when’s the film of the novel coming out? I could write a novel! I’m going to try writing when I retire!

Both of those ladders are how other people react to us but they are cutting because we also think the same way: we wonder why we’re not dating yet, we wonder if we can’t write. We wonder that an awful lot. Well, some of us don’t: some of us are certain that we can’t.

But if you do actively think you can write or if you simply do continue to progress and survive in writing as a career, it’s like you have a choice between calling yourself lucky or calling yourself a success. All English and writerly modesty aside, if I did call myself a success here, while talking to you about this, it would feel galling. It would feel like I was trying to compare myself to Rowling. I don’t, not in terms of her talent or her money, but I love what I do, I love that I get to do it, I wouldn’t swap with her or anyone else. So I’d call that success. There’s little reason to expect someone to have heard of me but when they have, that can mean we get to meet and natter. Similarly, if I make money, I get to eat tonight. These are two important things to me. 

But when you reduce it all to success or not success, made it or not made it, lucky or not lucky, you’re creating a wee binary barrier and convincing yourself that only luck will get you across it.

It is not true that writing a great book means you will get rich or that you will get published. It is not true that everyone has a novel inside them. It’s not even close to true that everyone can write.

But the way you find out if you can is to write. And if writing well isn’t guaranteed to get you success, it’s at least something that you can improve at and learn from and grow with. There’s no improvement, learning or growth from picking seven lottery numbers. There’s actually nothing, you get nothing from picking seven lottery numbers. The lottery is all about the ending while writing is about the journey too.

Now, if you told me writing is stupid, I could well agree with you there.

Elite Death Squirrels

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I do have something to say in my defence. I was forced to do it by Elite Death Squirrels.

You can’t argue with that, can you? They come in the night, they take what they want, and nobody dares say a word. You’ve never heard of the Death Squirrels. Not even adults have heard of them. That’s how scary they are.

They’re like real squirrels, you know, but they kill. On missions from the government, usually. Their trademark is that they can get where nobody else can – and they never leave a trace. That’s really why they have to kill. It’s like compulsive tidying with them. No trace. No clue. Minimum residual presence.

That’s their term for it. MRP. Minimum Residual Presence. I tell you, these squirrels, they’re trained.

Seeing what I saw, I’m lucky to be here at all.

Look, if I were making this up, wouldn’t I have stolen a proper car? I hid in the ambulance because it was the nearest and because they wouldn’t think to search for me in there.

Yes, of course I stole the uniform. I’d be rubbish at hiding if I hadn’t put this on, wouldn’t I?

And of course I drove it away. How else do you think you escape Elite Death Squirrels? I mean, they’re fast. They really so fast. Wish I had nicked a proper car. You don’t get a lot of acceleration in ambulances. Surprises me, that. Wouldn’t you think that ambulances would have some welly? They should be on Top Gear.

Hang on, sharp bend coming up.

That should shake the last of them.

There!

Did you hear that squeal? Grownups say that’s the brakes but really it’s squirrels falling off the back. You’re not afraid, are you? It’s a well-known fact that you never see Elite Death Squirrels snatching anyone from a moving ambulance.

You’ll be okay.

I’ve done this before. Not with the squirrels, they’re new. I only found out about them recently. But the stories I could tell you of –

wait, there’s something moving.

Hang on, I’m going to floor it. Soon get you there.

What we’re going to do, we’re going to chase that motorbike. With the lights, right there, do you see it? Don’t look! They’ll see you!

It’s called a Rapid Response Team but it’s really a moving Squirrel Control. You can tell. That one who looks like a police officer? That’s really eight squirrels standing on each other’s shoulders. Five more to reach the pedals.

Yes, we could go the other way but they’d spot that right off. They’re clever. I tell you, they’re trained. And they’ve been in worse situations than you can imagine.

No, the thing is, what we’ll do, right, we’ll stick close on their tail. They’ll think we’re part of the team. If they look, can you pretend to be a squirrel? Good girl, that’s the ticket.

No, no, keep that in. It’s helping you. It’s liquid marigolds. Squirrels hate that.

No, you keep it. Thanks. I’ve had, um, marigold aspirin, I’m fine. Yes, when you’re an adult, you take little marigold aspirin daily and it helps. You need a bit more, just because it’s your first time.

Yes, right, well, yes, all adults take marigold aspirin. They just don’t know why. The government knows though, don’t they? Bound to. They command the Elite Death Squirrels. I suspect Squirrel High Command is in Westminster. Got to be. Top secret.

Well, there’s fallout, isn’t there? From the bears.

Squirrels go around killing for the government, you’ve got to have bears. Checks and balances. Squirrels and bears. It’s obvious.

Nearly there.

Yeah, ah, the bears, they’re – well, you know Goldilocks, don’t you? She runs the bears. I think they have a restaurant. But it’s a cover for their covert anti-squirrel operation. Clearly.

Yes, Golidlocks controls the bears and the government runs squirrels. They don’t do it alone. What about when there’s a new government? They can’t take on national debt and a vast squirrel army, not all at once. That’s why they’ve got One Direction.

Took over from the Pied Piper, they did.

That’s what they say, I’m just telling you. I don’t make this stuff up.

Oh, that’s my girl. Very good. Yes, the sign said hospital. We’re going to hide the ambulance there. It’s perfect, isn’t it? They’ll never suspect. You’re not afraid of hospitals, are you? They’re the very safest places in the world. There has never been a squirrel attack on any hospital, ever.

Fact.

Now you’re doubting me? You accept the Elite Death Squirrels but you doubt me about hospitals? How do you think I know all this stuff? I’m a grown-up. I’ve been to hospital for a lot worse than you’ve got and I’ve seen for myself. No squirrels.

Yeah, okay, sometimes you see them outside, patrolling the gardens, looking for their way in but they never find it. Never. Not one squirrel has ever got into a paediatrics ward.

That’s the special name for where we’re going to hide you. Keep you extra safe.

I want you to be very brave now.

When we get you hidden there, I bet the nurses will tuck you up in a bed. Make sure you stay there, it’s very important. I need my spy on the inside. Can you do that?

Well, you’re safe in there, safe from the squirrels, but if you can get a window, keep watching out. Be vigilant.

It means keep concentrating, don’t miss anything.

Very good! That’s exactly right, you are clever. I’m taking a little shortcut. The motorbike squirrels don’t know you can get to the hospital this way. We’ll scoot around them and get you there before they can say gesundheit.

Squirrels say gesundheit.

Everyone knows that.

No, I’m going to lead them away. You be safe inside, I’ll take the ambulance back out to squirrel territory. I’ll be okay.

And look! Look at me, stay with me, stay focused, keep your eyes open, we’re here, just a little longer, kidder.

A little longer.

Here we go. Here we are. The nurses will take you in. You tell them I said you were very brave and you deserve a lollipop.

And we’ll keep the Elite Death Squirrels to ourselves, okay? The doctors don’t know about those. They leave no trace.

Right of Centre

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I gave up trying to understand this years ago. Soon I hope to give up trying to excuse it. But for whatever reason it may be, when a piece of work is right – is just somehow right – it makes me cry.

Now, my definition of right is unquestionably going to be different to yours but you know when something is right, too, even if you’re cooler than I am and only rarely blub. I think it’s when I can recognise that an artist has tried to reach something new, that they have succeeded and that I have been brought along by them. Very often it can be at the end of a piece, it’ll be at the point when the artist’s journey is done. It’s happened to me with novels, films, with finely-made one-hour television episodes. There are certain Emily Dickinson and Christina Rossetti lines that I can’t say for sobbing. Actually sobbing.

It has happened just once with a place. New York City. My favourite place in the world. Can’t tell you why, can’t point to a feature or a fact, I just know that I stepped out onto those streets one night and I felt taller. I felt taller with a tear in my eye.

I need you to understand that this isn’t an hourly occurence and that I don’t ever cry because something is sad. It’s rare and powerful, it is vastly more raw and dambusting than just a mawkish weepie on a Sunday afternoon. Something opens me up and reaches in to get a good grasp. Usually it’s unexpected, statistically it’s most often music. The entire Suzanne Vega album Songs in Red and Gray, for instance. I can’t hear that as a set of tracks, it is one piece to me and it all works.

I bring this up because I went to a concert this week and it began with the words “From New York City… Suzanne Vega”. Nobody can tell me why I got a shiver from that, but I did and it was glorious.

But while I’m telling you that she was great and that while I felt only a shiver and slightly damp eyelids, I want to tell you of a time when all this was very bad for me.

It’s pretty bad now, admitting it to you.

But once. Just once. It wasn’t only a tear from something being right. There was just once also a sense of sadness. Maybe it was just the combination of right and sad, but it felt more. It felt like howl-with-rage misery.

And it was over a Suzanne Vega song.

Tired of Sleeping, from her 1990 album, Days of Open Hand.

It’s not like that’s a comedy record but I also wouldn’t have said that it was the darkest 3’47” of the night. Except that it was for me. I cannot convey to you how that song smashed away inside me, I certainly cannot explain why. But everything I’ve confessed about when things are right, I got that with this. Everything I’ve denied about it ever happening when things are sad, I got all that too.

Over and over, actually.

It was so bad, it hurt so very badly, that I asked my wife Angela Gallagher for help. I may be imagining this but I think she held my hand while she listened to the track. She liked it, she recognised how strong it was, but, frankly, it didn’t throw a brick through her skull as it had me.

And do you know what? From that moment on, I have been able to listen to Tired of Sleeping without being upset anywhere near as deeply.

So let this be a lesson. If something is right and something is powerful, I’m keeping it to myself.

UPDATE: There are many versions of Tired of Sleeping now but this is the skull-smashing one. The link is to a fan’s YouTube video and right this moment I’m playing it while writing to you – and so not bothering to watch whatever visuals the fella has added. No offence to him, but I’d recommend that you do the same. Here’s Tired of Sleeping

Inside story – teaching writing to prisoners

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Usually when I run writing workshops they're for children, students and teachers. It’s always fun and satisfying because I’ve done it often enough now that I know they’re going to enjoy the material I’ve got for them, I know they are going to write well. But last year I did two workshops in prisons and while I hoped they would be as useful for the prisoners, I went in with entirely selfish reasons. I’ve never been near a prison before and I wanted to see inside that world.

But usually the people on writing workshops have chosen to come and they already have ideas they were working on. This time I was going in with Geese Theatre and we were working toward the Clink and Arts Alliance project Write to Be Heard. It's a National Prison Radio project with the aim of getting prisoners to write and specifically to write for radio. I'm a radio man, you don't have to sell me on writing for radio but there was an extra element here in that writing to be heard is different from writing to be printed. Prisoners who struggled with grammar or English – everything was to be in English and anyway my own three languages are English, American and Australian – would hopefully feel less pressured to get the commas right.

I was scared. I’ll admit that freely: I need my commas. And prisons. All those big, imposing walls. You see so many prison dramas and I’ve even written one: my very first Doctor Who radio drama had Peter Davison locked up in solitary in an alien prison. The high security, the heavy doors: it’s an imposing and a frightening world.

It's also a world. You're not stepping into a community per se, it is a world entire of itself. The air is different. You're much more conscious of the open sky above you because of the closed walls on all sides. You never find out what any person did to get locked up but you know every person did something. And you haven't. They are all at a different place from you and you want to understand it, but you vividly don't want to experience it.

Plus, it's a criminal offense to bring a mobile phone into a prison so my iPhone security blanket had to stay outside in the car.

Once you're through all the walls and the doors and the dogs and the guards and the forms and the photographing, though, you're working in a room that could be anywhere. I did two prisons in two days, back to back, and the first one was like working in my old sixth form. Apart from the prison guard watching all the time, there were low-slung seats, school-quality tables, plenty of room. It was a low-security prison where everyone I met was in the last stages of their sentences so they were very much looking to the outside world.

It meant I got writing from them that was one moment introspective, the next quite liberated. One moment unexpectedly happy and one moment very piercingly dark and personal.

The second group was in a higher-security prison. Even more serious walls and, this time, retina scans. The group I got was made up of primarily young offenders who were in on drug-related crimes. Some had been there a long time and none of them leaving soon so you knew there would be a bit of a different mood.

Unfortunately, there was also a mistake. For whatever reason, these men hadn't heard of the project, they didn't actually know they were going to be doing any writing. They came along expecting to watch some kind of performance.

Okay. So I have fifteen men, some deeply troubled, all scary, none wanting to be in prison of course but also none choosing to be there because they wanted to write.

Whatever you're picturing now, add in that we were today in a pair of portacabins bolted together. With myself, these men, Geese Theatre people and prison staff, we all had to take turns breathing in and out.

But also picture this. In moments, I had that room in silence.

Everybody writing. Really concentrating, very serious.

And then I had them all performing their work. Everybody talking, really concentrating, really laughing.

I write to be read. I forget that writing can do such big things as focus us and release us, that it can take us away from ourselves and push us deep into ourselves too.

Plus, very many of the men I met went on to enter the Write to Be Heard project. I can't be more specific: I can't tell you names, what prisons they were, I can't really tell you how well they did in the project. But in a counted-them-out-and-counted-them-back kind of way, let me tell you that when I heard the results, I was proud of them.

I've been wanting to tell you that and in fact about all of this for six months or more but it's only now that I'm allowed to talk about it publicly. Which is good because I get to tell you but it's great because there many of us writers did very many days in a huge number of prisons and I'm hoping to hear from everybody else now too.

Thanks to Clinks.org and Arts Alliance for having me and to all at Geese Theatre who I'd heard of but truly did not appreciate how much they do in prisons and for prisoners. And to Writing West Midlands whose Room 204 project got me the gig.

How 1984 wasn’t much like 1984 and still isn’t

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mac1984

(Image from Mac-History.net)

It’s thirty years since Tommy Cooper died on live TV. It’s the thirtieth anniversary of Colin Baker’s first trip in the TARDIS and of Virgin Atlantic’s inaugural flight. Also, importantly, it’s three decades since some sports thing. But of all the things that happened in 1984, I’m feeling compelled to talk to you about just one –

– no, two.

Officially this is also the 30th anniversary of Cyndi Lauper’s debut album, She’s So Unusual. I remember that so well: I remember the feel of the vinyl in my hands, I remember that it was an unusual impulse buy of an artist I’d only vaguely heard of. I remember that it was the first album that felt like a single body of work to me instead of a series of songs. And I remember that was because it seemed so strikingly clear that Side 1 was terrific – Money Changes Everything, Girls Just Want to Have Fun and Time after Time were all there – and that Side 2 wasn’t.

You don’t remember when albums had sides. I hate you. Give me my biscuits back. For my part, I don’t remember exactly when I bought it but the album came out in 1983 so it bothers me that it’s this year that a 30th Anniversary edition is being released. I’m wondering if they’ll sell me the first half.

But I know I’ll buy it, I know the odds are that I’ll buy it online and I know for a fact – because I’ve just done it – that I called up the original album right now on iTunes. Curiously, it’s the only Cyndi Lauper album that I don’t have complete. It’s not as if I stopped ripping the CD half way either. I’ve a patchwork of songs from it. Definitely going to buy the thirtieth, then.

So it’s 05:46 and Girls Just Want to Have Fun is in my headphones, I’m writing to you in Evernote, my email inbox is teetering, my calendar is throbbing and my OmniFocus To Do list is wiping its brow. Every part of that sentence, bar the stupidly early time, is tied up with my Mac.

And that’s the one thirtieth anniversary I really am compelled to write to you about.

It’s actually thirty years to the day that the Macintosh was launched. It would be perhaps five years before I used one but the Mac that launched in 1984 directly changed me: it stopped me being interested in computers. I know I’m talking to you about machines and that at least software tends to come up a lot with us, but that really is what it did: after I used a Mac, I wasn’t into computers.

Maybe I never really was into them – I’m certainly not as technically minded as so very many people I know – but I think I enjoyed the puzzle of them. I definitely enjoyed all the fiddling with all the settings and the options. That day at school, right at the end of the last term, when I found out if you bash your head onto the keyboard in despair it would restart the RML 380Z and save you the usual twenty minute wait while a tape loaded. (“Oh, yes, I meant to tell you,” said the teacher.) The way that I learnt to swear while just trying to fit a bigger hard drive into a PC. (I got it exactly right the first time, motherboard jumpers and all. But it still took me a week of increasingly foul evenings before I got it working by doing exactly the same right thing again.) The satisfaction, even the sheer victory of getting computers to work.

Bollocks to that.

Here was a Mac and it worked. I could write books on it. So I did.

I was still split between Macs and PCs because I got work as features editor on a PC magazine – which is also where I learnt that I am a magazine kinda guy far more than I am a computer one – but nonetheless, when it came time to spend my own money, I bought a Mac. I vividly remember my flat with its Mac and its CD player. (Oh! I played John Barry’s Dances with Wolves soundtrack a lot on that CD player. Hang on – just switched to that on iTunes.)

A few years on, Apple bought me a Mac that had a TV in it. It was a time when Apple was doing badly and apparently its PR firm reckoned it could either spend a lot of money on ads that nobody would write about or they could just buy Macs for a lot of journalists and hope it would have an impact.

It had an impact. I had that Mac throughout the rest of my time living in London. I remember watching Alan Plater’s Doggin’ Around on it. Sitting in my narrow flat, eating my then healthy and obsessively favourite meal of French bread pizza, waffles and sweetcorn, watching that TV. You must’ve been able to record TV on it because I clearly remember watching Northern Exposure when the phone rang and then when I continued watching, the sound was vastly poorer. Mono instead of stereo.

I remember later using a review PowerBook Mac, I think the first with a colour screen, and seeing that screen permanently die in front of me just as I finished writing something. Saving that document, copying it to a floppy disc, gathering up all of my work and copying it off to many floppies – all without being able to see anything at all on the screen. Oh! Another PowerBook Mac, another day: being late delivering an article to Macworld and, knowing the editor would be at the same press launch I had to cover for PC Direct, writing the whole article on a PowerBook on the Tube train on my way. Handing him a floppy.

I don’t miss floppies, I’m not compelled to write to you about floppies.

But I am clearly compelled to write about the Mac today. I’m curious how the one thing I would tell you about these machines is that they get out of my way so that I can get on with writing books, talking to people and watching Alan Plater dramas, yet even as I can forget the computer entirely, I remember that I am forgetting it. I heard an argument once that said Android phones are always so bad that you are driven to upgrade where Apple wants you to like your iPhone so much that you upgrade to get more of the love or whatever. I don’t know enough about Android to judge that: Android phones seem to me to be great for fiddling with and that’s very nice. But I think there’s something to it.

I could not tell you the name or manufacturer or any single thing about the PC that I spent a week inside fitting that bloody hard drive. Nothing. The image of tiny jumper settings is burnt into my retina and I could probably work out from a calendar which version of Windows it had. But I’m not going to.

Whereas I can tell you with impossible fondness that my first Mac back in the 1980s was a Mac SE running System 6.

Ironically, the books I wrote on it were all computer manuals. I remember the boss of the technical author department regretting having bought Macs. “Seriously?” I said.

“Yes.”

I think the man was just bored with his job because he explained that it was because PCs were different. That’s all. He wanted a change. Hadn’t tried Windows, didn’t know anything but that they were different to Macs.

Can’t fault him for technical accuracy, then, and it is entirely coincidental that I left shortly afterwards.