journalism

Lies ahead

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I’ve been having trouble with a script I’m writing. It is partly because I appear to be in it and while my cold writer’s head can see that’s necessary to tell this particular story, even I wouldn’t watch something about me.

But then there is also this. The script is about real people. I am a real person, I’m a real person who hasn’t had breakfast yet and is having difficulty remembering whether he’s shaved this fuzzy morning, but I don’t interest me. Beyond wondering why I’m writing my own dialogue, and then why I’m reading it back, I don’t concern me. Instead, it’s everyone else I’m worried about.

I have more research about the two other real people in the story than is even really feasible. Plus above all the facts and the documentation, they were my friends. No question, I’m armed and ready in that sense, but I’m a writer who’s also a journalist: I would give up an eye faster than I would make up a quote for a real person.

And now I’m going to have to make up entire speeches. Ouch, that’s revealing: I’m hiding in tenses and presumably because I am tense. The truth is that I already have made up entire speeches. I’ve written a two-page argument between me and one of these people. And that fight cuts into me, it hurts me, yet still I look at the page thinking he didn’t say that and nobody cares what I didn’t say back.

Except I had a dream the other night in which the late Alan Plater told me, in these precise words, “as long as it’s true, make it up”.

Then it’s like I planned what happened next. The reason I’m telling you this today, apart from how it’s pressing on my mind and I tell you everything, is that a play of Alan’s is to be re-staged at the Hampstead Theatre in London later this year. “Peggy for You” is about Alan’s first agent, Peggy Ramsay, and I read the script last night. Re-read: my copy of the published script turns out to be 21 years old.

It also turns out to be the true story of this eye-poppingly wild and wonderful woman, except it isn’t true at all. Except it is. It is an account of one day of her working life in the 1960s, completely made up, and therefore completely true.

I know because Alan’s introduction to the script says so.

“When I started writing the play, I heard her voice saying: ‘Just make sure it’s a pack of lies, dear.’ And it is. I did no research, but relied totally on a blend of memory, anecdote, myth and legend. The few elements that can be clearly identified could not possibly have happened on the day in question.”

Since Alan is one of the real people in my script, I think I should keep listening to him.

No question

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An editor told me this week to not write questions in a feature and I overreacted. Not at all because I disagree, but because I was appalled at the idea I would ever do this dreadful thing. I explained that questions in feature articles were a pet peeve of mine and then decided no, that’s not strong enough, it’s a pet peeve, a hobby horse and a religious tract.

I feel so strongly about this that it is honestly difficult for me to write you an example. Honestly. But here goes.

So what is a question in a feature?

God, the willpower required to not delete that before you saw it.

A question like that in an article comes loaded with a lot of information and all of it is bad. When you read a question, you know the feature is moving on to a new point, which is fine –– but you also know the writer didn’t know how to do the move. You can suspect that the writer is lazy and you can know for a fact that the writer isn’t very good.

If an article isn’t one of those bullet-point lists, a listicle in which number 6 will blow your mind, then it’s known as a read-through. You’re meant to read it through from the start to the end. That means the text starts somewhere and the writer takes you through to the end.

Each point has to follow on from the one before. The piece has a whole has a lot to say and the job is to say it all in such a way that the article flows, that it carries the reader along without any bumps in the stream. The job is finding the right sequence of points and making it seem inevitable, obvious, easy that they go in this order.

You also have to write well enough that someone bothers to read on, but that’s another story. The reason poor writers include questions in their text is because they can’t take you to the next point in a way that feels inevitable, obvious, easy.

When I read a question, it feels to me as if the article has stopped in a panic. I can see the writer, I can feel the writer, realising they don’t know how to keep the text going. I can feel the weight of the word count on their backs, the pressure of the deadline. I can feel that they don’t read much. And I can sense that they don’t give very much of a damn, either.

A question in an article is a brick wall and if I ever read on after one, it’s because I have to for some reason. I then resent having to, because I already know the writer isn’t any good and so the chance I’ll find what I need is suddenly dramatically lower.

Don’t get me started on questions in headlines, either. Actually, no, do get me started on that because it’s quick. So quick that there’s even Betteridge’s law which states that any headline that’s a question will be followed by an article that answers no.

“Can you declutter in one hour?”

“Is Elvis really teaching PE in Cardiff?”

It’s possible, just about barely possible, that you’ve picked up on how questions in articles and headlines make me a teeny bit unhappy. I told you I overreacted. But I can’t help it: when I see a question in a feature, I am affronted that I’ve been wasting my time reading this crap. So to be told not to do it, and by implication have it suggested that I ever do, it was pet peeve hobby horse religious effigy burning time. And then some.

Revealing writing and reading

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You realise that I am, of course, an incredible human being. And that’s despite being reduced to complete fanboy behaviour when meeting the writers of Lou Grant the other day.

(They were too polite to notice and anyway, I’m not likely to be within 100 yards of Santa Monica again any time soon, so it’s all a fuss about nothing.)

Anyway. I do genuinely think there is one thing where the nature of what I do gives me an unusual perspective. Writing always gives you perspective and I find that fascinating: the more you look within yourself, the more you reach other people.

But in this specific case, the perspective I get is because I’m writing a lot of journalism while also doing books and scripts. I like writing about writing, I adore exploring tools that make giant differences to my writing life and it’s great to get to write about those and share them.

I like and I have always cherished being both a writer and a journalist. I can’t actually speak to how good I am but I can know that having the two sides makes me better.

This week it also made me angry.

Last Tuesday, Apple launched many new products and did so with one of the firm’s typical big events. That’s all good: they do it well and they had plenty to say this time.

But.

You know Apple is this huge company and that it earns an incredible amount of money. The head of Apple’s entire retail arm, the part that includes 505 Apple Stores and the website store, came on to make a speech.

I’ve actually written a profile of her: she’s Angela Ahrendts and has an interesting background as well as a fascinating job. But you’ll notice I said ‘her’.

The second she stepped on stage I read some comment somewhere in the torrent of people following this event where they called her Miss Apple Stores or something like that. It wasn’t in the sense of a beauty pageant but it was meant to demean: she ‘just’ runs the shop.

Then I kept reading reports of the event which named her as Ms Ahrendts or wrote about what “the lady” said.

Nobody called Apple CEO Tim Cook “Master Apple”. Nobody called him “the gentleman”. No one says he ‘just’ runs a trillion-dollar company.

I’m glad to say that none of this was on display at AppleInsider.com where I was writing. But it was so prevalent across journalism and across twitter.

You can like Apple or dislike them, that’s up to you, but its audience craves new technology, new ideas. It craves new. And yet some of it sounds like it’s in the past.

Writing reaches into other people but what you write also shows them you.

Kirsten Bell in Veronica Mars

Now I wish I were writing Veronica Mars

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There is no chance I’ll get to write Veronica Mars but what makes me ecstatic is that today there is slightly less of no chance. Because the show is coming back.

So, true, it’s already written and presumably by series creator Rob Thomas. And true, I have absolutely zero chance of making my television drama writing debut – I don’t count Crossroads – on this show.

But there is a series. It was over, then it was a movie, then that was over, now it’s back. Stuff writing, I’m getting popcorn, I’m ready.

I don’t actually know when it’s coming and I do actually know that this news is old. It’s been a month or even two since the return of Veronica Mars was announced but I wouldn’t believe it at first. I needed an awful lot of evidence and here’s one of the last little bits: series star Kristen Bell talking about it:

I’m a writer but I’m also a journalist and normally if you give me two credible sources plus some documentary evidence, I’ll believe something is true. Unless you’re in government. This time I didn’t because it was just too important to me.

Five years ago I wrote a piece called I wish I’d written Veronica Mars and the title says it all. Except while I could’ve written that at any time during or since the show’s initial 2004-2007 run, I was writing it then because we’d had multiple sources and documentary evidence that a film version was coming.

I wrote that piece partly because I couldn’t contain myself and partly because I was hoping aloud that around a year later I would be seeing this film and wishing I’d written it. Sure enough, four years ago, I wrote I still wish I’d written Veronica Mars.

This time I’m just going to take it for granted that I’ll like the new show this much. It stands a bit of a chance.

And that’s it, that’s all I wanted to exclaim about to you today. Except writing this, I’m conscious that I haven’t even said what Veronica Mars is. That’s not uncommon: if you try to describe the show it generally sounds so poor that you wonder how Rob Thomas managed to sell it. Veronica was a teenage detective and I want to write “but…” here, yet anything you say after that sounds like an apology or an excuse.

No excuses. No apologies. Veronica Mars is great.

Years ago, I remember someone insisting very seriously that The Bill was the greatest crime series ever made. And I remember telling her she should stay in more.

At the time I would’ve been thinking of Homicide: Life on the Street, Hill Street Blues, Between the Lines, I’d have run out of fingers and borrowed yours to continue listing more forever. Today I’d just show her Veronica Mars.

Doing and not doing

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Don’t laugh now, but journalists are meant to be unbiased and impartial. They’re definitely not meant to get involved and do things.

It’s different with the kinds of feature articles I usually write but if I’ve written a news story and you can tell it’s me, I’ve failed. News is news.

Except of course it isn’t and while total disconnected impartiality is the goal, you know that’s not possible. It’s not possible in part because the very act of choosing what to cover is coloured by your own opinion of what’s important.

I’ve always also believed that the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle applies to writing. That’s the quantum mechanics claim that you can’t measure something’s speed without affecting its direction and you can’t measure its direction without affecting its speed. Our act of looking at an event affects it.

It’s the old line: if you write about a terrorist attack, you are giving it the oxygen of publicity.

Nonetheless, the aim is detachment, the goal is impartiality, and I believe to this minute that this is right, that this is how it should be.

Except for three things that happened this week. One was simply that I listened to an interesting interview with a guy who has spent his entire career as a journalist covering a particular subject. The man is entertaining, he’s informative, but I came away feeling a little sorry for him. That’s all he’s ever done. Write about other people’s work.

Then I was recently asked to join Cucumber Writers, a producing writing group in the West Midlands and I’ve been talking with them this week about their future plans. But look what I did there: the first word describing this writing group was not writing, it was producing. This is a bunch of writers who have the same ambition of being produced that we all do, but they went ahead and produced themselves.

I swear they don’t see how great and rare that is. But it’s remarkable. I’ve shaken at writers who have huge dreams but won’t take small steps. And here’s this group that’s been producing new writing for five years now.

Strictly speaking, all of Cucumber Writers and this fella I heard interviewed spend their days writing. They’re observing events or human nature and communicating it to audiences through various forms of writing.

Yet it feels to me like Cucumber is actually doing something. It’s not a passive recitation of other people’s work, it is an act of creation.

Work that is created is surely work that is worth being described: I’m not going to knock the idea of coverage, of journalistic examination of a piece of work. I think about this far too much as I must’ve written 20,000 or more reviews of various things yet also my favourite films tend to be ones where I went in cold. Where I went in to the cinema having not read reviews.

I’ve also been reviewed a fair few times and that’s fascinating: you also learn how rare it is for a review to be worth reading, regardless of whether it’s a good or a bad one. The lack of meat, the lack of point in the majority of reviews is depressing. The – what’s the opposite of lack? Abundance? Thanks. The abundance of times a reviewer has said what I should’ve done with a piece is educational. Not because they’re right, but because regularly they don’t care about being wrong: they’re not examining a piece, they’re often advertising how much better they would’ve been. Yet they don’t go do anything, they just carry on advertising.

I believe that making is better than describing, though. I believe that it’s better to be crew than passenger. And in my most optimistic moments I believe that being both a writer and a journalist makes me better at both.

Mind you, the third thing that happened this week was that I read a quote saying “It’s better to walk ten thousand miles than to read ten thousand books”. And I just thought, bollocks.

Ditchwater dull

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I don’t know what I want to say. If you don’t mind, I’d like to noodle around a couple of points that have become a thing this week. There’s a connection, I don’t know what it is.

Yesterday I was in a Performing Arts school talking about journalism and at one point we got into a discussion about the dull things journalists have to do. A teacher made the suggestion that the amount of reading you have to do is, well, not dull, but a chore.

I worked it out in front of them: I probably read a couple of hundred headlines a day, maybe a hundred starts or standfirsts to the ones that intrigue me, then maybe just sixty full articles. But I couldn’t tell you which of that is for work and which is for pleasure as they overlap: these are topics I work in but they’re topics I’m interested in.

Then one 11-year-old said that it was the amount of writing. I’ve only this moment, typing that to you, realised that the first dull suggestion was reading and the second one was writing. I suspect I may have found what my point is: these people I spoke to don’t want to be journalists.

Only, there’s one more thing knocking around my head. As well as me, there were two BBC television news people talking to these kids. I’d say I’ve rarely felt so outclassed but actually there are times when I’m that outclassed daily. Really, though, these two had presence and you were just immediately drawn to them.

One told me about having worked in schools and universities plus then seeing how those pupils and students behave when they get jobs in television. She said that it was common to find them refusing to fetch props, get coffees or even to shadow someone doing the job they apparently want so much.

Maybe this really is my point: they don’t want to be what they think they want to be.

Few if any of the 120 or so pupils I saw yesterday will ever choose to become writers. That they’ve seen something about it all and can make that choice knowing gigantically more than I did when I was their age, that’s fantastic. That the school does many of these days giving their pupils access to all manner of careers is perfect. I wish I’d gone to this school or that my school had been anything like it.

But of those people in any school, any education establishment, who want to become writers and journalists, I am suspecting now that many of them actually want to be what they think the job is.

The television newcomers want to direct Panorama in their first week, that kind of thing. Some or maybe many would-be journalists and writers want to be journalists and writers who don’t write or read.

This could all be obvious, you’re nodding at me now, and I think I’m being slow. But these thoughts about yesterday are clicking together with one I’ve seen before. When I meet a new writer and they say something about wanting to be the next JK Rowling with all her millions, I know they never will be. I haven’t even seen a word of their writing and I know they haven’t got it. They don’t get what she did. What she does.

If someone wants to write because they’ll enjoy being a published writer, they won’t make it. I feel I’ve lurched off into some kind of patronising diatribe now and I’m pretty sure that’s not what I was trying to figure out with you here.

You have to see the necessity and the pleasure of the dull things. Maybe that’s it. Yet I’m so deep into this and I so love what I do that I am struggling to name a dull bit.

Well, the fact that I’m full of cold again and must now go deal with spreadsheets, that’s getting there.

You couldn’t make it up

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You’ve seen this over and over again: Trump does something stupid, Britain realises yet another thing it failed to consider before Brexit, and someone will say that you couldn’t make this stuff up.

Of course you could.

The End.

Only, as well as just being wrong, I think this ‘you couldn’t make it up’ lark is a kind of marker post. It’s saying that over here is reality, over there is fiction. Actually, I think it really says that reality is better or sharper or harder or just more.

Okay. Except there are going to be Brexit dramas aplenty, there are going to be Trump biopics, and the faultline between fiction and reality will be examined anew every time. Writing will be tested, writing’s ability to convey real-life drama is going to be tested.

And it will fail.

As both a journalist and a writer, I can’t do creative non-fiction: to me it’s either fiction or it’s fact. As a reader, I want the same divide: I don’t want to come away believing that Napoleon was the leading Tetris player in his gang.

And when we get dramas based on real events, I think the audience is watching for the facts – or actually for the errors. If it’s a brilliant, searing, insightful piece of drama that wonderfully conveys the human condition, there will still be complaints that this person didn’t say that or this other person never wore the other. I’m minded of people who would come away from the Harry Potter movies saying yes, great, but they skipped chapter 11’s reference to ostriches. Or something.

Anyway, the dramas that we are going to get about anything real, anything political, are going to be rigidly factual and that will just reinforce this notion that we can’t make things up.

True, we’ve had a Nigel Farage piece that was a comedy but it was really just one good trailer-length joke and nothing else. We’ve also seen real-life events translated into science fiction but pretty simplistically. We’ve more often seen dramas that are as faithful as possible to the real-life events.

And I just don’t see the point of them.

That’s not drama, it’s a Crimewatch reconstruction. Granted, plenty of what’s happening now should be examined in criminal law courts but my need for a verdict is firmly, totally centred in reality: I don’t have a thirst to see justice done only to make a drama’s happy ending.

The word dramatised, by the way, means moved. From some non-dramatic form to another. You can’t dramatise a movie, for instance, because it’s already drama. The aim is to move whatever it is to another form in order to make something new, to create something that has value and worth on its own. It is not to fill in the blanks.

Drama documentaries do this and nothing else. They are a foul idea borne of a need to have something to look at when there’s no contemporary footage. So some historian will talk to some camera in some gorgeous house saying “And of course WIlliam Shakespeare lived on Lemsip” and it will be followed by portentous music, ancient costumes and actors trying to put emotion into Shakey telling Anne Hathaway: “I doth so adoreth it greater than Night Nurse”.

You can make it up, but you won’t.

This took me a very long time to realise but I got there and it’s become a staple for me: journalism is about facts and drama is about truth. It’s not the same thing.

There’s a thing I stick to in drama writing and specifically when pitching an idea. I’ll begin with what the story is about but then as fast as I possibly, conceivably can, I’ll ditch that and move on to this: what it’s really about.

Drama is about what really matters, what really is going on. Journalism is about who, what, where, when, why and how. Dramatised versions of real-life events are just pointless bores. Drama that examines why people do what they do, that dives into people instead of diligently copying news reports we’ve already seen, that’s just tedious.

You shouldn’t make it up.

The facts, ma’am, just the facts

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Sometimes you have to say something before you realise that you think it. Consequently this may be very obvious and I’m definitely going to take a time getting to it, but I first realised it on the ring road near Damascus.

Follow. This week in Stafford there’s been a children’s event called Page Talk, produced by Hayley Frances for Writing West Midlands. It’s a writing event where a small group of 10-14-year-olds have worked with professional writers, journalists, poets and more.

On Monday, they had poetry with Stephen Morrison-Burke. Tuesday was journalism with Alex Townley. Wednesday was science fiction and horror writing with Alex Davis. Tomorrow they get taught performance by Cat Weatherill. (Seriously, what a week for these kids, eh? Stephen, Alex, Cat – I don’t know Alex Davis’s work as well as I do the others but the kids told me he was superb. I’d pay to see that lot.)

Today they got me and “Play in a Day”. Twenty kids wrote a play together from scratch. At 11am, we had nothing whatsoever. At 4pm, we had a play.

What I hope also happened is that they got to taste a little of what it’s like writing for real. Not in school, not to be praised for how clever you are. For real. I told them that I wouldn’t be giving out grades. I told them that if we didn’t quite manage to finish the play today then we needn’t have bothered starting.

(I can do that, I can play the this-is-real and this-isn’t-school card because it isn’t school and I’m not a teacher. I’ve only once been studied by Ofcom people and that was a mistake. I’ll tell you now, I came away from this Play in a Day feeling pretty good – but I could because today I’m in my office writing for 16 hours or so. No kids. No trying to teach anybody anything. I’m not even a parent. Truly, I am a civilian.)

Anyway. No near misses, I told them, no well done for trying, the job was to write a play and that’s what we were going to do. That’s what we did.

But I was also strongly aware that this was one day in a week and that they have been doing all these other types of writing. They were obviously going to see what the differences are but there are two that I particularly wanted and needed them to know from the start.

I think one of them is obvious and I’ve said it a hundred times. Scriptwriting is different to novels and short stories and journalism and poetry because the audience never reads the script. The script is there for you and everyone else involved to make something else: a play, a TV show, a film.

It’s the other thing that I hadn’t realised I really think and it’s this.

Journalism is about the facts.
Drama is about the truth.

Journalism is who did what, when, where, how and only in the most coarse way why. Drama is all about why and also why it matters.

I’m not convinced that I gave them a brilliant example but it popped into my head and I said it. Since nothing else has popped into my head since, I’m going to say it again.

I was working with a guy named Connor Evan so I pointed at him. “If I walked in here with a custard pie and slapped Connor in the face with it,” I said, “that might be a news story.”

You can see the headline: Prat Pies Producer. Connor would point out that he isn’t a producer but we’re talking 21st Century journalism here and alliteration goes a long way.

You can also see the news report. You can practically read it now. A reporter would get a quote from a witness, from Connor and from me about why I did it – “Well, I had this spare pie and…” but otherwise the whole news story is Prat Pies Producer.

Whereas drama would convey to us – not tell, never tell, always convey, always show – what it is like to be the victim of that pie. What it’s like to feel cold custard against your skin for the rest of the day.

It would also convey why I’d really done it – and it would’ve accepted the fact that actually, maybe I don’t know.

Drama is messy. Drama is people. Journalism is just the facts.