Nothing comes from nothing

Compare and contrast, would you? Earlier this year I worked at a media careers fair where certain schools had pulled out and refused to allow their students to attend. It wasn’t any complaint against the fair, it was something to do with the cost of getting them there and the staff time it was going to take up. Whatever. The key thing is that a handful of those students came anyway.

I don’t know if they lied to their teachers, I don’t know if they pulled a sickie, I just know that effectively they said screw the school, we need this. And they did something about what they needed.

No question: you know they’ll go far and you would hire them on the spot.

Then last night I was talking with some university writing students and they were great: I mean, they were funny and cheery and they’d come some distance to attend a Royal Television Society event. But they also told me about a problem they’d had which is that they’d been assigned to write substantial projects in groups and some of the other writers didn’t always show up.

Now, they were adamant that some of those writers had really good reasons to be absent but these were their friends they were talking about and they were nice about them.

I’m not.

You don’t show up, you don’t matter.

I’ve always believed that the show comes first. All that’s changed as I’ve got older is that I’m more careful which show I pick. Once you’ve agreed to do it, though, you’re doing it. That seems so obvious to me when in my case I’m being paid but these absent students have spent a lot of money to study at university so if money were the only factor, you’d expect them to be making the most of their investment.

Apparently the university knows as well as you do that some writers are going to let their colleagues down and actually that’s part of the teachable moment. And as one of the two I talked with described what she’d had to do, I did realise that she’d just learned a little about becoming a producer.

That’s great for her but it happened because she showed up.

I have no idea whether her writing is any good or not. But you do know that it’s better than the writing these absent writers failed to do.

The twelve-word writing lecture

You didn’t notice but I borrowed you about twenty minutes ago. I was asking your advice about a writing thing and I just went off into the most tedious and even poncy side points. As we talk, you see, I’m in a rather posh club in London waiting to deliver a couple of workshops for Equity. It’s a really nice club. I could and did go on about it. But your time is more important.

And I do want to sound you out on something. Next week I’m due to give a talk on the Life of the Writer at a university. I asked if the writer could be Alan Plater or Emily Dickinson, I did. But it has to be about me and since there is no way in the world I can stand talking about myself for three hours, I’ve got to think of something.

It’s for students on a writing degree and I didn’t study writing, not at university or ever, so I can’t charm them with tales of debating Proust in the bar. I could, but they’d see through both my points and that I only drink tea and Pepsi Max on the rocks.

They have asked me to read from my writing, so I’ll do some of that. But what I’m thinking is that because they’re students, they probably don’t yet know what it’s like writing for a living. I presume some will be mature students so they may well know all about it, but on balance, I’m probably safe to stick to that. Safe and hopefully best.

It’s where to start, though. And how to fill three hours.

I do know that I absolutely, definitely, completely do want to stop people writing three very similar words in a row for emphasis. Also that for everything else that writing is, it’s a job. If you do the professional stuff professionally, you get to do the artistic stuff artistically.

There’s also that yes, there are very definitely harder jobs than writing. But there are also easier ones.

I think I’m going to end up saying that you need to take writing seriously and to get on with it. That’s it. Twelve words. Given that our general speaking rate in English is three words per second, I’ve got two hours, fifty-nine minutes and fifty-six seconds to fill.

I’ll make sure I read from my longest book.