This was only meant to be a joke. I write the blog to talk to you but a couple of weeks ago the Birmingham Rep reprinted one entry, then the Writers’ Guild did another one and I could see numbers going up. It was nice. As ever, my mind wandered to getting us all biscuits. But then last week I dissed Star Trek Into Darkness and within the day had doubled the number of people who’d read the blog in the whole week before.

Well, I said. Next time I’ll write about sex and see what happens.

And that was about as far as the thought got. I did ponder being serious and giving you advice or maybe even reaching deep down inside myself to reveal some of those desires we all have. Possibly even admit a fantasy to you. I’m not ashamed of this: there is a sexual position I’d like to try. It’s nothing very kinky, it’s just that maybe one day during sex, I think I’d like to be present.

But then writing that line made me think about how you’d have to search really hard to find any sex in anything I write. This could well be because I write Doctor Who audio dramas and, please, it’s a family show. And there’s not a huge amount of sex in Radio Times magazine.

Only, even thinking back through my script pile, sex doesn’t feature much at all. I do remember a friend complaining that nothing happens in a particular script of mine – ooh, it was called Other Women: I like that title, I must use that again somewhere; oh, look, I just have – and he moaned that it was just people talking or having sex. We’d swapped scripts at that point and his had nothing happening either: just the end of the world, or the universe, or something. I remember alien tentacles. And he was right about Other Women: unless you were interested in the people, they weren’t interesting and nothing happened. Similarly, I wasn’t interested in his characters so let the world end, or the universe, or something.

Sex isn’t interesting. Not in TV or film.

I mean it. Will they/won’t they tension is remarkably powerful but once they do/did, it’s all over. Certainly the tension, often the series, always the movie.

Equally, if someone takes their clothes off in a film, I don’t think you’re watching a character any more, I think you’re noticing the actor’s body. Even if only for a moment. I don’t know. It could be a male thing, it could be a me thing.

But Dar Williams said something especially smart once. I haven’t been able to find the quote for you so I’ll have to paraphrase – and I’ll also have to set it up less eloquently. She wrote a tremendously moving and deceptively simple song called When I Was a Boy. I’d quote you the whole thing because it’s as intricate and powerful as a poem but the key lines for today are:

I was a kid that you would like, just a small boy on her bike
Riding topless, yeah, I never cared who saw.
My neighbor come outside to say, “Get your shirt,”
I said “No way, it’s the last time I’m not breaking any law.”

Notice the ‘small boy on her bike’. It’s not a mistake. It’s another case of a writer using the wrong word and thereby making a far more powerful point. But you need to hear the whole song for that. For now, the story continues.

Some years after writing this song, Williams was performing it at a festival. I want to say Lilith Fair but I’m not sure. I want to say that it was an all- or a mostly-women event. The Lilith Fair concerts didn’t exclude men from the audience, did they? I adore the music from those concerts. Anyway, whatever the festival, this particular gig was at least very much mostly women in the audience and Williams says she thought about taking her top off during that song.

But she didn’t.

Because there were cameras.

And here’s the thing I think was so smart, so perceptive: she said that cameras are male.

It could be ten years since she said that and I still think about it.

I can’t let you out of a story. If I’ve actually managed to get you into a tale or even into this blog’s nattering, the idea of deliberately chucking you out is abhorrent. And I think sex, shown on screen, does exactly that. I suspect that if I looked, I might – might – just possibly be able to find you a dodgy photo on the internet. I know, it’s unlikely. But if I ever did manage to do it, you know that posting it here as some kind of an example would change the blog totally. You would see that image before you read a word and this would no longer be about drama or even sex, it would be about Page 3 porn and the like.

Sex increases the ratings but it changes the content and it decreases the drama.

For me, anyway.

But this fascinates me because one reason I write about people instead of the universe ending in tentacle-based peril is sex. Let me pin it down more precisely: I find immense, seismic drama in the instant before sex.

We are all this cauldron of desires and fears and for most of the day we go around hiding both from everyone. We cover ourselves in clothes and an awful lot of pretence. I hesitated over telling you that gag about my favourite sexual position being “present” because for it to work at all, I needed you to believe I could be telling you the truth right up to that word. That was difficult. But then it’s supposed to be. Drama is difficult, drama is telling the truth. Not necessarily telling you something real, but telling each of us something true even as we are lying.

And so there we are, wrapped in our clothes and our culture and our neuroses and we are so practiced at it all that it would surely take dynamite to break through to the real us.

Yet there is dynamite. Thank god there’s dynamite.

There’s a reason I think we use the word naked. It does mean nude but it also, to me, means more than clothes being opened or shed, it means us being opened. Revealing our skin is revealing what’s under that skin, what’s inside us. It means revealing our desire. Our hope. Fear.

Desire is the dynamite. Wanting someone in a way that’s more like your very body and soul yearning than it is your mind thinking or being at all rational. The complete need for this person. The need that makes you blush, makes you incoherent.

And if it’s dynamite for opening us up, it is primacord explosive wrapped around your waist because of the risk. Admitting your desire to yourself is one thing, but admitting it to this other person is geometrically, exponentially, infinitely harder. You’re laying yourself bare and all of the power of your cauldron is irrevocably put in their hands. In every physical and emotional way, you are giving yourself to them and in that instant they may reject you.

There’s no going back from that: you can try saying you were kidding, but nobody’s ever kidded.

It is do or die inside.

So I find romances and romcoms deliciously tense. That’s silly, even preposterous of me because there surely has never been a modern romance tale that didn’t end happily. But as the couple tentatively lean in for that first kiss, I feel like they’re playing with live ammunition.

These are terribly male types of analogies and metaphors, aren’t they? I’m not trying to be masculine writing about romcoms, I just don’t know another way to convey the totality of the damage done by rejected love and desire.

Also, I’ve just realised why I wrote the qualifying word ‘modern’ back there. Wuthering Heights. Oh, my lights, the power in that novel. Emily Bronte knew all this stuff, even if she did write weird narrative structures and never thought to include tentacles.

When I watch a romance, a romcom, a drama, I am truly edge-of-seat until the first kiss. After that, I’m not fussed. Sex, nudity, cor, phroaw, whatever, do what you like. Have an orgy on screen for all I care. I’m not saying I’m either prudish or even trying to claim that I am somehow immune to body parts, but sex on film isn’t explosive, it isn’t story, it just isn’t drama.

I started writing this to you as a gag and yet I’ve actually learnt something about myself: I’ve learnt that although I have mocked films before for cutting to rippling waves on the ocean or whatever, it turns out that I am actually quite fine with a kiss and –

FADE TO BLACK.

There’s a contrived, gratuitous underwear scene in Star Trek Into Darkness and I didn’t notice. I saw the film on a giant screen and in 3D and I am male but I did not register a scene with Alice Eve as Dr Carol Marcus wearing considerably less than a Starfleet-issue uniform. I keep hearing references to it now but it was only when some review included a still from it that I remembered it was there at all.

I obviously saw it, I have zero doubt that I shook my head at the whole thing when it happened. And you can bet that one reason it all left my head instantly was that we see so many women characters wearing so little in so many films. It’s just because full costumes are expensive. That’s the reason. Austerity.

But the other reason that it left my head a frame later is that Carol Marcus is just not a character. There’s nothing there. She ultimately provides a plot point but what’s then meant to be deeply emotional is just a bit of a shrug because after most of the film is done, I still have no interest in her. I do remember having that brief kind of half squint, half blink you get when you’re trying to work something out: I remember thinking ‘why are they doing this?’ during her introduction scene. I’ll accept anything in a film, anything at all, unless it throws me out of the story and I was a little thrown.

Part of me doesn’t want to tell you why because I’m reluctant to spoil a film, but that’s silly of me as I’m about to wreck it. And I’m wrecking it because by the end, I wasn’t thrown, I was drop-kicked out of the movie. Star Trek Into Darkness has myriad problems and they are all well reported online, but there is one writing issue that I think is a knife and I’m not seeing that mentioned anywhere.

So I’m mentioning it. Alongside mixed metaphors about drop-kicked knives.

Here’s an amusing list of the film’s head-scratching moments: you’ll laugh more if you read it after seeing the movie, but you’ll save money if you read it before.

And here’s Star Trek writer David Mack exploding about the failed science in the movie. For all that I think science should always be correct in a story, I’m really against the science in this one because it makes so little sense that it damages the tale. You know that Star Trek is all about these spaceships flying around where nobody’s yet got to and you know it’s all about whether Captain Kirk can save the day against impossible odds and whether he can even live to fight another day though you suspect he just might. By the end of Star Trek Into Darkness, there is no need for any spaceship ever again and nobody can ever die ever again. Ever. And you will swear that the filmmakers didn’t notice they’d done that.

I noticed it. I also noticed the time a lot. The 3D process makes films considerably darker and that was a problem because it made checking my watch really difficult.

I didn’t initially see this writing issue that now so bothers me but that was because it came at the end. Up until then I was just getting progressively more irritated in general. I really enjoyed 2009’s Star Trek and hadn’t expected to: it made me a Trek convert and I came to this one very enthusiastically. But there’s a bit early on that’s a nice little nod to something in the old Star Trek movies and TV shows.

And then there’s another nod.

And another.

Then there’s a contorted speech that I could hear went down really well with the fans sitting behind me because it referenced a popular episode I do remember seeing some time. Okay.

Only, then there was another.

And if there is one reason that next time I’ll wait for the reviews before seeing a Star Trek movie, it’s because these references and homages built and built until whole scenes, whole sequences of scenes were remakes of famous moments from old ones. It gets so bad I was thinking “And… cue Spock…” just as he did precisely what you expect him to do. With the very dialogue you expect him to have.

It’s a giant emotional scene toward the climax and it is stunningly irritating and empty because all you can think of is that you’ve seen this before somewhere and it was alright then. The sequence revolves around the death of a major character and death has no impact in Star Trek anyway: I’m sure a real fan could tell me when a character has died and not come back to life next week but I don’t know of one. This time it is especially empty because of this pastiche sequence but also because it comes after a risible scene where Kirk abruptly and insanely interrupts an interrogation to ask Dr McCoy “What are you working on that will save my life later?”

He doesn’t quite say that but it’s only a pixel more subtle. I laughed and the wall of fans behind me growled. I like to think they were growling with me, not at me.

So anyway, we’re into the final parts of the film and I am no longer in the story, I am also completely out of Maltesers and having a rotten time, and then they do this. They have a very exciting end sequence and it is completely destroyed because of what happened in the film’s very exciting opening sequence.

Follow. When the film begins and we’re on some planet or other, the USS Enterprise has been hiding under the ocean. You know in your heart that this doesn’t make sense somehow but it’s still very exciting as the ship rises up from the sea and flies off across the sky before heading out into space. It’s very well done, it looks real, you could clap.

Only, then the end sequence is all about the USS Enterprise starting off in space and, damaged, now falling toward Earth. It’s going to hit atmosphere, this spaceship is going to be flying through the sky.

Yes? And? So?

We’ve seen that, we know the ship can fly really realistically across the sky, it’s great. But now we have to buy that this is suddenly a Calamitous Bad Thing when it was Perfectly Fine Before.

Writers Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman try to turn this into a devastatingly, heart-stoppingly thrilling moment by having some character or other actually say: “This bit’s exciting, I know we did this earlier but now it’s completely different and we’re in such danger, I can’t tell you, man, we could even die and everything”.

There’s a writing maxim that you should show rather than tell and I don’t agree 100% – there’s a fantastic example in Battlestar Galactica where the telling of a tale is riveting and the later showing of it it is a bit boring – but I think I agree 98%. Star Trek Into Darkness has what should have been and really could have been, actually was, a huge finish with little emotion but buckets of spectacle. Telling us that it’s exciting is like trying to put a bandaid on when you really know you should’ve thrown away that opening sequence.

In television, if the start doesn’t grab or seduce you into the story enough, you’ve changed channels. In films, you’re there to the end and it’s the end that’s in your mind and heart when you leave the cinema. I don’t know, maybe I would’ve walked out of there thinking the film had problems but was exciting. But instead I just walked out of there irritated.

The opening sequence unquestionably cost more millions of dollars than I can imagine, and I can imagine quite a bit, but the film was hurt by it. And if they’d cut it at the script stage, the cost would’ve been no more than wear and tear on the delete key.

I don’t go to films to get writing lessons, I go to be in the story but when you’re not, you take what you can. And I’ve taken away a writing lesson: don’t give the goods away too soon.

Alan Plater used to read my scripts and you know that he was tremendously useful, you know he was kind. But let me say it anyway: he was terrifically useful and he was really kind, most especially on the very first one. The Strawberry Thief – I still like the title – got the full Plater treatment in the 1990s and I’ve remembered every word he wrote me.

The key part, I think, was what you’d now call a praise sandwich or at least a criticism with a bit of a praise topping. He told me that my stage directions had regularly made him laugh aloud, but that my job was to get that life and humour into the dialogue instead. Because, after all, the audience never sees the stage descriptions.

I also remember that when I next did a script, his key comment was that I’d done this, I’d got the energy into where it could be seen. He said it was “a great step for writer-kind”.

I’ve only recently realised quite how much he shaped me in how I write descriptions in scripts. I’m a dialogue man, I’m a dialogue fan, that’s where I would’ve said I put my attention and effort and – however much it is – my talent. No, I’m hesitating over that word. Can I go again? I’m a dialogue fan, that’s where I would’ve said I put my attention and effort and – however fast it is – my typing.

But I wrote a book about Alan’s The Beiderbecke Affair and he has great descriptions in there. What’s more, he wrote them with a very canny eye toward getting cast and crew to read them where usually they, well, don’t.

“That’s right, actors don’t,” said James Bolam in my book. “You go yeah, yeah, but his you read. I mean, his stage directions are worth a read in themselves. They’re so funny, some of them, and they’re so evocative. They create the mood that he wants, that he feels, that he thinks. They’re all done in the same way, not sort of stuck in there but part of the narrative.”

He also had a way of writing just the right amount. He’d conjure that mood in a very short line and sometimes they’d be funny, always they’d be efficient: you’d get his point immediately and you’d enjoy getting it. So – again, I’m ripping off my own book here, but – take this for an example of apparently simple, short, description. It’s from The Beiderbecke Affair:

SC. 11 EXT. TREVOR’S FLAT – NIGHT

Establishing shot of Trevor’s flat. The cityscape of Leeds, lights shining like it was LA.

(You can see it for yourself in episode 1, What I Don’t Understand is This… which is on a really good Beiderbecke DVD set from Network DVD.)

But can you believe that description was one reason I wanted to write about the show? There were myriad reasons but I knew that if I included that scene description, I could also include one of my favourite Alan Plater passages: the equivalent description from his Beiderbecke Affair novel. The story is that an editor from Methuen was on location, had read the Affair script and specifically because of those descriptions asked Alan if he’d like to try writing a novel. He did and this is what he did with that same moment, translated to a novel:

A panoramic sweep across the urban landscape of the mighty Leeds conurbation at night could easily lead to confusion with San Francisco, if there were a bridge, Rome, if there were a Vatican, or Athens, given an Acropolis and a whiff of lapsed glory. In the blackness, the sub-standard housing and empty factories disappear, and the lights shining out, from street lamps and buses, public houses and filling-stations, police cars and off-licences, seem like beacons of hope in a hostile world. They are not, but they look like it.

I love that because of its way of getting you to picture a beautiful camera move, because of its Plateresque wry way of appearing to say very little and to say it with humour while it’s really undercut with a vivid example of his worldview. That last “They are not, but they look like it” seems to me to be final, closed, decisive and firmly bleak yet still open and hopeful. It’s someone who sees the world as it is but also as it could be, as perhaps it should be and is neither ashamed of being cynical nor makes any effort to hide idealism. If you want to get really, really, pixel-picky, it’s the comma. The entire description has stayed in my mind for three decades in part because of that rolling series of city names but mostly because of that comma in the last line. It’s a beat, a breath, a voice.

Tell me I’m not detail-orientated.

But listen, this is all on my mind because the other day I co-presented a talk on descriptions at South & City College here in Birmingham. Novelist Robin Sidwell is writer in residence there and runs a regular writing group session. I talked at one about scriptwriting and rejections, and judged a short contest with him. It was a script contest but we both separately remarked that it was unusual how long the descriptions were. He’s a novelist, I thought he’d like longer, richer, fuller scene descriptions but we talked about this and turned out to agree on everything. I mean, everything. He had this idea that we could present a talk on descriptions in script versus those in novels and part of me leapt to the Plater example, part of me enjoyed the idea that Robin and I could presumably spar: he’d be the real lecturer, he’d be the good cop championing novel-like long descriptions, I’d be the bad copy.

It didn’t work out like that. Apart from the, you know, small issue that he knows novels infinitely better than I do, we could’ve given each other’s side of the talk. We did do one swap: he gave me a novel to dramatise in script and I gave him a script to novelise. The bastard improved my story.

So I really wanted to spar.

But he had another reason for this talk. He’s got some students who are unsure whether they want to write novels or scripts so they’re really doing both. At the same time. In the same piece. I think this is common. I read a script once that had got someone a 2:1 degree in screenwriting and I would’ve handed it back to them after page 1 because, I believe, it was unreadable. Because of the descriptions. There were technical issues to do with the scene slugs, but it was just stuff that made it really slow to read and I maintain that if a script is slow to read, it doesn’t get read.

You can argue that producers and script editors should read on whether something is slow and hard or not. You can also argue that I’m in no position to talk about going on at length.

But working with Robin and remembering Alan, I realised that you can summarise my entire view on script description with that note that the audience never sees the stage directions.

So if you find yourself writing something like, I don’t know:

EXT. CENTRAL PARK – AROUND DUSK, THE CITY LIGHTS JUST COMING ON, THIEVES AND MUGGERS JUST STARTING TO SET UP STALL

Brad Chap sits on a park bench. He’s 20s, a little the worse for wear, maybe still carrying some scars from when Take That broke up, maybe the wounds of disappointment are still bleeding from when Take That reunited, and if he were a car, he’d be a Renault Megane with hatchback and a decent sound system that he routinely connects his iPhone to with Bluetooth. Brad could have been a lawyer, he could’ve been doctor, but instead he’s an international jewel thief and sometimes – usually when another woman has broken up with him because of his nervous, twitchy behaviour whenever police go by – he regrets his life choices. But not today. Today he’s just heard a good joke and it’s lifted him, it’s made him think that perhaps, just perhaps, life is actually worth living and if it’s raining now, it will clear up later and there’s a chance of sunshine. Not much of a chance, but enough for Brad. He is the world’s greatest optimist. He doesn’t look like it, but he is.

What will the audience actually see? If you think they’ll just see a man in his twenties sitting on a bench then, no, sorry, you’re wrong. They won’t even see that much. Because no producer would’ve read to the end, no producer would buy that script.

Nor would you. Because that description of Brad might as well be a description of the writer: not that the writer is a little worse for wear and all that, but descriptions can describe more than they appear to and in this case what I’d take away from reading this is that the writer is an amateur. It tells me that the writer doesn’t understand film. It’s not as if there are rules and it’s not as if we aren’t all amateurs until we’ve been blooded, but a writer doing that description will not have written an interesting drama.

I keep saying that the audience doesn’t see a word of your stage description but actually that’s only true of your ultimate audience. Your first one is the producer, the director, the cast and they do. They all see every single word.

They just don’t read any of it.

But when something is described the way Brad Chap was, there is no need to read it. Simply registering the length and the type of description it is, you know to reject the whole script.

There’s another difference with this first type of audience. The ultimate audience turns up to enjoy the movie, the first audience of these cast and crew are turning up to make the film with you. They are your collaborators. So your script is a working tool for you and them to work together, it is a blueprint for a drama that you will all make.

I put all this effort and energy into dialogue but I will also be as quick and precise and straightforward as I can be with stage directions. So if I were really writing the adventures of Brad Chap, that scene would run:

EXT. CENTRAL PARK – EVENING

BRAD CHAP (20s, optimist in a bad world) waits on a park bench.

That’s it. Do you need anything else? If you do, put it in the dialogue. It’s harder to put it in dialogue because that’s not dramatic, it’s just telling people the plot or the backstory or the description but that’s why dialogue is wonderful. It carries all this exposition, it propels all of the action, it is the characters. You do it so that nobody notices that the dialogue is even written, you do it so that it is as if these characters had just thought of these words. And you do it so that what they actually say is nowhere near what they really mean and yet the audience gets it. God, dialogue is a reason to live.

Description isn’t, not for me. If you want to write descriptions, write a novel. Or a blog. Cough.

To sell me a script, make it quick to read the descriptions and make the dialogue wonderful. I want to enjoy reading the script. I want scripts to get me engrossed and involved and I want them to regularly make me laugh aloud.

And I consider it a great step for writer-kind when they do.

I offer that the best thing any writer can do is get someone else to do the writing. You’re thinking they might do my blogs shorter and let you get a word in. You’re thinking Dan Brown could retain his apparently gripping stories but that you and I might be able to read beyond chapter one. (Didn’t you say you’d managed more than me?)

But I mean it and I wish it were something you could very readily do. Commission other writers and it will change the way you write. It will change how you see the whole process. And it will mean fully half the rejections you get won’t trouble you.

Best of all, you’ll no longer take it personally when an editor phones you up, skips all the polite stuff about how great your typing is and just comes straight in laughing about the very worst bit of your script. It’s happened to me and I admit I wish I hadn’t written that scene, whichever it was, but I laughed along with that editor because he was funny, he was right, it was a dreadful scene – and because I knew we’d fix it. I can’t remember the scene and I’m struggling to remember which script it was but I can tell you the editor: Alan Barnes at Doctor Who.

You want to write the best drama you can and that’s what he and all the Big Finish people want too. It’s not what every editor, producer or director I’ve worked for wants but usually it is. (I once had a director whose chief dramatic aim, I am certain, was to make sure he could catch his last bus home after the play. I never knew a human being could make me as angry but now, when I can instantly recall the bile but cannot draw his name to mind, I’m glad it happened. Because I wonder if I’d appreciate the directors I’ve worked with since. Ken Bentley, Nick Briggs and Barnaby Edwards at Big Finish; Polly Tisdall, Tessa Walker and Tom Saunders at the Birmingham Rep. I imagine I would, I imagine I must, but I really do because of this fella.)

This is going to sound all idealistic and happy-clappy but everyone wants the best show they can make. I found plenty of jaded people in journalism, maybe I’ve just been lucky in drama so far. But if the ideal is that this is what we want, the harsh practicality is that there is never any time to piddle about.

And this is one reason for rejections. Nobody wants to reject anyone, everyone wants the material to be great, everyone needs the material to be great right now or sooner, please. If your piece isn’t what that person or people need at this moment, they’re off looking for the one that is and you’re rejected.

I feel I’m telling you something you think is obvious and yet it keeps coming up. Rejection isn’t personal, it just feels as I it is because we’re writers and we are required to dig very deep and scrape very personally to make drama. Even though you know, intellectually, that it isn’t personal, it feels it. When it’s your innards on the page, it’s hard not to take a rejection as being a rejection of you.

So commission someone else and see what it’s like. I’m not sure how you can do that very easily, I’m afraid. But I’ve done it on magazines and quickly got to the stage where I had no ruth at all. You need this or that piece and you need it by a certain date: you don’t care who writes it, you just have these pages to fill and fill well.

It kills me to say this, as a writer, but we’re not the most reliable people. After my first month on a magazine, every deadline I ever gave anyone was a lie. It had to be. I had to have time for them to be late, I had to have time for me to cope if they failed to deliver at all and I had to have time to handle it if their writing wasn’t good enough.

You can of course argue that it was only my opinion whether their writing was good enough or not, but that was my job. And if I didn’t do it or I wasn’t good enough at it, I’d be rejected and replaced.

I found that there were a few writers who I could really rely on. I’d know they’d write well and I’d know they would deliver on time. I used them over and over again – and so would you. From the outside, it looked like I’d got myself a stable of writers and that it was a pretty closed bunch. On the inside, it was that I was trying to get a stable of writers and unfortunately it was a pretty closed group because I couldn’t find many more to add to it.

Getting into my stable was hard. I don’t say this to make out that anyone would want to, that it was in someway a special set, but genuinely, really, practically: it was hard to get in. I had this many pages to fill with this many articles and I had this long in which to do it. It was easier to hand over a feature to one of these writers I knew would do it. I could hand that off and forget about it for a few weeks. As those weeks ticked by, it became less that it was easy to hand it over to them, more that it was essential.

Taking on someone new is a risk and a risk that takes a lot of time. And this was just on a magazine: drama is so much bigger, so much more complex and so much more pressured. So taking on someone new is so much more of a risk and takes so much more time – that you don’t have.

I’ve never commissioned drama. I’m new to writing it. But because I have commissioned writers, I believe I get it. People can tell you rejection isn’t personal but I think you really only get it when you’ve been even briefly on the other side.

It doesn’t absolve you from trying to write better but it does stop you wanting to give up.

Even when a guy phones you and laughs down the line.

I’ve a couple of events coming up that I really want to tell you about. If you’re anywhere near them here in the Midlands, it would be a treat to see you.

June 1, 2013: Gillian Bailey at Kaleidoscope

Whether you only know her for this or you’re well aware of her huge acting career, you know that Gillian Bailey was in Here Come the Double Deckers. I’m interviewing her on stage about that show and this career plus what she’s doing now.

It’ll be at the Kaleidoscope event at the Talbot Hotel, Stourbridge, (map) from 3pm. Admission free but donations to RNLI encouraged. Add to Calendar

I met Gilli for the first time last year while researching a book about a show she only briefly appears in. So briefly that I nearly didn’t contact her. But I’m so pleased I did because she is funny and fascinating and her academic career is so interesting that sometimes we both had to promise to get back to the subject of the book. I still can’t tell you what the book is but to save you scouring Gilli’s ridiculously long list of credits on IMDb, let me say that this one begins with “B” and ends “lake’s 7”.

Dr Gilli Bush-Bailey is a professor of women’s theatre and this is a rare chance to hear her talk about her work and her acting. I think it’s a bit of a tribute to Kaleidoscope that they managed to get her and I am chuffed that I’m the one who gets to natter with her on stage.

If you’ve ever heard of a lost TV show being miraculously recovered, the odds are that Kaleidoscope was involved. It is a non-profit organisation that preserves and catalogues and archives British television. This is its 25th anniversary year and I think I’ve been using their books for most of that time.

I used to write a thing in Radio Times called On This Day – it was easily my favourite gig of all my favourite gigs at RT – and it involved a lot of studying back issues of the magazine. Actually, it shouldn’t have been quite such a lot but it’s impossible not to get absorbed by the job. It was an immense benefit to me that Birmingham Central Library had a set of Radio Times issues and I would spend a long and delicious time there, eventually coming to notice that so were some other people.

I remember struggling to find a fact I was after and becoming very aware that there must’ve been five people with their laptops out on the desks near me, all using RT back issues and all typing very fast. I promise you, I looked at them and I knew. Kaleidoscope, I said. Yes, they said – and here’s that fact you were after.

Tremendous people, doing an overwhelming job and making my research work infinitely easier. Have a look at their event site for details of everything at the 1 June event and their books for the reference works they have for sale. When I met them that time, I had a couple of their spiral bound drama books. A couple of years ago I bought the ten-volume perfect-bound set. And last year I bought the new PDF version of this stuff. It is ferociously annoying: I put the PDFs on my Dropbox folder and so now there is nowhere I can go that I can’t just take a little peek and end up spending hours entirely absorbed.

Kaleidoscope was also a great help with my book, BFI TV Classics: The Beiderbecke Affair and it’s funny that I should mention that to you because that’s what the other June event is about.

June 13, 2013: Meet local author William Gallagher

I’ve been invited to speak at the Jewellery Quarter Bookwormers Group about The Beiderbecke Affair. It’s at the Drop Forge pub, 6-10 Hockley Street, Birmingham, B18 6LB (map) from 7:30pm to around 9pm ish. Admission free. Add to calendar.

The group meets monthly or so for a drink in this most gorgeous pub which has these nooks and crannies dotted around. It’s all very informal and you get to talk properly: I’ve been to a couple of events just to see what it was like and have been thoroughly entertained by speakers like novelist Anna Laurence Pietroni, organiser Simon Stokes and everyone I happened to sit next to.

Have a look at Simon’s Meetup page for details of the group and the other speakers coming up, would you?

Which reminds me, I’ve got a new website as of today and it even plays nice with mobile phones. It doesn’t mention any events. I’ve just realised that now. Um.

So I had this small play on earlier in the week. Very small. Closed performance, script-in-hand, you know the thing. It was done as the culmination of a writing programme at the Birmingham Rep that saw fifteen of us writers working toward this week’s performances. Now, it wasn’t a competition but we didn’t collaborate either: these were fifteen separate short plays and you know every one of us secretly feared our one would be the worst and secretly hoped that our one would be the best.

For all that I talk to you ceaselessly about my work, I’m usually actually very modest about it – if for ‘modest’ you read ‘has no clue whether it’s any good or not so had best keep quiet’.

But not this time.

This time I’m telling you the truth. My play, Fat Priests, was excellent.

Easily in the top fifteen.

The truth that I do know and that I am rushing to say to you is that Fat Priests was new. I mean that literally, it was written for this event – though I so clearly remember in the 1990s telling a friend named Peter Guttridge that I had this great title and not one clue what to do with it – but it’s new in more senses than that.

I was very aware of this Birmingham Rep programme, Write Away, because my wife Angela Gallagher got on it last year. That was so exciting: every Monday for ten weeks I’d wave her off and really just spend the evening waiting for her to come back to tell me all about it. She would come home elated and it was wonderful. And she wrote a final piece called Fun-Packed Flat Pack – about a woman living in Ikea – that was marvellous. Really flew high on its performance night and she was being back-slapped about it for the rest of the run. And then when I got on this year’s one, it was delicious just how many times her play was mentioned. Usually it would be in a sentence that would suddenly take a left turn and become “- and of course that’s William’s wife Angela”. So she wasn’t being mentioned because I was there, but because I was there, I was gobbling up every mention.

And, I’ll admit this, I was also thinking I can’t let her down and do a rubbish piece for myself. She’s got a reputation here, she’s got form.

I got really worked up about that. And, stupid William, I also did the journalist thing: I looked up everybody else on the programme before it started. You just don’t walk into a room cold if you can help it. It’s not as if I was going to interview anybody, but we all have big social media footprints these days, for the five seconds it takes to see what someone’s done, I will spend those five seconds. The trouble is, this bunch was a bit startling. Poets, playwrights, performers, professionals: not everyone had written before but every one made me wonder how I’d managed to get in.

So I’m walking into that first session with the memory of Angela’s great group in my mind and the image of this year’s great group in my face. They were all instantly terrific, I mean all of them. I really liked these people and – flash forward to today – I’m going to miss the Monday night nattering.

But – flash right back to then, you, come on, we’re not done yet – I was thoroughly scared I would not be able to write something new. It had to be new. They’d never know if it came from my teetering pile of old ideas or old scripts. But I would. This had to be new: by the end of ten weeks, I had to have written a new short play.

We met on that first Monday night and I wrote my play on that first Tuesday morning.

Well, actually, I wrote a play. It was a short piece called Entrenched and it was fairly typical me: a nice enough idea, good enough characters, good dialogue – I do write good dialogue, that’s about the only thing I will say and I say it because dialogue is so important to me in drama – but, you know, meh. It wasn’t bad, wasn’t good, it didn’t matter.

But it was written. And that got me over the scare at the start of the programme: even if it wasn’t good, that play was done and could be handed in if necessary.

Somewhere along the ten weeks, though, I think I had the things I care most about in drama be pulled out, examined, scrubbed up and, mostly, put back. And somewhere along the ten weeks, I wrote Fat Priests.

I should really tell you about it but I’m hesitant. I want you to see it. I’ve no idea whether you’ll ever even be able to, there is no plan to stage it publicly. And short plays are fine for events like this but they’re not so hot for yer ackshual going-to-the-theatre evenings. I think that on the night Fat Priests came in around 20 minutes: in my mind I can easily expand it to 21. I don’t know how to make it longer.

But one of the reasons for that is a good ‘un: it works at 20 minutes. It’s tight and though you could drop in a line or two, though you could take out a line or three, you’d have to do some serious restitching of the whole piece to make that change work. Everything leads to everything else, that kind of thing. I like that. Especially if you can’t tell it’s the case until you try poking about under the hood.

I’m surprised that I managed to cover an issue, a subject that matters very much to me – I was going to say, I was typing the words that I’m surprised I managed to do this in such a tight, short length but actually I’m just surprised to say I did it at all. I’d like to be surprised to say that I managed it successfully, but that’s too far: I don’t know.

Except I do know that at the end of rehearsals, I explained to my cast and my director that I have no faith in my writing yet I felt what the four of us had created that afternoon was special.

Fat Priests was directed by Polly Tisdall and it starred Rochi Rampal and Laurence Saunders. Very powerful actors. Rochi brought more venom and just a greater mess of conflicts inside her character than I think I wrote. Even on the first read through, Laurence delivered a huge line and froze the room in the silence that followed. In that silence, I could hear a ticking clock. Hadn’t noticed it before, not even when we had happened to be silent. But it was like he made the silence more silent.

There was a lot I didn’t think I’d written. Polly saw a parallel between my setting and the deeper themes of the piece and – I warned her I would do this – I am now telling you that this was all my idea, it was a piece of brilliance and it was all me. Not her. Me. And it’s my name on the script, QED.

I’ve never watched an actor work to get into a character before. Watched them discuss it and debate it, reaching for what makes a character be that character. They’d get to a realisation about it and, inside, I’d be going “Yes!” It was thrilling to see them get a subtext or an undertow that I’d worked to provide yet also worked to keep as a hidden subtext. But then they kept on going further and finding more and I’m thinking, jaysis, they must be right. My script must be fantastic. Got to be.

Drama is collaboration, that’s one of the myriad things I love about it. But one of the things about collaboration is that while, yes, you have to work with other people and not be all precious about your writing, you also have to step up to their level. And this was the Birmingham Rep. It’s in its centenary year, it’s been a part of my life as an audience member, it’s been the subject of my ambition, it has a gigantic and impressive history – it was the first theatre in the world to stage Shakespeare in modern dress – and did I mention that this was the Birmingham Rep? I look back at the other shorts and plays I’ve done and, fun as most were, this was like when I got that first Doctor Who contract: it was real.

You can’t go back from real. I’m conscious that on the one hand I am making the Alps out of a snowball here and on the other that I’m pratting about like anything. Don’t mention to anyone I’ve said all this, would you? I can tell you because you’ve got that kind of face. And as small as this is, as little as Fat Priests is, it was very big to me.

Fat Priests was first performed at the Birmingham Rep’s offices on Wednesday 8 May, 2013. Oh! It was the very first one staged of all the fifteen this year so for twenty minutes, it was the best!

I’ve only just thought of that. Fantastic.

What I thought at the time was that I can relax now, I can just enjoy all fourteen of the rest. And, my lights, it’s fascinating to see where all these writers went. Writing is always a peek into someone’s soul and a glimpse of their worldview, even if they don’t realise it, certainly even if they deny it. Though clearly that’s not the case with my writing. No. Noooooo.

Listen, the Rep is moving back into its main offices and so I don’t think there’ll be another Write Away group before next year. But keep an eye on the Birmingham Rep website and apply for it when you can. Just remember to invite me to your play or I won’t be able to get in.

If you haven’t done this, you would do it: yesterday I stood at a bus stop, leaning against the printed timetable and using an app on my iPhone to find out when the next bus was due. Anyone who doesn’t have a smart phone might mock me, but you know it’s the truth, you know that you are so dependent on the information you can get on your mobile that this wasn’t silly of me, it was a profound statement about the world we now live in.

But the NextBuses app on my phone was wrong. It was the kind of wrong you only come to realise after you’ve been waiting ten minutes for the bus it said was due in seconds. Ten minutes of increasing cold, rain and the sense of having been conned. Never fear, though, there was that other timetable… app. There’s a fairly new one for my region called NetNav which is ace at planning bus routes for you and ridiculously good at listing the departure times of every bus within a mile of you. And sure enough, the times it gave me were only in the most generous sense even similar to the ones NextBuses listed.

After about five more minutes, I started to get suspicious.

So, trying to look nonchalant, I turned around and read the printed timetable on the bus shelter. I’m not certain why it’s called a shelter when that is one of the many things it doesn’t do, but as a housing for a timetable, it could do no wrong. And sure enough, the times it gave me weren’t even similar to NextBuses or NetNav.

You’re starting to think I was at a stop that had been abandoned, aren’t you? A stop that had stopped. (There are two bus stops near where Angela works that have never had any buses, not one. It’s as if they were put there in the hope that if you build bus shelters, buses will come. It’s a sound theory with plenty of precedent and if it had worked for them, by now I might’ve started building a shelter myself.)

The bus came in its own sweet time.

And when I’d got on, it waited at the stop for the correct time to depart. Which appeared to be as wrong as all the others but had the benefit of being when the bus actually departed.

I don’t expect you to happen to know the methodology of the West Midlands bus transport system, but I would like you to tell me why I carry on using these apps on my phone. This is far from the first time that everything has disagreed and everything has been wrong. In my office, I’ve also used the online bus planner and got times from it that were only accurate to the nearest day. But I keep using all of this.

I have become so dependent on my phone that I keep using this stuff and I keep forgetting the equivalents of the printed timetable behind me. I know I’m not alone in this. And you’re smart but I can see it in your eyes, you do this kind of thing too.

Do you also swear when it goes wrong? No, me neither.

I’ve told you before that I don’t tend to swear. No reason, I just don’t tend to. But there was a time when I didn’t at all. Again, no especial reason not to, just no especial to. But I learned. I learned to swear during the three evenings it took to fit a hard drive into my PC. This was a long time ago, back when there were PCs, and it wasn’t difficult, it was just stunningly tedious: I can’t remember all the steps now but it even included twiddling with the jumpers on the computer’s motherboard. If you don’t know what a motherboard jumper is, you’re looking at the wrong guy for the answers.

I promise you that I knew then and that I got it right then. First time.

It didn’t work. There were just enough permutations and I still had just enough interest in computing that I was willing to keep going and then there was just enough boiling rage that I wasn’t going to be beaten by this sodding thing. On the third night, I took everything apart, breathed deeply, and started again from the very start. I did each step perfectly and I did each step exactly the way I had done it the first time.

It worked.

I had a huge new hard disk and I had learnt the language that makes mothers blush.

I can’t remember what huge meant then, I know it was not a fraction of what you’d call huge now, and I also can’t remember having either that patience or the time to be that patient in. Strangely, as well as the swearing, I also learned this day that computers are alchemy and that knowledge has helped me through turbulent times when, lo, one’s faith in the cheapest equipment slapped together without being tested, was tested.

I trusted that the computer must be right and that I must be doing something wrong with fitting this thing. Trusted is too active a word, I just knew it was right and I was wrong. And you would think that having this dented would stop me believing the machines whether they are cheap PCs or, to be honest, gorgeous phones.

But no. I obviously still assume my phone knows more than me but I promise that’s less my bowing to the great electronic gods and more that I’ve twigged how everybody knows more than me. Yet the Hard Disc Debacle isn’t what showed me the truth, the closest I’ve come to Damascus was with what used to be called a Turbo Button.

If you know about turbo buttons, you’ve forgotten them. They used to make your PC run slower. You read that right: turbo means slower. When PCs came out, they ran at some certain processor speed, God and many people know what speed but nobody cares. Then when PCs reached their tricky second album stage, they were faster and, gasp, it was so fast! It was so fast that people thought software might not be able to run properly at this heady speed. Again, I can’t remember the numbers but think of the way people believed you wouldn’t be able to breathe in a car that went faster than walking pace.

No software had any problem whatsoever. But in that very Microsofty kind of way, PC manufacturers added a feature that you didn’t need. It was a button to slow the PC down. You’re wrong to think that calling a slowing-down button Turbo is the reverse of all sense. You’re just not thinking computing. Remember the Start button in Windows 95 and how that’s where you go to switch the thing off. Remember Microsoft Word which doesn’t have a New or Open Document button at all.

Turbo buttons always had LCD displays above them that said what the speed was. It was always a two-digit display and it only ever showed one speed or the other. If your software was collapsing at the wicked fast high speed, you press the button and all is well again.

I was okay with turbo buttons and even then I wasn’t all that fussed when reviews – I worked on a computer magazine – would mention it as a feature.

Except, one day, myself and a colleague did a feature together where we learnt how to build PCs. ‘Build’ is a joke. Assemble. It was like those How Do They Do It shows on digital TV where they promise to explain exactly how a car works and begin by saying “And when the engine has been placed in the chassis…” before going on to detail the method of paint spraying used.

Building a PC meant doing what a million PC firms did: take this motherboard, which is effectively the entire computer already built for you, and add in a few other components such as a hard disc. I promise I didn’t swear. But I came close with the only fiddly bit in the whole thing: the turbo button. It had a button, obviously, but that was already built into the casing. It had some fiddly wires, that was the thing. Wires that ran from the button directly to the LED display above it. Directly and solely.

I can’t speak for all PCs, but in this one, the turbo button only controlled the display that said it was a turbo button. Someone had designed, engineered and manufactured a button whose sole purpose was to tell you that you had pressed it. In my mind, that was suddenly just like the way that Microsoft Word is fantastic, truly fantastic at recovering documents that have gone wrong and how I deeply wish they’d just put a fraction of that talent and effort into not losing the bloody documents in the first place.

That button may have been the day that I lost interest in what had to then been my career. It was possibly the day that I got more interested in the mind of someone who’d put that effort into lying with electronics than I ever really was in electronics.

It was probably the day that I realised I was relieved to go back to my desk and write on the review Mac I was using.

But it was definitely not the day that I learned to distrust computers and stop relying on them because that day has yet to come. It wasn’t yesterday with the cascade of instant but wrong information.

And it wasn’t today when my 5am alarm went off yet didn’t sound.

Today is the 76th weekday that I’ve been getting up at 5am to work, the 76th day that I have put a £1 coin in a pot, and the 76th day that I have risked losing all that. I’ve said this to you in surprisingly enormous detail before but if I ever fail to get up at 5am then I take out every coin that is in that pot and I start again.

This morning I was just thinking that surely it was 5am when I turned to the phone and saw the alarm button was on – the one that says Snooze or Cancel – and that it was 5:31am. The alarm had been on for over half an hour but it hadn’t made a whisper.

I made more than a whisper, I can tell you. And as I continue to prevaricate about emptying that pot, I’m whispering quite a bit.

Tell me you don’t lie awake all day thinking of exactly these:

Where does all the dirt come from? Archaeologists keep finding bones and pots and cities under the soil. I’m afraid to sit down.

How does my iTunes library have music I’ve never heard of?

Why won’t voice recognition take ‘yes’ for an answer?

Was Del Boy based on Steve Ballmer or is it the other way around?

How lazy do you have to be to have invented fractions in maths? Someone asks you what half of something is and you say it’s 1/2. “Take one of it and divide it by two, that’s a half. You’re welcome.” Fractions are the maths equivalent of ikea instructions for solving a problem.

Why do television news channels still preview tomorrow’s newspapers?

Is it really worth strip-mining the Earth and creating a multi-billion-pound industry just so I can wrap my sandwiches in tin foil?

When you book a coach with National Express, why doesn’t it check if there’s a seat until after it’s taken your credit card details? If there isn’t a seat, why doesn’t it tell you which part of your journey is full?

Why are people so critical of the Conservatives when all they’ve really done wrong for the country is be in power?

Why do online train booking websites ask if you’d also like to see prices and availability? Is it because trains are so expensive that the site is surprised you’re looking?

Why do tea bags come in pairs?

If a tree falls down in a forest and there’s no one to hear it, does it swear?

In the next few days I will finish writing an enormous book, a new two-hour Doctor Who audio and a short Birmingham Rep stage play. These have occupied my life, mind and breathing totally for the year so far. What do I do now?

You have so much to do that you don’t know where to start. Or often, you know exactly where you ought to start but, grief, no, please, anything but that. And some of this stuff is so small and fiddly that it’s irritating. And some of it is so big that it doesn’t seem worth starting because you’ll never make the slightest dent in it.

I’ve told you before about how I put a £1 coin in a pot every time I get up to work at 5am – and how I don’t remove a £1 coin if I fail one day, I remove every one of them and start again. But now I’m 67 unbroken weekdays into this and it means not only am I unbearable, not only can I reasonably say it’s a successful productivity technique, but I also have enough coins in the pot to spell out actual words.

Actually, there is software you can use for this and I have tried but it was just too much piddling about. One tremendous thing about OmniFocus as a To Do manager is that you tend to use it first and last thing in the day; you come back to it and go yep, yep, yep, done those. Rather than constantly ticking off things, it’s there when you want it and gone when you don’t. Similarly, Evernote stays under your fingers but it doesn’t get in the way or need you to fiddle. And the only software I found that helps with my other productivity gig turned out to be very pretty but require a lot of work.

The whole point here is to put your work into your work. So let me tell you about the thing I sometimes do that always helps when I do: it’s called Shape of the Day.

Two things to note:

– things are pretty bad when I use this

– I’m using it today

And I should probably also tell you that:

– it doesn’t work

But it helps. It also helped me sleep last night instead of churning over the To Do list and my calendar into the small hours. When you get up at the time I do, there aren’t many small hours to go into. Yesterday evening, I checked my calendar for today and I went over the various tasks I have outstanding. And I shaped the day around them.

Follow. My calendar says I’m doing one phone interview at 10am and another at 5pm. They may move around, one of them has shuffled about a little bit already, but they’re set and in the calendar. That means a certain amount of time is set before them. It will vary but it’s rarely less than an hour so now I know I have prep work at 9am and 4pm.

Since I know when I’ll start and I’ll know how I can typically last until I’m useless for anything, I could go on to plot out every hour of the day. It would be a stupid thing to do.

I plot out every hour of the day.

Only on days like this, you understand. Only on days when there is so much to do that you can’t see when you’ll be able to stop, to eat, to breathe out, or to write a blog post.

That doesn’t stop it being stupid. What makes it irrevocably silly is that you cannot plan out your day like this unless you somehow plan out everyone else’s too. And they stuck to it. And nothing else ever comes up in the middle of the day. And the phones wait until you were done. And everyone you need to email replies immediately with exactly what you need to know.

That’s why the Shape of the Day does not and cannot work. But it also can’t work because what I do is divide the 12/13 hours or whatever it is into hourly chunks. I’ll throw in the odd half hour, the odd ninety minutes, just to keep it varied. But chiefly it’s in hour blocks like we were back at school and working to a timetable. Hand on heart, swear to god, I’ve only this second thought of the timetable analogy. I may have to abandon this entire plan right now.

Anyway.

The reason dividing the day like this can’t work is that there is nothing you do, no task you have, no duty you need to perform, that happens to exactly fit sixty minutes. Plus, you will need the loo from time to time. (Caution: take regular screen breaks. I don’t do this, if there were time to do that I wouldn’t be using this stupid Shape of the Day idea, but I feel honour bound and legally advised to recommend you do.)

You could do what I do every time and that’s make the hour slot broad enough to cover lots of tasks but narrow enough that I get down to it. I can’t give you today’s example shape of the day because most of it is contractually required to be quiet for the moment and some of it is a thing I should’ve done for a friend about ten days ago and haven’t yet. (Pardon? This is all supposed to make us productive? I’ve gone off you now.)

But 06:00-07:00, for instance, was “Write plan for [redacted] project”. Maybe a bit too broad, but it did the job. I stopped the script I was on at 06:00 and I wrote for that hour on that project.

Here’s the last reason why the Shape of the Day is stupid and why I tell you it doesn’t work. I did not finish that [redacted] project plan by 07:00.

But here’s why it does work and why I do keep coming back to it at key moments: I now have a lot of the plan written and I didn’t have that before. If I’d sat here paralysed by having to choose what to do next, I wouldn’t choose and I would be paralysed.

Plus, at 07:00 the next slot in the day was a big current project that actually I returned to many, many hours today. But first I did 07:00-08:00 on it and I was significantly further into it by 08:00 than I was at the start. It was also fresh to me, it was so different from the development stuff I was doing right before it. And when I go back to that development stuff, it will seem fresh, I left it at a good spot, I know what the very next thing I want to do with it is, I will start its next hour at a clip. If I’d spent two hours on it instead, I’d be waning before I finished the second hour.

Sometimes you don’t have a choice, you’ve just got to press on. But there are two major and two comparatively minor projects I have got to deal with today and while the ideal is that I would finish some or all of them, the ideal is not going to happen.

So while I end up with a series of unfinished pieces today, they are all much further ahead than they would be if I’d just panicked, they are all high-energy because I broke them off before I went stale on them, they are all fresh because I came to them from somewhere completely different. Plus, there’s little to no paralysis of indecision because the decision has been made: in this hour I am working on this, next hour it’s that and so on. You can concentrate on the job at hand knowing consciously and unconsciously that you are doing what needs to be done. That is a strange one because it’s a lie: you’ve just made up this plan but you’re sticking with it as if it’s real. But it works and it helps enormously, it is perhaps the strongest part of this Shape of the Day notion because what it does is remove the flapping time: you don’t ever lose time thinking oooh, should I do this bit next or that?

You’re working the plan instead of flapping about trying to triage everything every time.

I have sketched out a shape of the day on paper before. Couldn’t read it. Now I tend to write it as a single task in OmniFocus or part of the day’s notes in Evernote. But you don’t have to use software. I’m not pushing an app on you. Not this week.

The software I tried was an iPhone app called Daily Routine and I’ve just seen, getting this screengrab (right) for you – and getting that screengrab right for you too – that despite my not using it at all this year, it has continued to chug away popping my calendar items into a kind of shape of the day.

And waiting hopelessly for me to go fiddle and add more.

You may like it a lot, I certainly enjoyed using it at first, but even this bare routine-less day looks too complicated for me.

I don’t do complicated. I’m the sort who has to pay himself to get up in the morning.

I’m not criticising, you understand, but I do note that you haven’t told me how you cope with paper notebooks. Last week – no, wait, let me say this, I like saying this – Previously On Self Distract: I told you all about this business that my handwriting doesn’t look human. So I don’t handwrite, I type. And while I can understand that people deeply love their Moleskin notebooks, they’re no use to me unless they somehow decipher scrawling.

But this does leave me with a big mystery. I seriously wonder and have fruitlessly asked many people over the years: how do you find everything? You have this great big notebook, or this tiny wee thing, and you jot down everything in it, but how you do find anything? I’ve worked with people who were fantastically well organised and they seemed unable to forget a single thing, they were instantly able to pick up where they left off in the last meeting notes.

And the spookiest thing of all, for me watching them, was that no matter what the meeting or how many years it had been since the last one, they still had the notes with them. Don’t these things ever run out? I’ve got this image of you as a notebook demon who every morning picks out these stylish outfits you wear and then goes to some strange machine where all your notebooks are kept and it trundles through all of them until it reaches the one you’ll need today. I picture you with the pods that used to slide under Thunderbird 2 until it reached exactly the one with what today’s rescue mission needs.

Granted, I felt sure I was over-thinking all this and that there would be a simpler answer like “I just bluff well” but I thought you might tell me. I thought you might break ranks, break out from this Magician’s Circle of notebook users and tell me how in the name of God you can always have the right bloody notebook with you and it never fills up and you never lose anything and what great alchemy do you have that means you can read your own writing?

Instead, I got asked about Evernote.

I always have this thing that if I know something, everybody else knows it. And that everybody else knew it sooner than I did. This doesn’t stop me rushing up to you like a puppy when I’ve found out something, but it does mean that I’m used to you going yeah? So? And? Seriously? You just got this?

Prepare to do the same now, but it’d be nice if you did it nicely. If you’re an old hand at Evernote, we’re going to have words about why you didn’t tell me this thing existed. If you’re an old hand at paper notebooks, I’m going to try to recruit you to my side. Especially since it’s a series of revisions and improvements to Evernote these past few months that have turned it from nice yet a bit ugly into something I use near constantly.

You can keep your handwriting. But paper notebooks must go.

Join me.

(Please picture me slowly beckoning you and imagine I have wide eyes like a cult leader. It’s my new look.)

Join us.

Join us.

Evernote is free software and a service that you can use for no money, nowt, none up to a certain generous point that I never came close to exceeding. It can be a paid-for service if you want more features, and I do, so I subscribe. Angela bought me a year’s subscription for Christmas and I’m not going back.

Evernote is a service that runs on just about anything I’ve ever heard of anyone using: iPhones, iPad, Macs, any web browser you’re passing, everything. (Okay, also Android and Windows. I think Linux. Not sure there.)

And Evernote is just a service for making notes in. There are a million apps for writing notes in. And it’s not like we were lacking for ways to type notes before apps came along. I used to write articles in Word and when the phone rang I’d just carry on typing. I became known for my surreal writing style because I cannot tell you how many features nearly went to press with a paragraph in the middle saying “Burt rang, needs spanner back”.

That doesn’t happen now because wherever I am, Evernote is a flick or a tap or a keystroke away and if I’ve got that phone crooked under my aching neck, I’m typing a little jotted note. When I hang up, maybe I’ll chuck the note away, maybe I’ll pass it off to my OmniFocus task list to work on later, most likely I’ll save it in Evernote knowing that this means I will always be able to find it again.

I make notes in Evernote. I don’t lose anything. I have every note I’ve ever written and I have them all wherever I am. I can find it all instantly. Surprise me with a board meeting and I’ll surprise you with last month’s minutes and the fact that I’ve done everything I said I would. (Though, to be fair, I’ll have leaned on OmniFocus more than Evernote for that.) But then when we’re in a shop, ask me what recipe your third-aunt-twice-removed said could use Oregano. If I’m on the phone with Eon yet again, then here’s what exciting adventures I had with you the last five times I rang.

(Just an aside: Eon plays the same music every time I phone up and am put on hold. Not the same type of music, not the same artist, not the same album, but the exact same track on a loop. It got so I was singing along with it. And eventually I told the Eon operator to shush, put me back on hold, because I wanted to Shazam the music. And I did. Bought it off iTunes. It’s Ho Hey by The Lumineers. Here it is on iTunes US and here on iTunes UK. I’m linking a lot here today, aren’t I? There’s one in a mo that I could conceivably get tuppence for if you clicked it and followed through with an order on Amazon. Please buy a car in the same Amazon session. Or a house. Otherwise, none of these links do anything for me except send you bounding off away when I’m trying to have a chat with you.)

I could’ve chucked those iTunes links into Evernote. I could drag the MP3s in there too. A screengrab of the band’s website. A photo montage. Maps. Word documents, Pages documents. They all just go in and then they go whizzing around every copy of Evernote that you have.

This month I am mainly writing on two big projects and all my notes for both are in Evernote. A guy phoned me out of the blue yesterday and I was able to bring up all the questions I’d prepared for him, I was able to check a fact in a script PDF. Quite slowly, actually, but that was because my brain was mush more than that Evernote was hiding the note from me. Thinking about it, I could’ve put him on speakerphone and used Evernote to record the conversation if we’d needed me to.

Glasses ready. Pick up 10am.

The other month I lost some pension documents. Now when something comes in the post, I do file it away better but I also pop it through my Doxie scanner while I’m watching the telly and later on add the scanned copy to Evernote. You can organise all these notes, if you want, and one day I might put some thought into it all but for now I just bung ’em in and trust, correctly, that I’ll be able to retrieve any or all whenever I want. That’s just astonishingly useful for me.

There is one thing that is freakily useful. I’m writing a book that requires a huge amount of research through fairly old documents. I scan those in, they become PDFs in Evernote and then without my doing anything, they become searchable. These are old letters and scripts and treatments but I can type, say, “casting” into Evernote and it will show me every document that has that word in it. It OCRs the PDFs you put into it.

It’s freaky but also a bit inconsistent: I can’t tell you when it OCRs or how fast, it just does it when it does it. And I have some documents that I’d quite like it to OCR and it doesn’t. No idea why.

Other than that, I realise I’m talking like a convert and an evangelist but it’s because I’m a convert and I’m an evangelist.

Or I am now.

Previously on Evernote… I understood what it did but I found it a bit creaky and I just didn’t like the look of it. I know that sounds feeble, but this thing is in your face all the time and I even found bits of it irritating to look at: it used to do more to look like a paper notebook. Not much more, I think, I can’t remember now, but enough that I’d look at it and think, enough.

Talking to you today, I realise I cannot picture what it used to look like. There was this huge revision of it last year with massively updated versions for web browsers, iOS and Macs, I think also for Windows. The old one had the same features, more or less, but you can find them now and it just doesn’t look irritating to me. I tried the new iPhone version, then pretty quickly tried the iPad one, then it was the decision of an instant to get it on my Mac and then that was me done. All three versions of the software free and I used them more and more. It’s when you use Evernote a lot that you get it – actually, when you use it for everything. That’s when you start wowing.

So the software is free and the service is free up to a point. That point is to do with how much you can save to Evernote in any one month and it’s do with how big any one note you make can be. For a free account, the biggest single note you can have is 25Mb. You’re not going to hit that unless you’re saving audio files or images. A lot. You’ll get an hour’s audio in that, easy. Premium users, for comparison, can have notes that are up to 100Mb. I am a Premium user. I have no idea how big any of my notes are but nothing’s fallen over yet.

If you use the free version – and you should, try it out like mad before you get hooked and wanna upgrade; I must’ve spent six months or more on the free one – then you also have a limit that you can only upload a total of 60Mb of notes each month. Again, never hit it. Until I went Premium, which ups that to 1Gb per month, and I started filing away a thousand scripts PDFs or more.

These limits are only to do with how much you save in Evernote in any one month: there is no practical limit on how much stuff you can have on it. Again, I have no clue how much stuff I’ve got in mine, but it’s a sight more than 1Gb, I can tell you. Just keep shovelling the stuff up there.

Hand on heart, I went Premium because I like the software so much and I was depending on it so much that I wanted to contribute – and because Angela bought me the first year’s subscription. I did also believe that the freaky thing with documents being OCRd was a Premium feature but I’m sure now that some of mine were done when I was a Free one. Not sure. Sorry about that.

But Premium costs around £35/year and, like I would with OmniFocus, I’d pay that over and over.

Because I use Evernote every day. I’ll start a note on my iMac when I get up to work at 5am every day, then I’ll refer to it on my iPhone when I’m on a train, and I’ll maybe finish it later on my iPad when I think of something else. I don’t have to do anything to get these things to work together and I usually forget that this is remarkable. It feels normal. So much so that when someone at the Birmingham Rep was asking me that thing I mentioned last week, that thing about losing my iPad, I forgot. They wondered why I risked making notes on my iPad when a mugger is always going to take that and never going to take a paper notebook. And I am so used to this feature that I forgot that whatever I’ve written on there is already on my iPhone and my iMac. After I’ve written it, while I’m writing it, I dunno, it just is.

If a mugger took my iPhone too and worked out from it where I lived, coordinated a flashmob-like raiding party on my home office and took my Mac, I’d be somewhat bummed but I’d still have every single one of every single note I’ve ever written. And that includes all my scripts, all my writing archive, all those bleedin’ pension documents.

Did I mention that you can password-protect Evernote?

One more thing? I’m really not sure why I forgot this because I find it a delight: Atlas view shows you where you were when you made a note.

Something else non-evangelisty. There is a rare bug in the iPhone/iPad version of Evernote that isn’t quite rare enough for me: I got it and it took weeks to sort out. (A note made with an audio recording added started to duplicate itself. I had around 170 copies of this same note and it Kept Popping Up until Evernote support fixed it.) All the way through those weeks, though, I would be alternating between shaking a fist at the screen and going ooooh, that’s good, I didn’t know I could do that, I’m going to do it.

So far as I know, that bug has not been fixed yet. It’s been sorted out for me but I could get it back and it’s only okay that I now know the steps to repair it.

And yet even with that and even with how annoying it was – tell me you get annoyed by software too, tell me – I’m still using Evernote every day and I’m still recommending it to you.

This is all true. It is all genuine. There isn’t an ounce of my being envious of your ability to handle paper notebooks and, sheesh, handwrite in them. I mean, who wants legible handwriting? Come on.