I am at least half a dozen episodes of Star Trek: Picard behind so it is at least possible, if not highly likely, that the show has gone in a way I didn’t expect after watching the trailer.

But deep in the middle of that surprisingly long trailer for the new Picard series, a character says “trust no one.”

Oh, aye, you know what that means. It means don’t trust them, the person saying it. If Star Trek: Picard does not bow to that trope, it means that maybe thrillers have moved on.

Because there are certain things in thrillers that come in to fashion because they were originally surprising and then eventually become unsurprising, become obvious, become risible.

Follow. Previously on “trust no one”, they just meant it. Whoever said it, whichever character they were saying it to, it was serious and true. You could object to how no such character ever follows this up with a list of suspects. And the character who told this never remembers anything about until the shock/obvious revelation later of who is the baddie.

I’m wondering now if there a moment in time where “trust no one” was not true, yet not serious. Because it seems in retrospect that we got very quickly to today’s version where “trust no one” is practically a guarantee that whoever said it is the specific person who should not be trusted.

Audiences are clever. You and I have seen a hundred thousand billion dramas and read at least two books, so we know the significance of tiny details, we know about face value and surprises and reversals and twists.

I once had a mentor who wanted me to change something in a script I was working on. It was a scene in a hotel bedroom and I remember that the way it played, you at first thought that there was a man and a woman about to, er, pass the time. Later you realise much more and I hoped that there would come a moment where you suddenly realised that all of the playful things said between the characters was actually really vicious.

This mentor wanted me to have the guy lose his socks. The mentor was far more experienced than me, so maybe this was the secret of his sock-cess, but what you’re picturing now is how he tried selling it to me. My male character is a klutz and he’s searching the bedroom for a sock while half in and half out of his trousers. If you just pictured him falling over, you’ve got it.

I said no.

If someone who is a better and vastly more experienced writer than you suggests something, you will listen at the very, very least from politeness. But this time, no.

“I’ve seen that before,” I explained.

“You have,” said the mentor, “but the audience hasn’t.”

Bollocks.

Not only has the audience seen that particular situation, they’ve seen every version of it. At this distance and having said to you what the real aim of that scene was, I’m actually quite pleased with myself because for its time, I think I was at least trying to do something a little fresh, a little new.

But it would have to have been for an earlier epoch before the sock story would’ve actually been new.

I like that things move on. I adore when drama respects the audience. But isn’t half a moving target. Trust me.

I’m going to be positive about this: my sense of drama and writing was fully formed by the time I was a teenager. Alternatively, my sense of drama and writing hasn’t evolved since.

But I was watching an old Doctor Who story recently and remembering how I felt when it aired, remembering the feeling as vividly as if it were happening right now. Of course, it was happening right now, I was watching this thing and it was dreadful.

Back in the 1970s or 1980s – I’m not trying to hide my age, just trying to obscure which Doctor Who story I could be talking about – I sat in front of this thing thinking no. No. It had impossible moments like a companion happening to speak an Aboriginal dialect from thousands of years ago and I’ve just given you enough to recognise, know, or be able to find out that I’m talking about Four to Domesday.

Peter Davison is the Doctor, Terence Dudley wrote it. Sorry, Terence.

So anyway, it has moments like that about the dialect, and the same character — Tegan, played by Janet Fielding — being able to fly the TARDIS. On one hand, pop me into a sports car and I’d be lost looking for the ignition. And on the other hand, Tegan gets so frustrated trying to take off that actually it is a glorious piece of heartfelt acting.

But still, it had these impossible moments that so jump out of the screen and slap you that you resent the characters. It had a thing where another companion, Adric is asked to explain E=mc2, and if my first reaction is kill me now, my more considered reaction is kill that script then. It was meant to be Big and Clever and show that Adric is amazing. I’ll bet you anything that out of writer Terence Dudley, actor Matthew Waterhouse and me, I am the only one who’s read the General and Special Theories of Relativity.

It’s the presumption that even so, they know more than the viewer, and that the viewer will be wowed by this pathetic bollocks.

Still.

Anyway.

Breathe.

Back when this aired, fine I thought no, this is poor, this is not serving your characters, it is not telling a story. Fan reviews at the time liked the show much more than I did and to this day, every review I can find manages to praise something in it.

Whereas the me of today is left wondering not just whether I should bother coming back for part 2, but even whether I should pack in this thing of watching the original Doctor Who episodes from the start. I’ve been doing that for 10 months I think, and I know I’ve now seen more than 400 episodes, but maybe it’s time, maybe enough is enough.

But.

Rather than make a positive decision to end this watching marathon and find a kettle, I think I really let Four to Domesday’s episodes play on back to back with decreasing attention from me, and increasing pressure from my hands cradling my head.

But I’m glad it did run on because the next story is Kinda by Christopher Bailey.

Doctor Who may never have looked cheaper than it did in Kinda and that is truly, truly saying something. What’s supposed to be a lush jungle is filmed in a garden centre’s display corner. There’s some poor business at the start and end with Nyssa (Sarah Sutton) being incapacitated for no reason other than to cut down the number of characters in the show.

I’m not complaining. There were too many companions at the time and for a brief moment when Nyssa’s collapse was a cliffhanger, there was actually speculation that the character was pregnant. That would’ve been a story. But no, she collapses from early onset technobabble and it takes just under four episodes for her recover and never speak of it again.

So that was risible and if I’ve mentioned the cheapness, I haven’t conveyed it enough to you. No, cheaper than that.

At the very time it was broadcast, Kinda wasn’t exactly dismissed, but other stories easily beat it in popularity polls that year. Then shortly after it aired, Kinda was in fact dismissed, was actually derided, and its most apparently cheap moments were mocked. This period lasted a long time in part because, true, there is a lot to mock.

Except.

I adored it at the time. Yes, if you know the story then you know what I’m alluding to when I say yes, yes, that thing at the end, I know, I know, it is impossible to watch without thinking The Muppet Show had a better budget.

But by the time we reach this thing at the end, we’ve got there with such characters, such ideas and – be still my beating hearts – such dialogue. By that last episode, I am totally in this story and I am enthralled.

And I still am.

Kinda is my favourite of the more than 400 Doctor Who episodes I’ve seen so far.

There is a bit of me that would adore seeing Kinda redone as a modern production, complete with location filming and a better thing-at-the-end. But characters and dialogue beat everything.

They always do.

I have a ferociously sore thumb and I have to tell you that because despite all claims to the contrary, you wouldn’t notice, you couldn’t tell, since it does not stick out.

But it’s funny I should use the word “stick”. I got this pain because I have been holding a pencil, really a stylus, and handwriting on a device called a Note Air2. I’m reviewing it, actually I’m mostly liking it a great deal, but I also had a Secret Plan.

I was going to handwrite my next novel.

All of it.

I’ve friends who handwrite their first drafts of anything, then type them up later. Usually I figure I don’t have the time, and besides, I like typing, I think through the keyboard. But I see their point about it being just you, the pen and the paper, or in this case a screen.

I see the point about how the paper isn’t going to interrupt you with a notification. And I very, very much see the point about how when you type it up later, you are not just copy typing, you are already editing and changing and improving the work. You’re already taking it from a first draft to a, I don’t know, draft 1.5. Or at least 1.2. Something like that.

So.

I’ve been mithered over a novel for months. I wrote a 100,000-word one over COVID and then threw the lot away immediately afterwards because it was, in technical terms, utter shite altogether.

Since then I’ve tried salvaging the one decent paragraph and the one half-good joke from it, but that’s gone nowhere. And then a couple of weeks ago, practically minutes before this review Note Air2 arrived at my door, I had a new idea. Totally new novel.

So. I’ve got the idea, I’ve got this thing, I’m also going to be away on one of those there holiday things I’ve read about all my life, I felt sure that this was it, this was my time.

I handwrote about 50 words last night. It wasn’t even the novel, wasn’t even some notes about the novel, it was purely and solely playing with the Note Air2 to see how it worked. To see how you handwrite on it, most definitely how you erase your rubbish, and then things like how you set it to lined paper, and then no, narrower lines than that, please.

Plus.

This thing has a handwriting recognition feature. That alone is enough to make me crack knuckles and say good luck to it, but actually, give this thing some credit. This device was better able to read my handwriting than I was.

So I considered all of this a giant success, but since I was in bed, since it was late, I thought that was enough so I swiped away from what I was writing and instead got back to reading Crime and Punishment on the same device.

It’s not the laugh-a-minute thrill ride musical I’d been expected, but still it’s good, I read on far too late, I consequently slept in far too long, and I have had a throbbing sore thumb all day.

I thought it was RSI. Until I found it eased when I typed, and when I picked up that stylus to handwrite the words CHAPTER ONE, I yelped in pain.

So.

I have handwriting no human being can read, including me. I type something like eight times faster than I can scrawl by hand. And it is physically painful for me to handwrite.

It’s not as if I think the world will weep, but I’d like to be able to hand write more. And for some reason, this novel feels locked into handwriting. I don’t know why that could be and really I only thought it right now, talking to you, but it is.

I’ve evolved away from the need for pens, but I miss them. I need to break out of this. Or at least not spend a whole holiday going ow, ow, ouch.

I had this thing recently where a stranger asked me about their writing. I like this: if there’s something you think I might know the answer to, I’m flattered that you asked. Plus, face it, I’m a man: if it turns out that I know the answer, too, that’s made my day.

In this case, I knew the answer.

What he asked was about how to start writing and in particular, how to choose a word processor, a text editor, a system, an app, a lot of apps. He had Apple’s Pages word processor, I think he had a dozen other things, plus there is a huge amount going on in the guy’s life.

Did I know what he ought to do?

Yes.

“Open Pages again and start writing,” I told him. Forget everything else, all the apps and tools, because you can come to them later: remember that I’ve been doing this for thirty years so while I enthuse about a huge number of apps and tools, I found each one as I came to need them. Technology is a boon, but it isn’t a shortcut, writing is always and forever one word after another.”

He hasn’t replied and I’m not sure I expect he ever will because for all my best intentions, I think my answer there reads a bit snotty. Sorry, Matthew.

But it’s a rare case where I know that I am right. You can argue about Pages, and I only picked that because he mentioned it, but the thing is to I get on with that or Word or anything, to get on with it and this one-word-after-another is always the answer.

Admittedly I have to keep telling myself that too, but it’s true.

True and a bit boring. No wonder he hasn’t replied.

I’m doing this thing at the moment where I actually count the number of words I write each week. I promise that it’s for a good reason, it’s for a good purpose.

Okay, I can’t leave it at that, it sounds so suspicious. My 58keys YouTube channel now has a Patreon thing and one element of that is a weekly email to subscribers called “Fess Up and Press On Friday”. The stated aim is that I will tell you what I have written and — more importantly — what I haven’t written this week, plus what I promise to write in the next seven days.

I say that, then Patreon subscribers can — and I love this, do — attest to what they’ve done, not done, and are going to do. I think it keeps us going, I know that so far I am quite encouraged when I come to look at what I’ve done.

Also obviously very discouraged when another week goes by and I haven’t got any further with this script or with that novel.

But on average so far, I’ve been writing around 17,000 words per week, with practically all of them published. That’s going to go down shortly, I can see this is a busy period, but given that I don’t know how much you write, I can tell myself that this is a good amount and so feel, well, good.

I want to also say that I have automated a lot of this, although in another way I ant to not say that to your face at all. It’s Occam’s razor: am I anal for counting every word or anoraksic for having my Mac do most of the counting? Let me get back to the point.

Which is that I said most of that word count is published. The small bit that isn’t, or at least isn’t yet, is the killer.

If the current level kept up to the end of this year, I would have written and published something around 800,000 words and since I’ve been doing this for a long time, I’m certainly a few million published words in.

Yet it’s this unpublished sliver that I think about. There’s this certain type of writing I want to get into and maybe this is on my mind today because I’ve just an extremely praising rejection to do with it, but it is all feeling impenetrable.

I know I’m wrong, I know that this is just like any other form of publishing or producing, writers are needed and unless this rejection was entirely bollocks, I am capable of doing it.

But it does feel sometimes like all I can do is count words. Mind you, I’m not sure there is ever anything else. All writing is one word after another.

And so if I’m not getting where I want to be, if I am not achieving what I want, the answer is that it’s entirely on me and I should pull my finger out. So just as in Fess Up, I’ll make a vow to you: I will write more of this thing I want to do.

You and I can always write more. And that is always the answer.

I don’t think it matters what gets you into something. For instance, I may not be a classical music buff but I am deeply fond of Mahler’s Fifth and I can trace that back to Bid Time Return by Richard Matheson.

You may know it better as Somewhere in Time, the film version which Matheson also wrote, and which starred Jane Seymour and Christopher Reeve. For the film, Mahler was out and for some reason Rachmaninoff was in.

Okay.

I have to be in just the right mood for the film version — though plenty of other people will always love it, and some of them dress up in costumes at the filming location every year.

Right mood or not, film or book, I will always and forever be impressed with how Matheson pulls off the meeting between Richard and Elise. I suppose now it’s a meet-cute, but in the 1970s when the book was written and the – I think – 1980s when the film was made, it was just really clever. A hat’s off moment.

Anyway.

The book has a ferocity to it that the film, for all its charm, does not. Richard is ill and there’s a frenzied delirium on the page that’s so compelling. It feels like Rachmaninoff’s little Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini is too light for the book.

So I listened to some Mahler after so enjoying the book. Some years later when I left a magazine to go freelance, I was given a CD of his First and Firth Symphonies. I think it was by a Polish orchestra, I’m not sure anymore.

But I am sure that the very next day, my first-ever day as a self-employed writer in my home office, I put that CD on.

Instantly, the phone rang. For some reason, though, I didn’t stop the CD, I just turned the volume down, down, so low down that it might as well have been off. But since it wasn’t, it of course carried on playing.

And carried on. And carried on.

For that entire first day of freelance life, Mahler’s Fifth Symphony played on a barely audible loop, working its way into my head and – actually – leaving me miserable. At this distance I’ve forgotten the details of the day so maybe I was just becoming conscious of what a big step I’d taken leaving a magazine and a salary.

But I think it was the music.

The other day, I had to write about the launch of Apple Music Classical, so naturally I listened to it. So naturally I listened to Mahler’s Fifth first.

Fifth first. There’s something wrong with that sentence.

The thing about Apple Music Classical is that it’s supposed to be incredibly good at helping you find what classical music you want. I believe that’s true, you can search by what instruments you like, you can search by record label recording number, and everything in between. But you have to know something and apparently “Mahler Poland” isn’t enough to get back that old CD.

So naturally, since I live in Birmingham in England, I listened to Mahler’s Fifth Symphony performed by the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. The world-class CBSO.

And at moments this music was exultant, and at moments this music scuttled me.

I was standing in my kitchen, cooking, and shocked how miserable I got. It was wonderful.

I got a bit excited recently, talking with the musician and film composer Isobel Waller-Bridge. It was just for a few moments at a event, seriously no more than moments, and yet I can’t stop thinking about her work.

Follow. As a writer, I like to believe that a script exists outside of the film or the play that’s made from it, that it is a distinct piece of work where acting, for instance, is obviously inseparable from the production.

So when you hear that a TV show, say, is dreadful but the acting skill of such-and-such a star saved it, that’s just bollocks. I’m not in any way knocking actors, I just know that a performance is the actor performing the script and if it is not on the page, it ain’t ever going to be on the stage.

Without the script, an actor just gets to stand there, so consequently acting cannot ever be separated from a production. I suppose costume design, locations, hair design, these are all things that can have a life away from the production. But they don’t tend to.

And in truth, reluctantly, nor do scripts. You can read them without seeing the show, I do read them, I frankly am incapable of stopping reading them, but I once gave a friend a book of Frasier scripts and she looked at me exactly the way you are right now.

Whereas.

The music lives on.

Music is astoundingly woven into a show, and yet it can fully exist outside it. I relished the 2009 film Coco avant Chanel by Anne Fontaine and Camille Fontaine, for example, but I’ve only seen it the once and yet I’ve listened to the soundtrack by Alexandre Desplat countless times.

I’m listening to it now.

That does bring the film back to me, but less as images or frames, more the feel of it and of how I felt at the time, too.

And this is what was on my mind as I quizzed this film composer at an event. Talking with someone who is actually doing this work was fascinating.

I asked her about how late in a production she can be brought in, for instance. Something so crucial as music, something that could be make or break for a show, I’ve heard that it is just about the last thing considered, and yes, apparently it’s true.

I wanted to ask her about the responsibility of writing to deadlines, of writing to other people’s words and images. But I didn’t get that long. I did get to ask about “The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse”, which she did the music for.

“I can’t remember the running time,” I said. “What was it?”

“Thirty minutes.”

“And how much music did you have to compose?”

“Twenty-eight minutes.”

I laughed because, as she pointed out, there can be entire feature film scores with no more music than that.

Music is something crucial to me, and I know nothing of it. I wonder sometimes if that’s a good thing, as in the way I was looking at Chinese handwriting in a workshop recently and because I don’t understand it, I’m just seeing the sheer beauty of the letterforms.

Still, I want to write something that this composer then works on. I want to soak up how in the world she does it, I want to witness the process. And oh, do I want to sit in on the recording sessions.

Years ago I interviewed various people involved in The Beiderbecke Affair, Alan Plater’s drama, and several of them told me about Alan in the recording studio. Just being there, nothing to do, no requirement for him to be there, but he was and he was being happy.

And right this moment, I am choked up by Coco avant Chanel, track 4, Royallieu.

You’ve heard this before just as often as I have, but earlier this week someone again told me that thing about acting as if you already have the job you want. Fake it till you make it, they said, act and dress and behave as if you are what you want to be, whatever that is.

The argument is that total immersion and a concomitant total self-belief will get you where you long to go.

I can buy the immersion side. I know when I’m with other writers it doesn’t matter how different we are, for instance, we all somehow get it. Whatever it is. There is something fulfilling about that, and if I’m about to mix a metaphor up, let me: a rising tide lifts all boats and does so until the cows come home.

What I can’t get behind is the total self-belief part. Perhaps it’s because I don’t have it, but for some reason this time when it was said to me, I was reminded of every time I’ve heard it.

And I realised that I am never told this by someone who has got where they want to go. Most of the time the person telling me is currently striving toward that, and there’s nothing wrong with a bit of good old striving, but there is something wrong with this picture. The person who told me it this week had read it in an autobiography of a man who’d done this self-belief business. Actually, it had worked out for the autobiography guy, so I must be wrong, yet I can ignore that like a man and instead keep coming back to this same thing.

I am never told that self-belief works by someone who has self-belief.

Honestly, I think I prefer people who don’t.

But as well as the person telling me about self-belief being usually so far away from self-belief, maybe what I think I’m seeing is a similar disconnection between describing work and actually doing it.

It’s like the way — you’ve heard this, too — if you spend 10,000 hours on something, you will become good at it, or an expert, or something.

No one, not one single soul, who says that is currently anywhere but at the start of the 10,000 hours. For speed, I just nod and ask them to make sure to look me up when they’re on 9,999.

There isn’t a number of hours. There isn’t a manifestation of success that comes from nothing but total self-belief.

All there is, all there ever is, is the work and the effort and the striving. I have no clue why anyone would want to be any other way.

Mind you, total self-belief. Complete confidence, complete certainty. Oh, it would be good to have that. Just for an hour or two, just once in a while.