Strike won

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It was pointed out to me yesterday that writers have never lost a strike. And it’s true, most clearly right now when the US writers’ strike has ended so well this week, but winning this time and winning every time, it does not reduce how difficult it is to strike. I don’t think it’s easy anywhere, but in the arts especially, people are living pay cheque to pay check all the time.

No one ever wants to strike, but also when it happens, you have countless networks and streamers and studios on one side, myriad writers on the other, yet it’s the writers who stick together.

I think that’s amazing in so many ways. The networks and the streamers, sure, they always want more and they always want to pay less, but we’re supposed to be the arty creatives, they’re supposed to be the hard businessmen and women. So you expect them to find it easy to stick together. After all, what affects one firm’s balance sheet affects at least most others.

This reminds me suddenly of how when I was growing up, the Conservatives in the UK and the Republicans in America were seen as the parties of business. Yet today neither party can actually organise anything, neither one can get anything to work.

Still, when money is all you measure worth by, a strike could be avoided with two minutes on a spreadsheet, not 146 days of picket lines.

Whereas writers, we tend to work alone, we don’t know what the writer next to us is being paid, we don’t know what their working conditions are — okay, we know when they’re on staff on a Disney show and still have to accept charity, but overall, we are siloed. We should be easy to pick off, we should be a target-rich environment where anyone can turn us against one another and consequently divide and rule. I’m British, I’m embarrassed to say that we know from divide and rule.

Except, of course, there is the Writers’ Guild.

Obviously it was the Writers’ Guild of America that called for the strike and it was its staff and its members who managed to hold the line and even keep pickets cheerful while executives publicly said they would just wait until the writers were losing their homes.

I’m deputy chair of the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain and you would be amazed — I was amazed — at how much work the strike and advising members with international projects caused the staff here. I didn’t appreciate that, and I had nothing to do with anything strike-related whatsoever, but I do now appreciate all the UK staff did.

I am profoundly proud to have ever been the smallest spoke on a cog within the British Writers’ Guild, and to stand with these particular people at this particular time, it’s been a privilege. I think it’s been an easy privilege for me, but if I had nothing to do, nothing I could help with, that only reduces me, it obviously doesn’t diminish all that the Writers’ Guilds of America and of Great Britain did.

And I’ll tell you, to sit there yesterday with the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain staff, having chocolate cake and a mug of tea, it was a highlight of my year.

I need the Writers’ Guild for a thousand personal reasons and I aspired to be a member for at least that many again. But we truly need the Writers’ Guild, we need all of the Writers’ Guilds around the world, and these past months have demonstrated that vigorously.

Look what they managed to do. Look what they did.

At a loss

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I want to be able to write something where the good guys lose, and I don’t seem to be able to do it. I did try writing a novel about the end of the world in which the world ends. But then while I was typing away, some bastard character saved it at the last minute. I threw that novel in the bin.

But recently, I saw a musical that did this thing about good guys failing and I can’t tell you which one because it would ruin it for you. (I wrote a piece about the musical for the theatre’s programme and despite not having seen or read the play before, I managed to accidentally nearly spoil the ending. So now that I am fully aware of how it ends, I am shutting up.)

Except the good guys lose and it’s still a kind of triumphant finale. I am struggling to think when else that ever happens in stories. It does in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, but then it would, that series did everything. Still, “Take Me Out to the Holosuite” by Ronald D. Moore (series 7, episode 4, here’s the script) is the only other example I’m certain of.

Wait. I was so careful not spoiling – buggersticks, I nearly named the musical – but I casually ruined DS9. That episode aired in October 1998, you’ve surely had enough time to catch it now, a quarter of a century ago. God in heaven: a quarter of a century. That was its original US air date, though, so it would’ve been sometime in 1999 when I saw it, which is merely 24 years ago. Phew.

I don’t remember seeing it then, but from the dates it would’ve been one I watched on a break at BBC News Online in the BBC’s White City building. Nostalgia, I haven’t got time for it, I’m too busy trying to create new nostaligiable moments.

Anyway.

That DS9 episode centres on a baseball match or something — it’s sport, I don’t know from sport — and the regular cast, the good guys, lose.

Maybe you can argue that Ian McEwan’s novel Atonement ends without victory for the good guys, but that’s a bleak ending. It’s a marvellous ending, but it’s bleak. DS9 and the Musical That Shalt Not Be Named are both upbeat.

It’s killing me. Upbeat failure.

I suppose the original film of Fame does it too, at least to an extent. That film is more about failure than fame and rather than characters bonding together they tend to become separated and alone. And then they do come together for a closing number that is so rousing it can bring a tea to my eye — I Sing the Body Electric by Michael Gore and Dean Pitchford — but Christopher Gore’s script doesn’t aim to suggest they’re all happy again now.

It does occur to me that I am failing in my attempt to either find more examples or, more importantly, to write anything that has an ending which is failure yet triumphant.

Hang on, I’ve pulled off the failure, let me try this. I’m now going to go rewatch the Deep Space Nine episode and to track down the film the musical was based on.

It’s not a triumphant ending, and overall the stakes seem rather low, but I will enjoy that show and that film, so it’s up beat. A bit.

I’ll take the win.

One bad episode

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Back in the day, when we all watched television either as it first went out or very nearly so, I used to overthink about high-rated episodes. Pick any show and there will be some episodes that were watched much more than others and the easy presumption is that they were the best ones.

Today with streaming, I think that might well be the case. You hear something was tremendous so you go look it up. Right now the series Suits is doing incredibly well on Netflix, for example, even though it ran on the USA Network starting in 2011 — and ending in 2019.

Meghan Markle acts in it, at least for the first few seasons, but I don’t see how it can be royal interest that has brought the show a second wave of success. Not since if that were the cause, it should surely have happened years ago.

I think it’s because Suits is very good. I’m suddenly reminded of hearing someone say that their teenage daughter’s favourite band is Fleetwood Mac. That would have been impossible for a teenager in any previous time except when the band was at its height, but now they are just another streaming group like anyone else. I can’t imagine how hard it is for artists to get found, but I can well imagine that bands are no longer restricted to having fans who knew them back then and have grown up with them.

This has all got to be a good thing, but as well as meaning life and reach for good work, I think it has also ended the unfairness of high-rated episodes.

Follow. Back when you couldn’t just order up any show and instead had to wait a week to catch the next episode go out, you could have a brilliant, brilliant episode that few people saw. Enough of those people raved about it that others tuned in next week to see what the fuss was about — and so next week’s episode is the one that gets the higher rating.

Whether or not it deserves it.

And equally, last week’s episode, the one that did warrant the attention, never got it.

This wasn’t all that long ago either. In 2003 or 2004, I can’t remember which, Ronald D Moore’s revival of Battlestar Galactica aired initially as two feature-length movies run on consecutive nights. I don’t know the ratings figures but I do know this: the first night did okay — and the second night did very well.

It was unheard of: part two of a show never exceeds the ratings for part one, except with Battlestar Galactica that one time.

Moore has said that he had assumed the second night’s ratings would be down and when he saw they weren’t, that’s when he knew the show would be picked up for a series.

In that case I think both parts were exceptional, so maybe I’m arguing against my own theory.

But the reason this is on my mind now is that if a good episode lifts the next one in the series, a poor one can end things. For instance, I really relished the Spanish series “El Ministerio del Tiempo” (The Ministry of Time) until it had an episode I couldn’t even finish. I never went back to the show.

And this one hurts a lot because there’s a show I wish I’d written, a show that is superb at so many things I relish, but it hit a similar bump. Only a little similar, but similar. Months and months ago now, I was enjoying “Leverage: Redemption” a lot until it had an episode that just seemed to clunk, I can’t explain why.

I also can’t tell you which one because I stopped watching the series and it’s long enough ago now that I’m blank. And if I feel bad about that because I admire the show’s writers, I also feel a bit stupid because earlier this week I caught a later episode in the series and it was excellent. And so was the one after that.

But it was only chance that I came back to it. I’d have missed out on a lot if I hadn’t, certainly, but there’s so much choice now that when you’re dented out of a show, you can be gone. I can be gone so easily.

I’m also wondering about all this now because I believe I have lost my chance to see “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny” in cinemas — and I appear to be okay about that. I wanted to see it, just obviously not enough. And while that appears to have been true of most of the cinema-going public, I wonder if this is proof that one instalment affects the next.

For I believe I am unusual in thinking that the previous Indiana Jones film was quite good — until about halfway through. Then it was shite altogether, and maybe enough so that even 15 years later, it put me off the new one.

Now I’m wondering whether you’ll read next week’s Self Distract. That’s going to worry me.

Define impossible

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So I was thinking a few weeks ago that it is amazing how great the Mission: Impossible films are when they aren’t written in advance, when they are kind of compiled on the go as the makers come up with particular sequences and then look to see how they can be connected into a story.

I concluded that this process was exactly the same as drafting and redrafting a script, just without the Final Draft writing app and with millions of dollars in camera gear and travel expenses.

Mission: Impossible 1 was written in advance and is very good. MI2 was written in advance and isn’t. I don’t know about MI3, but it doesn’t quite work. But Mission: Impossible: Ghost Protocol, Rogue Nation, and Fallout were all done this way and they are all excellent.

In my opinion, of course. But I like those films so much that I’ve watched them often.

The new Mission: Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part One isn’t as good. It’s fine, there are the most exhilaratingly arresting sequences in it and there’s no question that I won’t be seeing the sequel next year. Whereas MI2 was sufficiently bad that it took years for me to get around to seeing MI3.

Your mileage with MI7 may vary, naturally, but it’s on its way out of cinemas — and appears to have been a relative failure. The extremely high cost of the film caused by COVID delays was a factor and so was the scheduling that saw MI7 denied its usual length of run in IMAX theatres.

But I think there is also just that it stumbles and I want to think this through from a writing perspective. Because these Mission: Impossible films are, well, impossible and you can easily make a case for any or all of them being ridiculous, yet some work and some don’t. Then MI7 comes in the middle: it’s not that it doesn’t work, it’s that it doesn’t work enough.

For me, anyway.

I offer that there are three moments in the whole running time that are problematic. They each took me out of the story and where only two definitely burst the bubble and make you consciously think no, that’s actually impossible, I wonder if all three would have been smoothed over if the film had been written before it was shot.

One issue is the killing off of a major character where the drama is subtracted because we’d believed she died earlier and so we’ve no way to judge that she isn’t going to come back in a minute. Again.

Then there is a gag. Ethan and Grace are in a teeny yellow car which at one point goes tumbling through the air. When it lands, the two characters have switched places. It’s not a mistake: the characters look at each other to emphasise that it’s a gag, but it’s impossible. It’s wrong.

Later on, Benjy is in what becomes a fully self-driving car. But there’s very little reason Benjy has to be travelling to anywhere at this point and switching to self-driving is another gag instead of a dramatic imperative. And it’s impossible. It’s just wrong.

Even including the death of that character, we’re looking at under three minutes of screen time, but each one breaks the preciously thin bubble of these movies.

I’m obviously not saying that I could have done better. But the great Mission films are deeply satisfying because they put characters you care about through such high stakes that it feels like a vice closing in on them — and because when they prevail, it is at a cost, but it’s never a cop-out, it’s never a gag ending.

For instance, there’s a moment in Mission: Impossible: Rogue Nation where I was taken out of the film because it was such a perfect sequence. If you’ve seen the film, I mean when Ethan Hunt has to decide which of two assassins to shoot in order to protect their target. The resolution is very simple, but at least for me, it was a resolution I did not see coming and I admire it.

I’m okay with being taken out of a film to applaud. But with MI7, it had these moments where I just had to consciously think okay, let that go, let’s try to get back into it.

I did get back in, each time, but it took a while, every time. And while I imagine I’ll watch it again some time, it won’t be the turn-to favourite that the last three have been.

Space and time

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I get impatient with writers who aren’t practical. If this needs to be written and it needs to be written now, you write it now. I’m conscious that this may all be a failure of imagination on my part, that I could be a hack in the worst sense of that, but I do not write better for having sat on my arse until the last second.

Nor would I have said that it matters to me in the slightest where I am when I write. Certainly I don’t need peace and quiet, and certainly I will write in a newsroom as readily as a library.

Only, you know there’s a but coming. I didn’t, though. I would not have seen this but, not have considered this but.

Last Sunday, I was shut out of my office for hours. Overnight a tall Ikea Billy bookcase collapsed in there, falling sideways so that on the thinking positive side of things, it didn’t send very heavy books crashing out onto my equipment. But as glad as I am about that, the shelf unfortunately collapsed sideways — toward the office door. It barricaded that door.

With every ounce of girth I could manage, and that is regrettably quite a lot more than it should be, I could not get the door open more than a fraction of a centimetre.

This was around 3am and there’s a limit to the wailing you can do if you don’t want to wake the neighbours. So I went back to bed and I plotted.

Since I have a security camera in the office, I was able to see on my iPad what it was like in there. Thank goodness for that iPad which I’d left in our living room. Because what I could also see was that my iPhone, my office Mac, my MacBook Pro and a digital recorder I was supposed to be taking out to an interview, were all on the wrong side of the barricade.

Okay. Now 4am and I am not sleeping, I am pondering just the right drill pattern to make in a door panel so that I could then hammer through to get a hand in and start trying to move some books.

The hammer is in the office.

The drill is in the office.

So instead it takes me two hours on my knees, scraping the skin off my hands, as I get a fingertip through that sub-centimetre gap and manage to make it a centimetre, then two, then three. I got it to a stage where instead of having to try flicking a book away into the office, I could just about lift it up — and drop it again, lift it again, drop it — until I could get it up to the top of the door and pull it through there.

Two hours of that. And it took perhaps the first hour for me to have any sense of progress at all. I carried on solely because I didn’t have any other ideas.

But around the two hour mark, I got that door open enough that I could get my head through, then using the wall for leverage I pushed the door enough that my body could get in — before the door snapped back, pressed again by books and shelves I hadn’t been able to reach.

I think I sat at my office desk for easily ten minutes, though, just being there. Seeing the debris field, sure, but also just being conscious of how for all my pragmatism and write-anywhere approach, I had been scared when I was shut off from this space.

I’ve been writing in this room for twenty years. It’s at least a couple of million words now — in the last six months alone I know I wrote half a million — and I cannot imagine how many hours thinking. There was one night when it was so late and it was so dark outside that my office window was more like a mirror and I saw the late Alan Plater reflected in there. “It’s only a book,” he told me as I fretted about something.

I’ve had some bad times in there. I have literally bled over the keyboard — though that felt like a badge of honour somehow — and some of the toughest moments in my writing career were in this room. But of course so were some of the best. And if the journey of a thousand miles ends with 2,112,000 steps, the journey has been the best.

Doubtlessly there are other spaces where I could’ve been writing, but I was writing in this one, it was taken away from me, and then I got it back through harder physical labour than I ever signed up for.

It occurs to me that I’m just saying you don’t miss something until it’s gone. But I missed this. And it’s back.

Mind you, I also missed a joke about it and will now forever envy writer Peter Anghelides, who said to me on Facebook: “You have only your shelf to blame.”

What lies ahead

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I did stay up to watch Trump arrive in Atlanta but then fortunately insomnia met the certainty of his giving a speech and I went to sleep. There’s that line in WarGames that goes “the only winning move is not to play”, and surely if anything, the only thing to do with Trump is ignore him.

Except you can’t make others ignore the man and — I’m obviously in a homily mood today — all it takes for Trump to get in next time is for good people to ignore him. Mind you, good people, politics, I can barely think of a couple.

I like to talk to you about writing and there’s no possibility that Trump has written a complete sentence in his life. But just as the most brutish, stupid man can be capable of surgically precise abuse of their partners, so Trump is shaping a narrative over and over.

I fell for it, too, watching live footage of an aircraft subtly bearing the name Trump, land in Atlanta.

He’s like when you have a tooth out and your tongue keeps going to the gap. But where that stops after a time and possibly corsodyl, one reason Trump keeps prevailing is that others join the narrative.

This is making my teeth hurt. Late last week — you know this bit, although it seems lot longer ago than seven days — Donald Trump did that thing of saying that on a certain day he would reveal definite proof of his innocence but then he cancelled the whole thing.

In the days since, the reaction I keep seeing is that it was his lawyers who told him to cancel. That this was actually a sign that he was finally listening to his legal team.

Bullshit.

There was never going to be an announcement, it was always pre-cancelled, and he got three news cycles out of it: the claim, the cancellation, then the analysis of him apparently listening to advice.

But what that inane analysis also did was give just a little substance to the announcement. Seriously. By focusing on this idea of him listening to advice, all of the news media chose to ignore that his proof was going to be nonsense — and that’s enough.

I would have liked BBC News, or CBS, or CNN, or anyone to say: “Tonight’s headlines: more bollocks from Trump. Now the weather. Or even the sport.”

Instead they were looking in the wrong place and by shining such a light on that part, on making such a big deal of lawyers allegedly telling him to cancel, they validated the claim that he had something.

Just enough.

Certainly just enough for his fans to believe a little longer.

It’s easy, distressingly and disturbingly easy, to mock Trump supporters for being fooled by the crook. Yet all of the media that considers itself unbiased, or which has run a thousand news stories about his demonstrable lies, every one I saw was taken in by this particular performance too.

And there I was, unable to sleep, waiting to see a mugshot and only persuaded to turn over — either in bed or the channel — by the thought of having to look at his mug as he basked in attention.

In the pink

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(Image: a Barbie billboard poster that is just is so impressive. Source: Reproduction via RockContent.)

I am reasonably sure that I have never even seen a Barbie doll in real life, yet I came out of the cinema last weekend wishing I’d written the Barbie movie. Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach wrote a film that is so clever, so joyous and so sad that they made me feel for a plastic doll I’ve never seen or thought about before.

There are things I’m not keen on, such as one gag about Mattel cancelling a particular type of Barbie doll. It’s good, but then it’s practically repeated later. I’ve read that in scripts before, where a gag was being tried out in two scenes but you have to pick one or you diminish both.

Then there’s a narrator at the start and unless a narrator is lying to me, unless they are what’s known as an unreliable narrator, I have a problem with them because they are problematic. Barbie’s narrator does what they all do: talks a lot at the start, comes back for a quickie sequence in the first half hour, and is then forgotten about completely.

Except then she comes back to throw in a line that is very self-aware about this being a film. Without giving it away, the line is funny but it comes so late that you’ve forgotten there is a narrator — and it comes precisely at the right time to undercut Margot Robbie’s performance as Barbie.

She is extraordinary. Barbie manages to remain plastic and unmistakably doll-like, yet also convey happiness and fear and betrayal. It’s deeply impressive and also very funny, except when it is heartbreaking.

Otherwise, this script is replete with jokes that I both get and wish I’d written, and I am certain it is also replete with at the very least the same number of jokes again that I simply didn’t get. Poor comedy just uses references it knows its audience will recognise, but great ones do exactly that with such a light touch that if you don’t know the reference, you don’t even realise it’s been referred to.

The only reasons that I know there is so much I missed is how the film is a ceaseless barrage of spoken and visual gags, and you come to realise the background has as many as the foreground. Plus YouTube has half a pound of videos detailing all the bits everyone missed.

So there is all this going on, but Barbie doesn’t exclude you just because you happen, like me, to not know the history of the doll.

Absolutely brilliantly, it also presents every criticism Barbie has had over the years and it does so without flinching or apologising. It is brutal about Mattel, too.

I can’t stop thinking about that streak of – I was going to say viciousness, but no, I think it’s a vein of strength. The film sets up this fantastical pink world but doesn’t do it by being cloying or saccharine, it somehow does it while also being pragmatic. I do not have the remotest idea how it did that.

Then amongst so much going on in this film, a central point is about patriarchy keeping women down and I don’t think you can argue that Barbie handles this subtly.

But then I also don’t think you can argue that this central point is wrong.

Whereas I do think you can argue that my own central point is. I said that I came out of that cinema wishing I’d written the film. After a few days, though, I realised that actually what I wish is that I could write any film the way Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach wrote this.

But I did not come to this realisation by myself. I had help. Specifically, it was writer Andrea Mann who commented on Facebook about my enthusiasm for the film.

“It’s great, isn’t it?” wrote Andrea. “And I took from it that I want to write like they wrote Barbie: i.e. to swing for the fences, to lean into your own tastes and ideas, to write as you unapologetically want to write. Because that’s the overall vibe I got from it: that Greta Gerwig (and Noah Baumbach) just, well, went for it. And I find that really inspiring.”

Now I wish I’d written Andrea’s comment, too.

Dead again

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So earlier this week, I was called a shit hot writer. But I think I imagined that middle word.

Anyway, whether I’m a writer or just a fool to myself, I think a lot about this stuff and after so much thinking that I successfully put off writing for hours, I have a strong opinion about characters being killed off in stories.

Let them die.

Please.

I saw a film recently in which a major character was killed and not only did I not feel a flicker, I don’t believe it was physically possible to care at that point. This was a good character, we’ve been with her through a lot and of course she’s well played, so this death should have been enormous and it was played on screen as if it was.

But it just wasn’t.

Because we’d seen her die before. She was shot early on in the film, then we went through that familiar feeling of no, come on, she’s a major character, this is a trick, she’ll be fine, and then we’re told no. We are directly told nope, she’s dead, deal with it.

And then she was fine. It had been a trick. Terrific.

So later on when she is killed and everybody’s is acting like this is really the end for her, you can’t engage because all you can think is that it was really the end for her last time too. By the time it is really sure she’s gone, you’ve been out of the film for long enough that you don’t care. Important character, big death scene, shrug.

Even now, talking to you about a month later, I don’t expect that this character has survived and will be in the sequel, I really don’t, but if she were, it would not be an enormous shock. It would be played as one, but it wouldn’t be it, you wouldn’t feel the shock.

But that possibility aside, at least this film killed her. I am wondering when we got so we couldn’t just let characters die. The name Lazarus is coming to mind, but then only slightly more recently there is Star Trek, in which I think every major character has died at least once and is always back next week.

I know the reasoning is that you have a popular character so killing them off will be this enormous thing that everyone will talk about – but they’re also so popular that they’re why audiences keep coming back for more. So kill them off, absolutely, but don’t kill them off, no.

Only, let’s say this particular character I just saw die on screen does come back for the inevitable sequel. As popular as she was, as good as she is, if she comes back and it’s all some trick or dream sequence, I won’t ever quite engage with that character the way I did.

That kills me.

Two tone

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Last week, it was pointed out to me that I started off sounding nicely silly, then I turned a bit serious and possibly a little uplifting. I promised to stop that this instant.

But while I know this is just you and me talking, still I do think about you during the week, I do think about what we can natter about, and yet I don’t think I have much control over the way I say it.

I must do: if I were writing you a news story you would know. Yet it seems to me that unless there is a specific requirement for a certain tone in my writing, my writing is just the way it is and I can’t do anything about it.

Which I would have been fine about until around seventeen minutes ago when I installed QuarkXPress on my Mac. Quark is the publishing app that conceivably you use, but more likely you only vaguely remember, and even more likely you’ve never heard of. It’s not my first choice for a publishing app, I’ve only installed it now because I need it for a job, I wouldn’t think to mention it to you.

Except.

This app has a tone and I am fascinated.

I don’t think about apps, I think about what I can do with them, and this one has been written over decades by countless developers — yet it has a single clear and actually rather strident tone.

It is proof positive, I think, that the writer’s voice comes out through whatever medium they are working on, and whether or not they’re working alone.

Or maybe it just does when the tone is arrogant.

Yet Quark shouldn’t be arrogant, it should seem like a scrappy underdog, trying to get back to its glory days of the 1980s. The business shot itself in the foot back then and the best you could say is that it aimed well.

Doubtlessly there is a Business 101 class somewhere about how Quark ruled the publishing world and then surrendered it all to Adobe InDesign. I’d take that class.

But today, all I want to do is install the app so I can do a job. And instead installing QuarkXPress was a job itself. Where usually you find an app, click the Buy button and then start working in it, Quark steps you through a 1980s corporate-style installation sequence that says you — oi, you, I’m looking at you – are binding this app to this machine and you’d better not forget it.

If you try to forget it, if you try to do some work in another app while Quark gathers its bits together, tough shit. Quark is a good Mac citizen in that it will allow you to switch to another app — but it’s s crap Mac citizen because it then covers up that other app so that you can’t use it.

Consequently, I read a book while ignoring various warnings, and then I got to wondering. There must be a reason why I actively removed this app some years ago instead of simply leaving it there in case I needed it again.

And just as I thought about that, QuarkXPress was fully installed — and I found out why I had removed it.

Remember, this was a copy of the app I had just now, just right now, downloaded fresh from the official site. But the moment it had finished installing, it immediately told me there was an update I had to download. From the official site.

And then, I promise you this is true, once that updated had installed, Quark told me there was an update I had to install.

I suspect what happened is that the first one was an update to the installer, and the second was an update to the app.

But.

This is QuarkXPress 2019. There have been several releases of it since and there is just no chance that it is getting serious updates the instant I download it or — oh, come on — again now as I talk about it. Seriously. Right now. Fantastic.

QuarkXPress updates when the wind changes direction and maybe you can praise the writer/developers for constantly improving their app. But you won’t. Because all work stops while it updates, I’ve had to wait now while it knocks on the glass of my screen demanding attention over and over again.

I am agog at how strongly you can feel the attitudes and the personalities of the writers of something that is not a story, not a drama, and instead just a tool.

But as I say, I installed this for a job. And now that job has turned in to figuring out how to get the client to ditch QuarkXPress.

Bugger. Now my tone is clearly sarcastic, possibly a little petty, definitely annoyed. So there it is, there is no way to write anything without a tone coming through. I just don’t think that the makers of Quark are any better at controlling their tone than I am mine.

The true value of outlining

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Previously, if you ever told me that you plan writing out in detail before you do it, I mean if you say you do an outline first, I’ve magnanimously said that whatever works for you, works for you.

And when I’ve casually mentioned how I’m happy to write something and then throw it away if it doesn’t work, I’ve doubtlessly also thrown in how I did exactly that to a 100,000-word novel I wrote over lockdown.

Them’s the breaks when you write without prissy little guidelines, that’s what you have to deal with when you’re a real writer.

I seem to remember you saying “bollocks”.

Look, I do really mean that whatever it takes to get you to the finish line is a good thing. Outline, paint storyboards, do whatever you need. But for the longest time I have just started writing and then genuinely been quite fine about throwing everything away to start over again.

To be clear, I have always provided an outline when the commission requires it. But I have been the sort that if I possibly could, I would rather write the whole script or the whole book and then make up an outline afterwards.

Except a producer once pointed out that you can’t have a blank screen on BBC1 on Tuesday night at 21:00. It has to be filled and there is no scope to just write a script and throw it away if you don’t happen to like it. Outlines, argued this producer, get you to the finishing line on time. Maybe you’d write better if this weren’t true, but you might not write better on time and that’s the killer point.

I hadn’t thought of it like that, but the instant it was said to me, I couldn’t disagree.

I just didn’t do it.

Only, last week it looked like I was going to get a commission for a thing and this week I got it. There isn’t a massive amount to it, it’s more that the work is spread out over the next year, and in fact it’s not replacing anything, it is just going to be something extra I do.

But because it’s new, because it’s a producing job as much as anything, and especially because it is over a set period of time, I still didn’t outline.

I project managed instead.

Just before you and I started talking, I sent the people a Gantt chart for the whole year with something like forty points in it. That’s just for them, I know as I work through that project I will be creating many more tasks and the giant majority will be solely for me. But for now, this is where we are, I said, and this is when it looks like we need to do this, this and the other that.

It’s a Gantt chart. This bit of work has dependencies, for instance, so it can’t be started before this other work is done, and I have to finish it before I can start this next thing. And that next thing has to be done by this date, so this other task must be started by another date.

And finally I get it.

All this planning, all this assessing of sequences and balancing of resources, it all does exactly what outlines do.

It lets you feel busy while you put off the actual writing.