July 19 On this fine morning, I was squatting in a flat in Ealing, and looking out at the people going past. Across the busy street I saw two workmen, one a young lad and one a broad old hand. The older man was picking up a plank and grinning at the gangly youth for a moment before saying something and setting both of them laughing. My heart warmed at the sight because I realised that while I, as an outsider to those men and unfamiliar with their terms of reference, could never truly appreciate their joke, it was a rich, and personal vein of laughter in a sorry world.

And in the shop next to them there was another universe to which, yes, I was closed away from, but which nonetheless had the promise of the same kind of laughter. All over the world there was friendly banter, friendly jokes, showing us that we are all part of this human society. And that surely, with laughter as plentiful as it was, society was a good, warm, welcoming, and downright funny place that we should be proud of. The two men had vanished now, and a smaller gentleman was describing the planks to a police officer.

So I’d say that I’ve lived in only three different To Do applications but I’ve written about many more, tried even more than that and alpha tested some. Most have one thing in common: they encourage you to say that the report for your boss is Priority One, High, Flagged, Five Stars, something.

Bollocks to that.

Oddly enough, the To Do app I use now, OmniFocus, doesn’t bother with priorities. I’m sure it has its reasons. I want to show you mine and why this stuff looks handy but just gets in your way.

I do believe in lists but lists are there to be worked through, not worked on. Time spent writing myself a clear task is worth it: “Call Jim re new date for pitch meeting” instead of just “Call Jim” or even “Jim”. Good. I want to open my list, see what I’ve got to do and not have to think about it: do what with Jim? Call Jim what? Jack?

That’s useful. Choosing which shade of red to have the text in, not so much.

Let me prove it. This is your To Do list today:

Get aspirin
Reply to Tom
Buy veg
Research chapter 3
Phone re bill
Read Pride and Prejudice

If I asked you to put those in priority order, I doubt you would: we’re just talking here and your tea is getting cold. But you know that you could do it and I know that you could do it very easily. You’d haver a bit because you don’t know who Tom is but you reckon he’s on the list, he must be important enough, you’d bung him near the top. Equally, you probably put Pride and Prejudice at the bottom. I’m trusting that you did so because it’s something you can read for pleasure after work and, besides, you’re not about to interview Jane Austen.

So depending on the ferocity of your headache, the odds are that your sorted, prioritised list looks like this:

1. Get aspirin
2. Reply to Tom
3. Phone re mistake on bill
4. Research chapter 3
5. Buy broccoli
6. Read Pride and Prejudice

You’re happy now: you can use that, it’s a clear sequence and you’re getting the important stuff done. But you seem to have forgotten that boss of yours and he or she is on the phone now, demanding whatever they demand and by god they’re demanding right now or else.

Seriously, are you going to write out this:

1. URGENT HIGH PRIORITY BOSS STUFF
2. Get more aspirin because boss really shouted
3. Reply to Tom
4. Phone re mistake on bill
5. Research chapter 3
6. Buy broccoli
7. Read Pride and Prejudice

I’m a smartarse and you’ve already gathered that I wouldn’t prioritise that list. But, as I say, I’m a smartarse so while we’ve been talking, I bought some aspirin – and I did it at the supermarket so I could pick up some broccoli at the same time. I regret that as now I’ll have to carry veg around all day. But I also remembered that my Austens are on the shelf back at my office so I downloaded the free ebook version to be ready to read on my iPad when I get the chance. I haven’t done that task but now when I get to it, I can actually get to it.

It’s not as if these are the highest priority items on my list but now I’ve only got five things left to do and you’ve got seven.

Similarly, it’s not as if everything is equally important or equally quick to do on your list.

But it is that your To Do list needs to be useful or you won’t use it. The job is get your tasks done, not to end up with a perfectly numbered list with a rainbow of priority colours.

I’m irritating, I’m sorry, but it’s become a hobby horse. Plus it’s all on my mind because I did have a very full day today – and now it’s doubled. My mind is on what I can do, what I have to pass on, why in the world I took this extra gig on – answer: because it is huge fun – and why I keep talking about broccoli when I don’t like it. That’s a different issue, I grant you, but I can ponder it and I can have this mug of tea with you now because I’ve got my priorities right.

A version of this blog without the words bollocks and smartarse appears in the forthcoming family-friendly book The Blank Screen: Productivity for Creative Writers.

Hello, I’m Flavour O’Themonth, the roguishly handsome runner-up from Strictly Come Dancing who is a real man’s man as well as appealing to a broad demographic of women with my casual but highly made-up stubble and these blue eyes. So very blue. Look at them. Look at me. Don’t listen.

I want to find out why all modern documentaries are more about their presenters than their subjects. Join me on my personal journey. It’s a journey that will shock you. It’s a startling story that starts right here, just about one extension lead’s distance from a TV studio.

And it’s a story that will end by changing the face of documentaries forever.

The truths you and I will uncover tonight are going to shake the entire world, though obviously they won’t make a difference to anything or get a pixel’s worth of coverage on the TV news.

But they will shock enough to get us a feature in Radio Times and tomorrow there’ll be a nasty feature and extensive photo gallery of me in the Daily Mail by a writer who didn’t watch either but needs my celebrity name to drive traffic to his website.

[SOFT MUSIC: CURRENT BOYBAND BALLAD]

When I was a little boy, things were a lot simpler. BBC showed documentaries like Jonathan Miller’s The Body in Question. Dr Jonathan Miller took us around the world but he also just talked to us. Lectured, really. Huge long sequences that – [QUICK: THEY’RE LOSING ATTENTION: SHOW A RUBIK’S CUBE] – just had him telling us things we didn’t know. Crazy.

And yet, demonstrating how I’m intelligent but in a non-threatening way, I watched that show agog, completely lost in it and even for a brief while forgetting the Rubik’s Cube I had in my hand.

INT. YE OLDE 1990S TEENAGE BEDROOM – NIGHT

Caption: “Reconstruction”

FLAVOUR O’THEMONTH (15) watches a 1950s-era TV set showing a copyright-free clip of someone who looks a bit like Jonathan Miller. Flavour drops his Rubik’s Cube.

And I here I am, the impossibly handsome adult, catching that very same Rubik’s Cube as it falls from nowhere in particular but looks fantastic in slow-mo.

Coming up, I’m going to find out how Rubik’s Cubes were made and look at why they were so important to me. Not to you, to me. This is my personal journey, I don’t know why you’re watching. Why don’t you change channel to BBC99 where Vacuous Poorly-Paid and Insufferable Know-It-All are delving into exactly how cars work?

[flick]

[MUSIC: MADNESS: DRIVING IN MY CAR]

VACUOUS: It’s very exciting, isn’t it, Insuff?
INSUFFERABLE: It certainly is, Vacuous! We all drive, don’t we?
VACUOUS: Some of us worse than others!
INSUFFERABLE: Naming no names! But seriously, we’re all very used to cars and we all have opinions, but how many of us actually know how they work?
VACUOUS: Certainly not me.
INSUFFERABLE: We just don’t need to, do we?
VACUOUS: Er – so why are we doing this show?
INSUFFERABLE: Ha, ha, very good. But seriously, it’s a complex feat of engineering – that’s a kind of mechanical type of work, everybody – and truly fascinating. Here’s the science. Watch this footage now as we see the “engine” being put into what we call the “car”. It’s really like the body of the car. It’s the bit that looks like a car but without that engine, it won’t go anywhere!

[MUSIC: GARY NUMAN: CARS]

VACUOUS: Truly fascinating.
INSUFFERABLE: And I bet you didn’t know any of it before, did you?
VACUOUS: Well, I skimmed the script the work experience researcher wrote for us but I zoned out a bit during our rehearsals, so yes, it’s all new to me.
INSUFFERABLE: And I’ll bet you’ll drive that little bit more carefully now you know, won’t you?
VACUOUS: Why don’t you go f-

[flick]

I set out on this personal journey to uncover the truth about documentaries and their fatuous, nervous need to appeal to no more than one of your brain cells at a time and I’ve ended up learning a little bit about Rubik’s Cubes.

I don’t know about you, but that Rubik’s Cube took me back to my childhood. I presume it didn’t take you back to my childhood too but perhaps yours was similar. I don’t care. This isn’t about asking questions, it’s about showing me looking terribly serious and yet still roguishly handsome.

Here’s a montage of me nodding seriously, looking a bit shocked, giving a gasp, laughing – because, don’t worry, it’s all okay really – and now I’m talking to someone who’s obviously a scientist. What do you mean, she’s a woman? Get a man. Get him a white coat. And a clipboard. What do you mean, he doesn’t wear glasses? Find me someone more socially awkward to reinforce stereotypes. I want a Bafta out of this, I need to look handsomely patient and show I’m able to speak to the little people.

Science, yeah, yeah, let him go on for ten seconds. Make sure he pushes his glasses back up his nose a bit while I slap him on the back like a real man.

INT. YE OLDE SCIENCE LAB – NIGHT

Caption: “Reconstruction”

YE OLDE SCIENTIST (100, bearded, dusty clipboard and stained coat) repeats what the real scientist just said but does it standing in a much better set borrowed from CBBC and pro-nounc-ed ver-y slow-ly and port-entous-ly be-cause he’s an act-or.

And has a Rubik’s Cube.

[MUSIC: THOMAS DOLBY: SHE BLINDED ME WITH SCIENCE]

[STOCK FOOTAGE: BEAUTIFUL SUNSET]

Caption: “Beautiful Sunset”.

I set out on this personal journey of personal, deeply all-about-me investigation knowing you’re watching because of me and because I need something worthy to go on the CV as I’m actually getting just a bit too old for decent acting roles. Thank God I’m not a woman, my career would be over by now. Wouldn’t even get voiceovers.

But I’ve learnt a lot on my personal journey about the anti-aging benefits of moody back-lighting and I’ve really discovered just how much we can repeat the footage of that sodding Rubik’s Cube.

I hope you’ve learnt something too. I don’t really, I just hope that you’ve stayed watching for the entire hour and that I can now tell you to press the Red Button, to go online to our website or switch to BBC3 to watch the inside story of the making of my personal journey.

I’m Flavour O’Themonth. Next time, the winner of Strictly Come Dancing takes you on a personal journey of discovery into some topic or other. Doesn’t matter what. We’ve just got this charter that says we have to cover factual stuff, blah, blah, we don’t actually watch this crap, and anyway it’s cheaper to make than drama.

Maybe you have too much to do. Maybe it’s the opposite and every project you had out there has just been rejected and you feel like you’re having to start all over again. You are. So one quick way to slightly alleviate a certain type of bad day is to always have something else out with an editor or a producer. You can’t do it every time and the chance of book schedules, magazine lead times, Cannes and offers rounds means you will sometimes get that massive pile landing at the same moment. But reduce the odds by taking your breaks midway through projects rather than in between them: it’s not the greatest bandaid in the world that you’re deep into the next thing when a rejection comes, but it is the only bandaid in the world.

Starting over from nothing is similar to having too much to do: you can be overwhelmed with the certainty that actually there’s no point. You think that you cannot get everything finished and you’re certain that you can’t do another giant writing project today.

As a species, we writers are also a bit prone to depression. People who don’t have this seem to believe that it can be fixed by a tickling stick where of course you can really be paralysed by depression at any time. There isn’t a connection between depression and how happy you are yet there is a connection the other way. You can’t make depression better but you can readily make it worse. Depression on a bad day is like an anvil with a knife on it.

So maybe you’re facing this busy mountain or this empty valley, maybe you’re low and if you are depressed then you’ll be feeling it physically too, so everything screams at you that it is impossible to get through this. That it is impossible to get this work done.

The knife is that it’s true.

You may not be in the mood to hear this and you may be under such pressure that you don’t have time to hear it, but you will not magically get everything done because of what I’m going to show you here.

Sorry. I’d like to give you two aspirin and tell you to call me in the morning but you’re a writer, I can’t fool you. And the sooner that we can accept that overwhelming impossibility is impossible for a reason, the sooner we can start whelming.

So here’s the thing. You won’t get it all done but you will get it all started and the time you’re spending now in a tizzy or having to hold your chest to stop the anxiety will be much better spent starting the work. Just starting it. At the beginning, that looks pointless enough to make you sick: the walk of a thousand miles ends with a million steps. But getting started in any way is like ignition: it takes more power to start an engine than to keep it going. And once the engine is going, it wants to keep moving forward.

And what’s more, you may have these pressures and burdens because you’re a writer but you have certain advantages too. You’re a writer: you can fool yourself. I just need you to fool yourself in the same way I do.

You know how parents who also have demanding jobs – so they’ve really got two demanding jobs – can actually find the office work relaxing? There are all these issues of balancing work and life, family and career, and if you have kids you want to be with them and every ignorant bastard seems to blame you if you’re a woman who’s not at home. But in the moment, day to day, when you get to the office, it feels relaxing. That’s because you’re supposed to be there. This is exactly what you are supposed to be doing and there is no option about it for the next eight to ten hours. A gigantic amount of misery comes from constant struggles over whether you’re doing the right thing at the right time: you burn up the day churning instead of doing anything. So that clock, that salary, those office hours, they may dump incredible stresses on you but they take that one away and it’s gigantic.

It’s not as if all this is strictly true, either. If your kid had an accident you’d be out of that office meeting at lightspeed and bollocks to anyone who complains about it. But there is enough truth in it, enough reality to the timetable and the contract that it works. What you need to do is conjure up that same truth for yourself today. Especially if today is a bad day.

So if you’re having a bad one today – whether with your writing or at any job holding you back from writing – just do exactly this right now:

Write down the first five things on your mind. Doesn’t matter if it’s a writing problem or it’s fixing your boiler or a task your non-writing employer wants, just make a note.

Now spend the next hour doing the first thing you wrote down. No debate, no pondering. You wrote it, you do it. You do that and nothing else.

In an hour, put that work away mid-thought.

Spend the next hour doing only the second thing.

Rinse, repeat. But don’t look back. You can have tea. But don’t look back.

The trick of it is only that if you accept that for the next hour you are solely and exclusively doing this one particular thing, it stops you thinking about all the others. Those other things are not your job, not your concern, this is. It is a trick and it isn’t automatic or easy, and it also has the kicker that somewhere around 40 minutes in you will long to get out of this bloody thing and go on to the next or anything else. But if you make yourself work on for those last 20 minutes, it helps make this feel real. It also makes you deep-mine yourself and you can end up writing your best material in the last stretch.

Which you’d think would mean you should then carry on until you finish.

No.

At the end of the hour, stop it and move on. Don’t look back at that last hour, don’t pat yourself on the back or criticise yourself, it’s done. Gone. And now don’t plan the next hour, don’t look ahead to the rest of the day, just take that next thing from the top of your list and now that is solely and exclusively what you are doing for sixty minutes.

The odds are that you will finish some things in each of these hours but it’s almost better when you don’t. Because it’s like novelists who end the day by writing the first line of the next chapter and so know that will get them started tomorrow morning. You probably don’t have time to walk away from all of your writing for a day, but doing this brutal cease-and-desist at the end of the hour means you’re leaving that project with energy and with it all alive in your head. And it means you’re ending the hour before you fade away. All that energy goes into the next project and then at the end of that hour, you’re out before you burn out.

I’m not saying you have to be Sellotaped to your keyboard for the hour, all writing is fueled by vices and on a bad day you need that caffeine or sugar more than ever. But bring the biscuits and the coffee to the desk and get on with it. Sod crumbs. Clean up the mess later, you’re working now.

At the end of the five hours, you will not have completed your work, you will not have met all your pressures and deadlines, you won’t have magically launched an entire new writing project.

But you will be so far ahead of where you were at the start. And typically you’ll still have time left in the day to finish some of the five.

You would imagine that the aim of all this is to get these things done but really it’s about the immense psychological benefits of being that far forward. You had these five things that were impossible, paralysing mountains and now you have these same five things but you’re energetic and alive to them all – and you have made substantial progress too.

Substantial is a relative thing. Stephen King does 2,000 words every morning. James Joyce used to say that “three sentences” was a great day. If you do all this productive concentrating and the product of each hour’s productivity is a single page per project then yes, so, and? That’s a single page you didn’t have at the start.

All of which sounds good and is good but there’s a bit of you bristling at the idea of following steps and procedures and rules and orders. We’re writers. We don’t like any of that.

I’m a writer who doesn’t like outlines and hates writing treatments because I feel I’d rather explore the story on the page. But when I do a Doctor Who audio for Big Finish, for example, I have to do a treatment because that’s what determines whether I get to go on to write the script. Similarly, I’m not a big fan of Robert McKee’s rules but without my trying, the drama I write does tend to fall into the three acts he says it should.

Then within a story we set up certain rules for ourselves and our characters. For example, you know that audiences would feel more than a little cheated if the blind watchmaker with his seven sons – sure an’ they all have a tale to tell – gets out of trouble because he can suddenly see.

We don’t like rules, we don’t like constraints, but we use them. We make them. Writing on a bad day, writing when we don’t want to but we have no choice, is just making some rules for ourselves and sticking to them.

Listen, I don’t know if this will help or even interest, but I started this blog earlier in the week when I was having one such very bad day. I did exactly what I told you here and at the end of the first hour, I had a draft of all of this and moreover I went running energetically into the next hour. That one was a horrible mountain of phone calls and contracts and politics that I wanted to run away from but instead I boomed through the lot and out the other side into a deeply-needed lunch.

Man, it was a good lunch. Bacon sandwiches are loud and they never taste better than when you’ve earned them.

Excerpt from the forthcoming book Productivity for Creative Writers, published September 2013

Hello, you recently met with the West Midlands police: do you have a few moments to answer some questions for me today, please?

I see, you have a lot of time. Okay, thank you. I need to tell you – no, it’s not the same as that. No. All I need to tell you is that these customer calls are recorded and will be reviewed by senior police staff who take your concerns very seriously.

You bet they do. Yes. Well, indeed, that’s very good. Now, thinking of only your most recent meeting with the police, would you say you were happy with how you were treated, unhappy with how you were treated or not sure?

I’m afraid it has to be one of the three.

Happy, unhappy, not sure.

I’ll call that unhappy, is that okay? Thank you.

Now, thinking only of this most recent event, how happy, unhappy or not sure would you say you are about the time you had to wait for the police?

I’ll call that unhappy too, shall I?

And how long did you have to wait?

I’m afraid I can’t take comments about the, ah, ‘snitch’. I’m only asking about the police. They were waiting for you, I see. I’ll put that down as ‘under an hour ‘.

Did the officers call you by name?

Did they make you feel welcome and valued?

Thinking only of the moments before they shot you, then, did the officers seem fully engaged with your needs?

They haven’t provided a helicopter and an iPad mini, I see. But in terms of the transaction you were expecting – I’ll just put that down as no.

On a scale of 1 to 10 where 1 is definitely not and 10 is definitely yes, how likely are you to recommend the West Midlands police force to your hostages?

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.