dialogue

A word with you

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I’ve always known dialogue is revealing, it’s one of the reasons I love dialogue, which is out and out the reason why I’m a scriptwriter. The words one character uses to describe another, for instance, do hopefully do their job and give you a mental image of who they’re describing, but the very same words at the very same time also illuminate the first speaker.

For example, I could say right now that I think you’re clever. That’s a fair description of you, fine, but what it simultaneously tells you is that I’m observant.

The one word, “clever”, is not some special word, not some special code, it isn’t anything where you feel the line of dialogue is contrived or unnatural, it’s just a word to describe you — which happens to do this little bit of describing me, too.

What’s been brought home to me this week is that sometimes it only takes one word. One word can describe someone, it can convey a tone and atmosphere about a group of people, it can change your mind.

One word can be like a light switch.

There’s a Facebook group called “Old Pics of Brum”, and as it’s about my hometown of Birmingham, UK, I liked this group. Lately it’s been very active and I’ve been actually looking forward to the latest images, yet now I just skip any notifications like I haven’t got the heart.

Not since a friend, the writer Claire Bennett, mentioned that the group had removed one of her old pics of Brum for, ostensibly, not being an old pic of Brum even though it is in fact an old pic of Brum. You can see why they’d be confused. Maybe there’s more room for debate than I think, since I haven’t seen the image, since they’ve removed it.

Only, in talking about this, she also mentioned that separately she’d commented on some other image whose description talked about “ladies” and she had pointed out that they were women. She got told she was pedantic and I don’t know what happened next, but you know they didn’t change ladies to women.

And ladies is the word.

You do get many people saying “ladies and gentlemen” at the start of speeches but that’s practically become a meaningless series of syllables, an automatic utterance like the way “dulcet tones” is said by people who have no clue or interest what “dulcet” actually means. Or how so many such speeches have “and with no more ado” at the end, spoken by people who could not possibly tell you what “ado” is.

Frankly, I want some more ado. Give me lots of ado.

Outside of this kind of automatic sentence fragment, though, when someone says the word “ladies”, it is illuminating. Or to be fair, chiefly when it’s said by a man.

If a man comes out with the word ladies in a sentence, he’s at the very least telling me his approximate age. If he also decides to tell me that he knows how to handle the ladies, I know that he doesn’t and that he’s quite likely to be still living at home with his parents.

You just know, for instance, that the pathetic tossers who edit Wikipedia to remove biographies of women are men and that they are the kind of men who say “ladies” more than they ever say “women”.

The one word conveys a whole mindset to me, a mindset that believes women are another species instead of half of the same one as men. Whether it’s “ladies” in general, or one specific “lady”, the word is such a filter over someone’s description that I’m not sure I even register the rest of the words. I know I don’t think a man is describing a woman correctly. I do think he’s told me all I need to know about him.

“Ladies” is the turn in the conversation where you know you’re done. It’s a walk-away word.

I haven’t quit that Facebook group over the word. They might chuck me out if they read this. But I’ve walked away from it so far that I won’t even notice if they do.

No answer

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There must be something awkward about me because last time I fair raged at you about how writers shouldn’t ever ask questions in articles and now I want to at least enthuse about not writing answers.

It’s a different rant. Questions in articles and features tell me the writer couldn’t do their job whereas answers in a script tell me the writer isn’t great at dialogue.

This is very specifically something I feel about scriptwriting, but I feel it so strongly that I apply it in fiction, I apply it anywhere I remotely can. And it’s this: I will eat glass before I allow any of my characters to answer a question.

Respond, yes. React, absolutely. But actually answer what they been asked, as close to never as humanly possible.

Here’s an exchange of dialogue from a script. I need you to play the first part, I’ll play the second.

FIRST PERSON: What were you doing in Tesco this morning?
SECOND PERSON: Um, buying bacon.

You read that very well, thank you. I need you to do it once more, maybe with just a tiny bit more anger.

FIRST PERSON: What were you doing in Tesco this morning?
SECOND PERSON: Were you following me?

You see the difference immediately. The initial exchange about bacon was domestic at best, flat at worst. In the second one, these two characters feel like they’re on their feet, that there is some life and verve and history here, that they’re going to fight.

I grant you, we’ve lost the information that I was buying bacon. It’s possible that bacon plays an important part in the story, but you suspect not. So what the bacon line really accomplishes is confirmation that I was in Tesco. We already knew that from the question, so that answer was in all possible ways worthless. It was a dead line of dialogue. Dead and therefore deadening.

When you see an answer like that in a script, it is alway deadening, and it always means the writer is trying to write naturalistically. In a real conversation, it’s more likely that I’d say bacon than I would get in your face about it all, but this isn’t a real conversation. Drama does not have natural, real-life dialogue, it has dialogue that sounds as if it’s natural.

That’s a gigantic difference and it’s how dialogue carries infinitely more than the information in the words. You delivered your line about why I was in Tesco with some gusto there, but I could’ve asked about your following me in a light, jokey way. I didn’t, though, and you knew I didn’t, even without my writing it like this:

SECOND PERSON: (Angrily) Were you following me?

Last week I said that to me, a question in an article is a brick wall that stops me reading on unless I have to. An answer in a script can be a stumble, to my mind, and it breaks the flow, it takes me a little out of the story, because an answer is usually a bit of dead air.

If I feel strongly about this, though, it’s not that I’m against writers having their characters answer. It’s that doing so without being this dead pause, without reminding me that this isn’t naturalistic dialogue, is beyond me.

Whereas the reason I’m a writer at all is a show called Lou Grant which basically had an ensemble of journalist characters constantly asking each other things, and then spending half the episode interviewing people. Back when I was a teenager, I watched five years of that show without once realising that it was all question and answer, it is done that well.

It’s not very often that something you used to adore stands up a couple of decades later, but in this case I now admire that show even more. I just don’t seem to have learned from it how to ask questions without answers being rubbish.

Death by “As You Know”

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No doubt, the real reason I don’t happen to watch the hit sports comedy “Ted Lasso” on Apple TV+ is that it’s about sports. I did love Aaron Sorkin’s “Sports Night” but then that’s the show that famously said:

“It’s about sports. The way ‘Charlie’s Angels’ is about law enforcement.”

Doubtlessly, “Ted Lasso” is about more than its football subject, but unfortunately another reason I don’t watch is that I did read the pilot script. And in scene 2, somewhere in the first half-dozen lines of dialogue, there was this:

HIGGINS: Mrs. Mannion– Excuse me – Miss Welton – George is here… The manager?

Higgins did not say “as you know, George is the manager,” but that’s really what the line is. It’s an “as you know” moment, with one character telling another something they cannot possibly fail to already know –– but we, of course, don’t yet. If there is one thing worse than an “as you know” line, well, it’s the type of line that immediately followed it in “Ted Lasso”:

REBECCA: Yes I know who George is, Higgins.

You can write that line as sarcasm, you can play it as anything you like from that through to impatient annoyance, and none of it matters. Where the “as you know” line is the writer giving notes to the audience, so the response is not a character actually speaking, it is the writer excusing the “as you know” part.

They needn’t bother trying because the excuse is just a megaphone for anyone who missed the clunking “as you know”.

That exchange threw me out of the “Ted Lasso” pilot script and I don’t think I really got back into it again. Certainly I didn’t feel compelled to go watch the show. I am told, quite repeatedly, that the show is better than the scripts –– just typing that has made me twitch –– and that the performances are everything.

I agree that performance is everything. I just also know that directing is everything. That producing is everything. And that writing is everything.

The greatest performance in the world can make a piece better, but performance is interpretation. You are taking something and interpreting it, you are taking something and performing it. If the it doesn’t work, there’s only so far you can possibly make it watchable.

I suggest, then, that this particular “as you know” moment is probably a rarity in the series. I suggest, then, that if people say this is a great and funny comedy, that the scripts have to be great and funny.

But “as you know” shot me out of the story and it always does. You put it in, or networks demand that you put it in, because there’s a terror that the audience won’t immediately understand and so they will immediately stop watching. This manager guy –– who, as you know, is called George –– comes in to see Rebecca and she fires him. Making him an ex-manager is enough, that’s all we need to grasp that he was the manager and now isn’t. Since this appears to be a character we will never speak of again, I’m really not sure it was worth spending an “as you know” on him and the job he hasn’t got anymore.

Actually, reading on a little, I think that whole section clunks, but I was already in a bad mood because of the “as you know” syndrome.

So you throw in an “as you know” to please the network and retain the audience, but the result is – always – that you annoy the audience. There must be some proportion of viewers who miss that moment because they’re on Twitter, although the fact that they can miss it and survive not knowing George’s old job is another clue that the line wasn’t necessary.

And there have to be a larger proportion of viewers who don’t care. You can’t please everyone and it would be a pretty anodyne show if you could. But you don’t have to tell the audience they’re stupid and you cannot, cannot excuse doing that by having another character confirm that they know what we know they must already know.

You also can’t dismiss a hit that’s been picked up for three seasons, you can’t ignore the whole thing because of two lines of dialogue in the pilot script. But it’s not my job to watch any particular show, it isn’t my job to keep reading scripts from any particular series. If you lose me, you lose me and I’m not saying I’m a loss, I’m saying it’s unnecessary.

Take “State of the Union” by Nick Hornby, for instance. It’s a series of ten episodes, each ten minutes long and each set in the moments before a couple go into their weekly marriage counselling session. Part one ends with the man bolting, running up the street before the session door is opened. So in part two, you are dying to know if he came back and joined the appointment.

LOUISE: How are you feeling about this week?
TOM: As you know, I missed the start ––

No, no, okay, this is how that scene really goes:

LOUISE: How are you feeling about this week?
TOM: Well, pretty sure I’ll be there from the beginning.

In terms of straight plot information conveyed, we’ve got what we needed to know. And we got it without an “as you know”. I offer that we really get much more, it’s part of an exchange that says little but speaks volumes about the characters.

“State of the Union” is replete with dialogue that’s heightened but feels natural, feels just how these two characters would really talk. Over and over, it’s about them, and yet constantly it is also filling us in on the plot. Since every episode is set in the ten minutes before their appointment, we of course get the tension building up to what’s going to happen, but we never see it. We have to wait for the next episode and then we get filled in on how that previous session turned out.

Doing that ten times, or whatever, would make me murderous if each one had an “as you know, in the previous session we…” conversation, but there isn’t a single one. Not a single moment in ten episodes where it’s solely the writer filling in the audience. It’s always these two characters talking naturally and it’s a tremendous piece of writing. And of acting, and of directing. Also, actually, of photography: “State of the Union” is a web series but it looks like feature film.

It’s also always doing more than one thing in its dialogue, more than ticking a box to tell us who George is. Maybe that’s what I’m unhappy about, maybe that’s what I’m objecting to. Dialogue that only does one job at a time. “As you know” is annoying, but when there’s nothing else there, nothing telling me more about character, its annoyance is magnified. For me, anyway.

I watched the whole “State of the Union” ten episodes in one day. I will give “Ted Lasso” a go. But it is about sports and I struggle to summon any interest in that.

As you know.

A Wendy Napkins Mystery

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I really do have a character named Wendy Napkins and she really does get embroiled in Mystery. So far just four script pages of Mystery, but still. There’s Adventure, too: I’m not messing around here.

Don’t ask me when I wrote those four pages but I reread them yesterday and – truly surprising for me – I like them. I like her. There’s a reason she gets called this, it makes sense, but never mind that, she appears to be in the kind of detective story where you have to have an unbelievable name.

She isn’t really. I think I initially planned this as a pastiche and then came to like PC Wendy Naplinsky and her part-time hours working at a nursery too much. I’m not sure. I know that having read the four pages, I want to take her on into a full mystery and that it will tread a line between parody and seriousness so thin as to be invisible.

I want serious mystery but small scale. Who stole the crayons? Is that blood on little Nevada’s father? I’m already ramping it up. Let’s stick to The Case of the Missing Crisps. I think I can do it, I think it can sustain a series if I write the script well enough, but I’ve also been quite startlingly reminded of how collaborative drama has to be. And that’s making me wonder.

I’ve always known drama needs many people and I have usually always believed it to be a great thing. Writer, actors, director and producer working together at the top of their game and with the utmost of their effort, it’s fantastic.

I did once have a director whose sole vision, as much as I could tell, was to have the actors speak faster in order to bring the curtain down before his last bus.

But apart from him, whether it’s in anything of mine or just anything I know about, I have been agog at how it’s really the combination of these people that makes a drama fly.

And then there’s this. The reason I reread my old Wendy Napkins scene is that I watched an Aurora Teagarden Mystery on Netflix. I say Netflix: if you know your television at all well, then ten seconds in you knew it might be airing on Netflix but it was made for America’s cloying Hallmark Channel.

I’m not here to knock it. This is definitely not my kind of drama but it’s a long-running series of TV movies, it’s based on a longer-running series of novels. And it did make me want to see the resolution of the mystery.

What I keep thinking about, though, is the acting. There were some actors in it that I’ve seen before, some I rate, and others I hadn’t heard of but apparently all have great long track records.

It’s not that any of them were awful, it was that every single one of them – to my mind, to my taste – was bad in precisely the same way. And to precisely the same degree.

Every one of the large cast did wide-eyed acting. They’d have this giant pupil in a massive white eye reaction to everything. From “You mean he wasn’t the last person to see her alive?” to “You want milk with your coffee?”

To be fair, coffee should be black. And to be fairer, those are not real lines from the show. But they could have been: that was the standard of dialogue and that was the style of delivery.

It was funny. Perhaps most so when a character would go wide-eyed at themselves as they casually throw in helpful lines such as “well, I could ask my colleagues in the CIA which I haven’t mentioned I work for.” But then it was also fun watching an actor in this company visibly chewing over the impossible moral dilemma about milk or no milk.

It was funny but it’s about invisible lines again. This could have been pastiche but it was too serious. This could have been the cast and crew being a bit meta about the tropes of cloying cosy mysteries. But if the cast and crew were in on it, you got the sense that they didn’t think the audience was. They all acted as if they knew this wasn’t very good, but the tone of the show was that it was pandering to a very specific audience who they assumed would love it.

Tone. That’s the word. I heard once that ahead of every Doctor Who episode there is a tone meeting. All department heads from writing to, I don’t know, visual effects, meet to discuss the script and decide on its overall tone. To decide whether they were all going to make this one be the silly episode or the scary one and to what degree.

Tone is that important and it must be so with the Aurora Teagarden TV movies because their tone is unwaveringly precise from the barely noticeable teaser to the aw-shucks epilogue.

I may not want that Teagarden tone for my Wendy Napkins, but I do know I want a tone and I think I know what it must be.

What I don’t know is how in the world to write that tone into the script such that every actor performs precisely the way I want. I’m not at all sure I would want to make actors perform precisely as I saw my characters.

But if I don’t get that into the script, still it seems that someone can impose it enough to seem less Teagarden and more Stepford.

Bugger, though. I only made up that title “The Case of the Missing Crisps” for you and now I’ve got to write the script. Got to.

Talkback

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Last night I was asked to give a talk about dialogue. The poor fools. They thought they’d get me for an hour or something, but instead I got them. Barricaded the room and settled in for at least a month’s discussion about this.

I’m quite keen on dialogue.

Toward the end of the session’s official, planned, reported running time, though, one man there asked a question that ultimately became the answer. Not just to his point, but actually to just about everything I love about dialogue in scripts and prose fiction.

He asked whether what I was really saying was that character comes first. That without the characters, the dialogue won’t ever be any good.

I know that this is what I have always believed, I know it. But – possibly ironically given the topic of the talk – it was someone saying it that made it work. That made it real and concrete.

For all the things I could enthuse at about dialogue, as I pulled down this barricade stuff and let them out as free human beings once more, it does come to this. What a character wants, what a character does, who a character is, that is what makes dialogue powerful.

We had an example last night, for instance – wait, I’m making an example of an example, I’m not sure that’s even allowed. Anyway. We had an example of one character who is advising another not to take a particular job.

If that first character is a good friend looking out for his or her pal’s best interests, the dialogue will be one thing. If this first character wants the job and is trying to get rid of some competition, it will be something else.

The words will be remarkably similar, but the dialogue will be totally different.

I would like to say that I went last night to bubble over at people about this wonderful topic. You could say that I grandly went to dispense wisdom.

But you can’t and I won’t deny that I learned something.

Accented characters

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I’ve a friend who insists, really strongly insists, that he has no accent whatsoever. He’s American. I just look at him. But then this week, I was asked if I had deliberately changed my own accent.

I’m from Birmingham in the UK and if it’s fair to say we have a particular accent, then it’s very unfair how that accent gets maligned. When a Cockney tells you that your accent makes you sound stupid, truly the only thing you can say is “goodbye”.

As it happens, I don’t speak in a particularly Birmingham accent, but I am deeply uncomfortable at the idea I might have deliberately done that. I vow to you that I haven’t, but the very idea cuts deep into me and in part, I think because it connects to a key failing I think I have in my writing.

Let me triple underline that I have not and would not deliberately change my accent. I’m told that at times a sudden stab of Brummie will come out of me in some particular word. Good. If I cannot change my accent to avoid Brummie, I suppose I can’t in all conscience choose to change it so that I am more Birmingham, but I am proud of where I come from and where I live now, and enough so that I want you to know. If you get that from me actually telling you, fine. If you get it from a sudden Brummie word, all the better.

I used to tell people that my accent is what it is because I grew up watching Bob Hope films. But as I said to the person who asked me about it this week, I’m no longer comfortable saying that because of how Hope treated his writers.

He used to make them all stand at the bottom of some stairs while he was at the top. He would write their cheques and throw them down to them.

Maybe I could just amend my accent explanation, maybe I could just be more precisely accurate. I grew up watching the Road movies that Bob Hope and Bing Crosby were in. Seven movies from 1940 to 1960-something, so long before I was born, but films like Road to Singapore, Road to Rio.

My favourite is Road to Morocco, and probably because it contains one of my favourite lines from any film. It’s a quite tortuous line that Hope and Crosby manage to sing on their journey and it goes: “Like Webster’s International Dictionary, we’re Morocco-bound.”

Now you’re looking at me.

I wonder if my clearly British but otherwise not apparently very precise accent is less my exposure to American films, and more because of this writing failure.

I could tell you the history of Birmingham. I have been a kind of tour guide for the place, I’ve dragged friends from the US and Canada around it. With friend and writer Yasmin Ali, I’ve put a visitor from Myanmar through every possible site in the city. I remember when I eventually left him and Yasmin, I actually sank to the street, my legs were evaporated.

When an interviewee recently described Manchester as Britain’s second city, I switched off the audio recorder and gave him a talking to.

When a college friend insisted that actually Nottingham should be the second city, I explained “Bollocks”.

Yet apart from right now, here, talking with you, I don’t think you ever see Birmingham in my writing. It’s certainly not from any particular decision, and I do have a current script that’s set here in the city, but my writing is definitely not riddled with my home town.

And I do think that’s a failing.

Alan Plater’s work, for instance, was so often not just set in the North East, but positively imbued with the place. You can think of so many more, too. Places, usually home towns, that seep into a writer’s work and, I think, give it something I lack.

I have set more writing in the TARDIS than I have in Birmingham.

And this is all on my mind again because the friend who asked about my accent did so at a book event. There’s a new book called “Spake: Dialect and Voices from the West Midlands“, published by the great Nine Arches Press. It’s a collection of prose and poetry and essays about and using the dialects –

– sudden flashback to school. I’m in a technology lesson and the teacher is talking about computer languages and dialects. Then he finally writes that word on the board and the whole class goes “Oh, I see” because it had kept sounding like he was saying “Daleks”.

The book is funny and insightful and it’s a collection of writing from writers whose work I relish and some of whom, I know and relish as people too.

Each piece is about myriad other topics as well, but they all touch on location and they are all deeply steeped in the different regional accents and dialects of the West Midlands. I think sometimes it’s piled on a bit for effect, but the effect is brilliant.

The more precisely defined that a region is in these pieces, the more specific and particular the words and the grammar and the sounds of the writing, the more universal it all is. You may not know what a particular word means, but still it gives the writing life and verve.

You can’t make this stuff up, I can’t fake an accent I don’t have, and I suspect my writing will always lack this core, but that doesn’t mean I have to be okay about it.

Endings and finishes

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It’s not that I’m in a fight. But I’m disagreeing with someone and as polite as we’re being, as much as I rate the fella, we’ve come back to the same point many times this year and neither of us will budge. I can’t actually tell you the details because it’s about a book of his that isn’t out yet – and, besides, if you knew everything then you might take his side.

But I can try to present a case to you that I think applies generally to writing and drama and fiction. And by chance it also applies very directly and specifically to a piece of my own that I’ve been working on this week.

In both mine and this fella’s, the last moments are key. With mine it’s a radio play and it’s all about the penultimate sentence. With his novel, it’s about the past page.

He’s much further down the line with his piece than I am so I got to read it finished and as one of several readers he asked for opinions. I can tell you that my summary opinion was that it’s bloody good and so scary that I was reading bits through my fingers.

Only, he wanted to know a specific opinion about a specific thing. What exactly did I think the last page meant? I told him and actually felt a bit on the spot because while it was excellent and maybe a key reason I like the entire novel, what I thought about it seemed bleedin’ obvious to me. But of however many readers he’d had, apparently I was the only one who understood it.

Bully for me.

Except because of this, he plans to change the ending. To make it clearer. And that’s our fight: whether he should or not. Now, he’s going to win because it’s his book but in the middle of our emails about it, I stood up to make my point. I actually stood up even though we were emailing. I got to my feet because I am so certain that I am right. I’m never certain I’m right and yet here I am, standing up and steadfast.

His ending is a real punch to the throat, it is the kind of powerful head-jolt moment that a writer would give their last kidney for. He argues that this doesn’t matter, that it’s worthless if most people don’t get it.

I argue that there is no possible, possible way to simplify this single-point ending yet also keep its power.

So his position is that it’s better to have something every reader gets. And mine is that if you do this, then what they get is tepid water when they could’ve had moonshine-strength alcohol. He wants something for everyone, I want something brilliant. I envy this man’s writing and one of the reasons is this power that he’s willing to throw away.

Let me describe my own nearest equivalent, the thing I’m writing this week. It’s also not out yet and it’s actually so early days that the odds are it will never reach an audience or at least not in this form. Nonetheless, it’s mine so I can tell you that the penultimate line is someone saying her name.

That’s all. Just her name. It’s a point in the play when I officially reveal that someone is really someone else – and it comes about 40 minutes after the audience will have figured that out anyway. Only, I want the audience to be ahead of me here because when they finally hear the name spoken, it then tells them a second fact that they will not have got. I do like the trick of it, I do like the surprise, but it’s also important for the character and what she’s been going through.

And I’m proud of this next part: I wrote that line, I wrote the sentence that is simply her saying her name, and in that context, at that point, it made me cry at the keyboard. Honestly. Consequently that single line is the reason I must get this play made. The power in that penultimate line is my reason for writing it at all.

I just know both that audiences will have guessed the first part of it and also that given where it sits in the play, some will miss its import. Inescapably, you know the play is ending when you get to this line and I think it’s a beat that comes after you expect all of the plot and character to be done with.

Perhaps I could move it up earlier, but then it wouldn’t have the bang. I could skip it completely and just end the play a moment sooner. Accept that it’s no longer an ending, it’s just where the play finishes.

But this sentence is an end, it is the snapping of the suitcase being closed on the story. It’s also the best sentence I’ve ever written, so, you know, there’s that.

A Desire for More Cows

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Previously on Self Distract… After a month’s enforced absence from you, I ran back last week with a babble about the film Arrival, the idea of the Sapir Whorf Hypothesis, and right at the last moment squeezed in how I believe that putting yourself in other people’s shoes helps you write better characters. Or write characters better.

This is just you and me talking, isn’t it? You must’ve told some people, though, because I had a lot of response to all this. Most of it stopped just short of using a phrase to describe someone joins metal together under a hot flame. (“Well, duh.”)

I think all of the response said that whatever your route into thinking about other people, other characters, whatever term you want to give it, you are not a writer if you can’t put yourself in other people’s situations.

So I’m not a writer.

That was a hard thing to say to you. It was a harsh thing to say about me, since it’s all I want to do and I’m effectively unemployable in any other capacity. (Look at my hands. Have these hands ever done anything but type?)

I can’t always see other people’s perspective, though. I can do certain things. I can see certain other points of view. For instance, take the countless number of times that I’ve been in a pub with male friend who’s annoyed. He’s doing that thing of recounting something his female partner did and concludes with: “I mean, explain that. It makes no sense, does it?” And I am required by the script, by politeness, pretty much by civilisation’s very rules, to nod encouragingly.

I can’t actually make myself say I agree because usually I completely understand his partner’s point of view.

In fairness, it’s usually a comparatively trivial issue as if it were bigger, they wouldn’t still be together. Maybe I can just do the comparatively trivial, maybe I am limited in just how much I can understand of other people’s perspectives, of their way of thinking.

For take this as another instant. Recently a friend told me she was heading home one night when a man walked by and called her a slut.

Get inside that man’s head. I am a man, both he and I started off as babies and as little boys, but he went down a line I cannot conceive. Well, I know the same as you do that he got off on saying that. I know that in every sense of the word that he’s a wanker and we both know that he’d have said that to any woman he passed. And possibly did say it to every woman he passed.

You, I and this friend of ours – you’d like her, I must introduce you – also know completely and thoroughly that there was nothing about her that incited or encouraged this stranger.

Yet here’s this smart, vibrant, exciting woman and still when she got home she looked at herself in the mirror and thought about what she was wearing. Some shite of a man affects her enough that she looks in the mirror. I can completely understand her – wait, that’s a bit grandiose, a bit too much, I mean that I believe I can completely understand. I know that I can put myself in her place, I know that I would’ve looked at that mirror too.

I can only hope that I’d do what she did next: she says that she went out the next day wearing pretty much exactly the same thing. She wasn’t saying bollocks to this type of men, but actually she was.

I get that and I’m as proud of her as I am embarrassed by the man. What I can’t get is him. I mean, I’ve said to you that he got off on this and you know he did, but that seems to me like all I can do is label him. I can see what he did and if this were a story I were writing, I could plug him into various situations.

Whereas I can feel for her.

That seems to me to be a huge difference. It seems to me that feeling for her is not a writing exercise, not an attempt to draw a character, it is an involuntary human connection. I do definitely see that I need to make that connection, to have that feeling and empathy instead of a collection of labels if I’m to be a better writer.

And I’m afraid if I’m not just to write about characters who make me feel things, if I am instead to be better able to create characters that make you feel things instead, I have to be braver. For I know that one reason I can’t get inside the head of that man is that I am afraid to.

You have to agree with your characters, even temporarily, even just to an extent. Your characters and that man all think they are right so for them to work, for you to really see them and to see the world as they do, you have to decide that they are right and examine them from there.

I’m never going to call someone a slut but my characters might. And if they do, you have to believe it’s them doing it and not my authorial voice deciding they will because I’ve labelled them as the tosser of the piece. You have to believe these characters are real.

I get very tired of writers being asked where they got their inspiration from as that suggests everything we write is based on something real and so anyone could’ve written it if they just happened to have that same experience. I get very tired of people concluding facts about writers because of what their characters are like. I get deeply annoyed when someone quotes a writer saying something foul when actually it was one of the writer’s characters and the entire book is setup to prove that bastard wrong.

Not everything is based on anything. Not everything is how the writer really feels. But I realise that everything has to be something the writer has felt or made themselves feel. Made themselves examine and explore. No matter how distasteful.

I”m working on it. For neatness and symmetry and structure and all the things that I unconsciously think of when writing to you, I should end now by saying that it’s true, I’m not a writer. I’m not sure I’m brave enough, though. So let me try saying it this way: I’m not a writer yet.

Adjust your settings

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I was trying to get some work on a TV show once and I can’t even remember what it could possibly have been, but I do recall the producer. She said to me that the single most important thing in television drama is the setting. Now, I’m sitting there in her office thinking bollocks, character is immeasurably more important but, you know, I wanted the work, so I’m nodding away saying how interesting that thought is.

I know I didn’t get the work. And I know I still believe right down to every individual pixel of my soul that character comes top, but she had a point. She had more of a point than I appreciated at that time and I’ve been thinking about it a lot. Especially so since this week I worked with a group specifically discussing how novels benefit from where they are set.

I think I’m probably going to find a way here to conclude that a story’s setting is a kind of character itself. Just one that doesn’t talk much. Or usually, anyway: there is a famous BBC Radio 4 dramatisation of Wuthering Heights that is narrated by the house. I long to hear that.

But let’s see if we get to this setting-is-character lark and whether it works or is just my hoping to convince that producer she should’ve hired me.

Her point, if I’m understanding her correctly, is that the setting enables drama. So Albert Square in EastEnders, for instance, is naturally home to a fairly diverse group of characters. Different ages, wealth, backgrounds, jobs. Differences are what make the world interesting but they are also what makes for sparky drama: our situations put pressures on us that affect how we see things and what we do about them. Everything we’ve been taught and everything we’ve done affects who we are. So when you can find a setting that naturally puts different people together, it is potent.

My mind has just leapt from EastEnders to Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and specifically why it was set up to be different to the other Trek shows. Ridiculously, Star Trek got to the point where everyone on the Enterprise was lovely and they all supported each other perfectly. No difference of opinion beyond which technobabble solution would save which entire civilisation this week. It was a conscious choice: Starfleet officers are heroes. So for Deep Space Nine, the producers had the show’s Federation be brought in to help recovery in a region rather battered by conflict.

The baddies with the noses, the Cardassians, had used local Bajoran people as slaves in their mining space station. Now they were gone and Starfleet took over the station like a UN envoy. So very consciously and actually very cleverly, this space station setting was potent. You had the heroes coming in, you had the surviving Bajorans wondering whether they were swapping one group’s slavery for another, and you had the Cardassians hovering around wanting to come back. Rather than a single group of nicey-nicey people, you had at least three distinct groups inescapably in conflict.

It was well done and it means that to me, Deep Space Nine, is the only satisfying Star Trek out of an awful lot of different versions. I could argue that this is down to the writing: I read all 170-odd scripts for this show, most of them before I’d seen the episodes, and they read like a novel, they were so interesting. Somehow I also read all 170-odd scripts for Star Trek: The Next Generation and they weren’t so good.

But then Deep Space Nine didn’t move so the problems faced this week continue next time. The Enterprise just pops off to save the day somewhere else.

So certainly the writing elevates DS9 but maybe it could because of the setting the writers created.

That’s not the same as the setting being a character, I’m struggling there. I’m not sure why I think I’m going to reach that point or why I’m focusing on it, yet I can already see that I’m regarding the place as important to the characters. If I want to tell a story about a school, the characters I have in there will inevitably be different if that school is Eton or if it’s in an inner city slum area.

Perhaps because I’m a scriptwriter, I have seen that I’ve avoided being specific about settings: this script is set in a city, that one in a village, and I’ve not bothered to say London or Little Writings on the Wry. Maybe I should have been specific. Certainly I’m going to be. For it occurs to me that the setting affects characters vastly more than I realised: if a place is comfortable, that tells me a lot about the people who stay. If it’s a foul place then it tells me a lot about the characters who go there.

Character and setting are intertwined. I want to go just a touch further and argue that settings have moods: an underground car park has a different disposition to a hayfield in the year 19summertime.

So settings have moods and feelings plus they are deeply entwined with characters. Go on, give it to me: your setting is a character. And excuse me while I go phone a producer.

Don’t answer

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I’ve been talking my mouth off about writing all week. There is something funny about talking about writing and there’s something not at all funny about a writer not getting to write much. But in the course of yapping away, I rediscovered something so persnickety and detailed, an opinion of mine so exclusive to writing that normal people would think I’m barmy to care and writers would again recognise me as barmy but also as one of their own.

Naturally, then, I’ve got to tell you. For once, it won’t take long, either, as it’s so precise and so vehement as to be less an expression of opinion and more a banging my hand on the table for emphasis.

Do not ever write anything where your character answers a question.

Not.

Ever.

Let me give you the example that keeps popping into my head. Here’s Burt asking Susan a question. (I have no idea who Burt and Susan are.)

BURT: What were you doing in aisle 9 of Asda this morning?
SUSAN: Buying bacon.

Susan answers the question and in just two words I’m bored with her, that dialogue is dead air and it achieves nothing beyond the obvious. Now, if you had to have Burt ask this question, it would be because you needed your audience to know this fact that Susan had been at Asda in aisle 9 this morning. But you never need them to know that same fact twice.

The sole thing that “buying bacon” does is tell us that yes, she was in Asda’s aisle 9 this morning and presumably that’s where the bacon is stored. Unless we deeply care about bacon, this is worthless dialogue. Whereas this isn’t:

BURT: What were you doing in Aisle 9 of Asda this morning?
SUSAN: Were you following me?

Look what that just did. In both examples, Susan is actually saying yes, she was there. So that’s your plot exposition done. She isn’t wasting air with a pointless detail about bacon and pointless is always boring. If that were all, I’d at least be happier than when she just said “buying bacon”.

But it isn’t all. Without the rest of the scene we can’t tell what attitude she’s got – is she afraid? is she annoyed? is she flirting? is she a vegetarian who’s just been caught out? – but we do know that she has got some attitude. She’s on her feet, she’s pushing back, this may be very mild conflict but it is conflict. She’s pushing back and Burt is now on the defensive; she may have just changed the power in this conversation.

That’s drama. And I’l tell you this: you now want to know what Burt is going to say next. When it was about bacon, I doubt you were excited waiting to see if he’d enquire about smoked or unsmoked, back or streaky. Maybe you and I would both gasp if we learned she’d bought turkey bacon – there’s such a thing as turkey bacon? – but neither of us would be giving a very great deal of a damn.

You can think of situations where actually “buying bacon” is the right response, it’s the response that would bring up the end-of-episode drums of EastEnders. So when I say never do it, you know that I mean never do it but okay, if you must.

It’s as I’ve said to you before: there are no rules in writing, but if you break them…