writer

Thrown for a closed timelike curve

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Last night, YouTube offered me up Cyndi Lauper’s “Change of Heart“, a song that comes from – and instantaneously took me back to – about 1986. The music did and I can see your face, you’re not exactly looking surprised. Music does this, of course it does. I don’t know how, but of course it does.

Only, the video didn’t take me back one inch.

That song, and the True Colours album it comes from, are part of my skin but I had never seen the video before last night. I don’t think it’s an especially brilliant one, it’s not that I’m urging you to see it, but I can’t stop thinking about the disconnection of music and video, skin and surface. Each note, each syllable, as familiar as if they were my very own, and the video completely alien.

It was riveting, somehow like suddenly seeing the back of your head and realising you’ve always had a bald spot.

Presumably the video was filmed in 1986 and these people were doing that filming, were performing, no more than shortly before I was first listening to the album. So that video shows reality – I mean, okay, people don’t tend to run over London tourist spots singing, but those spots looked like that then, those crowds were there, this was reality.

And from the perspective of 35 years later, that reality seems so innocent.

It makes me feel old, not least after I just worked out that 35 figure on my fingers, but I can’t decide whether I miss that time or not. Knowing all that was to come after it, I don’t know if would like to be able to step back to then.

I just know that I cannot avoid stepping back when I listen to the music. And that this – to me – brand new video for it has thrown me.

Maybe I’m wondering what the next 35 years will bring and, time being what it is, also thinking of just how soon it will be 2056. I’m definitely thinking about whether we like or dislike music, we assess it now, in the moment we hear it, and we entirely miss that is forever welded to that same moment.

Sometimes I’m wondering whether we can actually assess whether something is good or not, assess it at all, because nothing is entire of itself, everything is bonded to its time. Except screw assessing anything, it works for you or it doesn’t.

Maybe I’m just saying that it would good if everything old were new again.

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.

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.

Stupid count redux

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I’ve read 2,000 scripts. Well, yeah, no, I’ve read an awful lot more than that but in my current reading of at least one script per day, I’ve just read my 2,000th and this was both later than expected and then sooner than calculated.

Not sure there’s much you can say to this other than big deal. I’m curious why I clearly have to tell you this trivial thing, but if I can salvage something useful, let me also tell you this. Of the 2,000, some 361 were on the excellent TV Writing site, which is simply a favourite corner of the whole internet for me. And 117 were from the script library at the BBC Writersroom, although note that their collection includes some post-production scripts that are cut-down documents, made less to read and more for some admin purposes.

The rest, by the way, were predominantly plucked from countless other sites and links, were sent to me directly, or were in the couple of hundred script books I own. Which reminds me, I’ve been meaning to recommend a couple of books to you.

Five Screenplays by William Goldman and Four Screenplays by William Goldman.

I’m a little torn over Goldman. I was a fan until his profoundly, aggravatingly awful non-fiction book Hype & Glory. (Goldman is famous for huge, huge surprises in his novels, really eye-popping revelations that make you want to go back to read the book again. Something like 90 pages into this tripe, he tries to pull off the same thing by suddenly announcing that his wife has left him. Rather than surprise, rather than eye-popping, it’s a moment that leaves you eye-rolling and realising that’s why this is all so bad.)

Then he regularly described critics as failures, which is harsh but I’ve been a critic, I could see his point, and allegedly called one woman critic a whore, which just pissed me off against him forever. Or nearly forever, I think it was a few years after this that I read his two books of screenplays and enjoyed them as much as I have again in the last couple of weeks.

Except, as well as superb screenplays, each book has thousands of words of background detail about the writing and production of these films. Fascinating, illuminating, compelling, it is like having a friend sitting there telling you these things. These essays of his were so good that a few more years on, I was actually eager to read his non-fiction book, “Which Lie Did I Tell?”

Unfortunately, I already had.

The majority of that book is a reprint of the essays from the screenplay books. I know few people read script books, but you could be pretty certain that everyone who did would read this. I remember flicking through and through and through thinking I bought the hardback of this.

Anyway.

Five Screenplays has All the President’s Men, Magic, Harper, Maverick and The Great Waldo Pepper. Four Screenplays has Marathon Man, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Princess Bride and Misery.

They are two tremendous collections and on the page, Goldman’s scripts fly. Some day I must actually see Waldo Pepper; I’ve read it a couple of times and yet never got around to watching.

Howay. That’s nine of the 2,000 scripts I’ve read in this run and if I don’t shut up now, I’ll be telling you about 1,991 more. Well, yeah, no, there have been some incredible stinkers that make you feel a) great that you can probably write better than that and 2) regret the time you spent turning those pages.

Although then there are others that are so good that 3) I want to give up writing.

Also, though, a fascinating number where either the script was a huge slog to read yet the show was great, or the script was incredible and the film was boring. I keep thinking about that.

It might be that a script is just the first, if biggest, if most crucial, part of a production. Might be.

Time series

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Tell me you do this too, look serious and say it isn’t just me. I measure the passage of time by TV series. I don’t mean to say that you and I should meet for a coffee at a quarter past “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” or on July “24”.

I mean Buffy lasted for seven years. Thriller “24” ran for eight years in its original run. The remake of “Hawaii Five-O” has just ended after a decade. It’s not even as if I followed these shows –– I like Buffy and 24 a lot but didn’t stick with either, I didn’t like Hawaii but the remade theme was fantastic –– yet I am conscious that they came and they went. I talked about “Hawaii Five-O” in my 2005-2010 podcast UK DVD Review and since then, I’ve talked more and they made 240 episodes.

Then “Doctor Who” is heading very close to its 60th anniversary and I remember vividly running across Birmingham because I’d booked the wrong cinema to see its 50th special. Realising that there were two Odeon cinemas and I was not in the most right one, feeling the skin on my lungs as I ran across the city, that was ten minutes ago, not most of a decade.

And speaking of most of a decade, the reason I am thinking of all this yet again now is that “Leverage” ended in 2012 after five years. It’s back today, after what WolframAlpha.com tells me is 3,118 days. What in the world have I done in the last 8 years, 6 months and 14 days? Well, I’ve watched “Leverage” again, I can tell you that.

Otherwise, television drama comes and goes, time ticks on. I think of the immense effort that goes into creating a series and keeping it going for years, and then I think about how quickly that is gone. One moment “Leverage” is a series on US television, the next it was a series on US television.

And now it’s again a series on US television, albeit now called “Leverage: Redemption”. I don’t know when I’ll get to see it here in the UK, but I do know that however successful it is, however many years it runs, it is going to be over astonishingly fast, before I get around to doing anything.

Now we’ve moved from broadcast television to streaming, I don’t get the same thing of seeing a pilot episode one day and hearing the series finale is on ten minutes later. But I do get the discovery that while I was looking away, entire series have come and gone. The other week I came across the script to the pilot episode of “The Last Ship”, for instance. I’d not heard one syllable about this show but it turns out to have run very successfully for five years.

Five years of work and I missed it. But can now watch it anyway, which is what I’m doing while I wait for “Leverage: Redemption” to come to the UK.

We get so little time. I think people who funnel that time into television drama pull off a gigantic feat and I think they make something that lives and lasts beyond its time. In this case, so much so that demand brings it back for another go.

I think you and I should make some television. Waddya say?

Owed to a fallen iPad

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You’re looking different today. Brighter, sharper, somehow higher resolution – it suits you.

And that is you, all you, it is not anything to do with how we’re talking over my 2021 iPhone instead of our usual 2015 iPad Pro.

Ah, I remember those days as if they were just last Friday. Before a long and sometimes extremely long day at the keyboard in my office, I’d sit right here, just here, with a mug of tea, my faithful old iPad and you. I thought we’d last forever. I mean the iPad.

Instead, we lasted 2,007 days. Two thousand days in which I doubt more than five or maybe at the very most ten went by without my entirely draining the battery from so much use. Two thousand days since I bought it despite not wanting to.

I don’t want to think about the cost of iPads just now, though inescapably I know that my one worked out to 40p per day and I’m suddenly harking back further to when we just used pencils that cost so little we can’t remember.

I’d rather think about how we met, my iPad and I, even if the start was a little unhappy. I hadn’t wanted it, I didn’t have the money to casually spend on something that I didn’t realise I would use so much. That I would both spend so much and depend on so much. But it was directly tied to work and a client that I needed. Plus, I paid for it in monthly instalments and if I did the work at just the right time, invoiced at just the right time, and the client paid at just the last possible minute, I was covered.

I can still remember how incredibly nervous I was carrying a 12.9-inch iPad Pro around for the first few weeks. What I can’t remember is quite how quickly it became indispensable. I keep saying 12.9 inches because that was in the name, it’s not like I measured it. The slightly longer-winded way to describe it is to say that it was exactly like having two regular iPad screens side by side. You’d be working that screen with both hands and it would feel like you were inside it, that you were kneading bread, that you were really getting work done.

I remember the day when it first went wrong. It was certainly after more than four years of very heavy use and travelling a lot around the UK with it in different bags, but one day I touched it and it didn’t respond. It was like a partner who has already decided to break up with you and just hasn’t said it yet.

Over time, whole sections of that 12.9-inch touch screen stopped responding to touch. It got so I would very often have to rotate the whole iPad in order to get an online button under an area I could tap.

But if it were awkward and peculiar, well, so am I and this is how you and I have talked on Fridays. Actually, on every weekday morning, I got into the habit of being on it in my living room, writing ahead of the day’s writing, getting things done, talking with you, reading, working. And then in recent months stopping after two hours because a) it is important to take breaks and 2) the iPad Pro’s battery died.

On Tuesday this week, the whole thing died too.

I sat down right here, had an idea for a title for something, and never got to tell it to my iPad.

You’d have liked my iPad, I just know it. And when we can all get out to travel as freely as once we did, I will take it to Apple and look at them with puppy-dog eyes. From all I can find out, though, when they’ve gone the way mine has, they’ve gone.

So.

Here’s to 2,007 days, here’s to something of the order of 20,000 hours, and here’s to my old iPad.

I don’t remember being this sad about a typewriter. I don’t remember noticing a pen or a pencil running out. But there was something so good about that huge screen and then there was something so charming about how the screen wouldn’t always work.

Anyway.

As I say, you’re looking brighter, sharper and in higher resolution on my phone. Specifically 460 pixels per inch instead of 264 ppi. And 900 nits of brightness compared to something like 500.

It suits you. But I miss rotating the screen in order to push your buttons

More cents than money

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Yesterday my YouTube series 58keys qualified to earn money. You need over 1,000 subscribers and overall people must have watched more than 4,000 hours of your videos in the last 365 days. It’s been quite tense this week as I’d near the magic total one day, then the next it would drop back because another 24-hour period had ticked by.

But now it’s over the 4,000, the bells have rung, the lights have flashed and I am in the start of a long process that will see me registered to rake in cash. As best I can calculate it, I can look forward to 55% of $3 for every thousand views I get in the future.

My most popular 58keys video has had something like 8,000 views. In nine months.

Tellin’ you, raking it in.

Just to be clear, I don’t understand at all what really constitutes a view in terms of whether YouTube will hand over money. I think you skip as many YouTube ads as I do, but I’ve no idea when that still counts and when it doesn’t.

Doesn’t matter, not really. It’s not like I’m expecting to run a media empire.

The difference it will actually make, I believe anyway, is that YouTube will promote the series more. That’s always an aim, to reach a bigger audience, and I’m doing it through writing. I present the videos, yes, but I script almost all of them. So since the end of January 2020, I have written about 70 short scripts and they’ve all been produced and they’ve all been watched by someone. Strangers have watched.

Actually, I can tell you this even as it entirely confuses me. It’s true that my most successful video has had 8,000 views, and it’s also true that most range from 200 to about 1,500. But still, YouTube tells me that in the last 365 days my videos have been watched by 49,669 people.

I have to assume 45,000 took one look and switched off, but let’s not go there.

Fifty thousand viewers, however briefly, is simultaneously big to me and I realise also small too. But I’ve profoundly slowly come to realise that what satisfies me is thinking of something and making it happen. Seventy episodes, an unbroken weekly run with some extra specials, fifty thousand viewers.

And my writing is better because of them.

That’s the thing, that’s the difference. Writing does not have to be read or seen, but when it is, I think writers write better. Certainly I do. It’s partly from direct things like comments from viewers, which have seen me doing more visual gags than I realised I was capable of.

But chiefly it’s just the focus. Each week, one video, thought of, written, made, and then seen.

So as small time a YouTuber as I now am, please raise a mug of tea with me to mark the occasion.

Possibly as well to commiserate that yesterday was also the first year anniversary of my finishing the hardest drama script I’ve ever done and it is not one pixel closer to production. And to mark that thanks to BT, I am without internet and I’ll be writing on a website today using the same tin can and piece of string tethering connection I’m using to talk to you.

Unequal pay for writers

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I was once asked to write something overnight, someone had let somebody down, something had changed, I don’t remember. But I do remember being asked to name my price and I doubled what this company usually paid me.

That’s very nice and I felt very good for about a pixel of a second because while they said yes, they said it with such obvious relief that it was clear they’d have gone far, far higher. For the sake of any claim I make of being a professional writer, I need to tell you that I then billed for that emergency rate for every single project I did for them.

Here’s the thing, though. The writer in me can go into paralysed circles over what I should be paid. The human being in me can go into a rage when, for instance, women writers are being paid less than men.

There’s no but in that one, incidentally and obviously. Women, men, equal pay, not one but, not one question, not one ever.

But.

That’s about minimums. And I’ve been in conversations this week where I think there was a belief that it should apply to maximums, too. There was definitely a moment where an idea of capping writers’ pay so no one could get more than some amount came up and wasn’t shot down instantly. These were writers suggesting this and there were circumstances, it didn’t come out of nowhere, but I said to them and I’ll say to you, no.

No caps. Every other bugger wants to limit our pay, we can’t enable them to do it.

There’s something British about this. I’ve been thinking about it all week and it reminds me of how in the UK, you don’t tend to haggle. The price is the price, you pay it or you don’t, it’s not that common to negotiate. I’m the same, I tried it once over a fridge or something and got nowhere.

Anyway. I think the logic was that if you are writing a one-hour drama for primetime television then it’s the same job for everyone. Takes the same time, is physically the same amount of words and pages, of course it should earn the same money.

I’m too polite to say this aloud myself, so please take the rudest word you can think of and prefix it with the phrase fucking bollocks.

Men and women, yes, of course, you must not, you cannot be paid more or less just because of which genitals you happen to have. Age, too, I’d definitely agree that a writer’s age is no more an important factor in fee negotiations than their shoe size.

I hesitate over experience, a bit. There is an increased rate for writers when they are experienced and there are good reasons for it, good and practical reasons, but I’ve also known writers who’ve written for years and just aren’t all that great at it. Still, experience, if I don’t back that as vehemently as I do the men/women equal pay issue, I’m not against experienced writers being paid more.

Where I will stand and if necessary fall is over this presumption that writing a one-hour drama is the same regardless of who you are.

Let’s say that you are not a writer, you’re a producer and you are now producing a series. You commission me to write one episode and you commission Phoebe Waller-Bridge to write another. There are immediately, instantly two very clear things you and I know both about these two episodes.

First, with deep and miserable regret, we both know that her episode is going to be better than mine. She’s a better writer than I will ever be, although I’ll be damned if I’m not going to try.

Second, you also know that she’ll be paid more than I will.

Of course she will be and of course she should be. She’s better than I am. I can’t comprehend an argument where I should be paid the same as her. She’s better, her script will be better, the show will be better, it is worth it to you as a series producer to pay more for her work.

That’s where people get this wrong, I think, and it’s where writers get it wrong, I’m afraid. We talk a lot about how important we are to drama because, well, there ain’t any drama without writers. But at the same time we deeply undervalue ourselves and where minimum rates are fair, maximums are not. It is worth a show paying more for certain writers, just as on a pretty infinitely smaller scale, it was worth it to that company to pay me more when they needed something written overnight.

Writers do feel undervalued and we are, certainly. There are actors who claim to have invented your characters, for instance. Even good actors are more likely to thank a director than a writer, although actually I get that: by the time the cast is on board, writers can be gone to the next project. Of course you’re going to bond more with the people you actually work with.

I just think writers undervalue themselves too. And in making a case for fees that assumes all writers are the same, are of the same talent and worth, is not standing up for our rights. It’s more like being colonised.

I think this is the killer argument and apparently I’m wrong as writers I talked with this week were not even injured by it. Still, it’s this and it convinces me at least: if you don’t pay a great writer more, some other show will and you’ll lose her.

Pitch and yawn

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Oh, look, all that happened was that someone emailed pitching to write for me and they managed to be so annoying that I still can’t be certain it wasn’t spam. They were so annoying that I’ve already written to you twice today, venting. At length. It may say something that I’m fine with that writer seeing me this aggravated, but not you. I don’t want you seeing me like that, I don’t want you feeling you have to calm me down.

Honestly, I sound ridiculous. But pitching is obviously important: it isn’t a game, I have to constantly pitch because it’s how I keep a roof over my head and a Mac on my desk. There is no possible way to count how many pitches I’ve done that failed, nor how many got silence in return. Nor, to be fair, how many succeeded.

Oh! I do remember calculating once that on average, I succeeded in 10% of my pitches. So naturally, I moved to pitching in far greater volumes. It’s worked out well for me, but seeing these aggravating emails reminds me that years of doing this mean I think I’ve learned some things. Plus I’ve so often now been on both sides of pitching that I could tell this fella a thing or two.

Eventually, I did.

And yet he kept emailing.

I only had three before I blocked him but a quick lesson anyone could take is that you’re not going to endear yourself by sending a “so what’s happening?” email two days after the first approach. Waiting is hard, but get used to it. I just mostly waited through ten months for a project that then died away, so 48 hours is a blink.

Without picking on this man, though, let me offer a countdown of key things that pitching writers can do that hopefully avoid pissing off editors.

5) Tell me who you are

I don’t mean that I’ll necessarily listen to you more if you’re a famous writer, but I probably would. Or that I’d pay attention because you’re a surgeon pitching me a piece about surgery, but I would. All I mean is that you should tell me your name so I know who I’m talking to.

This fella wrote commendably concise emails but in that short space he called himself by two different names and – this is hard to explain – also referred to himself by a company name. I’m still not sure this wasn’t spam, I’m not really even certain that it was a man since one of the names could be a woman’s. It did all read like it was written by a man, mind.

4) Tell me your great idea

In truth, when you’re pitching to an editor, what you’re really pitching is yourself. You want this to be the start of a long working relationship –– and so does the editor. Finding a writer who knows their stuff, who can write, who has good ideas and also delivers them, that is gold.

There have been times when I’ve pitched an idea pretty blindly, pretty sure that it couldn’t land, but knowing that it was opening a dialogue.

Nonetheless, if you’re going to pitch, you need to pitch an idea. This fella told me he had oodles of them, but he didn’t describe a single one. Rather, he said that he could write me articles that would organically grow my SEO engagement. You see why I thought this could be spam from a company.

Search Engine Optimisation will get you higher up the Google rankings when someone searches on a topic – today. Tomorrow, Google changes the rules and you need a whole different set of SEO tricks. The answer to doing well in Google searches is not to write clickbait conforming to today’s keywords, it’s to have bloody great ideas and write them extraordinarily well.

You do also have to be doing that consistently and over a long time for it to work, but it’s the one way that does mean you keep succeeding. Google is trying to surface useful, interesting pieces and its SEO changes are to try combating people who rig the system by presenting quick crap with clever keywords.

As far as I can decode, by the way, what this fella really wanted was for me to give him ideas that he could then give back to me. Yeah, no, let me get right on that.

3) Read the publication, watch the show

I did have a meeting the other day where the producer was visibly surprised that I’d watched her show first. But if she were surprised that I’d prepared, she had no doubt that I really had. And she had no question that when I said I really liked this particular thing about it, I meant it.

There never is any doubt. If you’re lying that you’ve read something, or if you’re lying that you liked a thing you haven’t watched, it is extremely obvious. I know, for instance, that this annoying writer hasn’t read the publication he was aiming to write for –– sorry, aiming to organically grow whatever –– and that he claimed to love. There were specifics like the way he mentioned a word count that has no relation to what that publication does, but mostly it was just the undertow. The total certainty that the words about loving the publication were bollocks.

A bigger, more overt clue was how he then said that of course we’re getting it all wrong and need him to fix it. What he actually said was that he’s done a research audit on the publication and identified a content gap.

If you don’t know the aims of a publication, all the research in the world –– er, bar asking what the aims are –– will not identify a content gap. I can only think of two publications I’ve written for or edited which ever mentioned football, for instance, but apparently football is popular so they should’ve done more of it and the editors of all the rest are fools for not identifying this content gap.

2) Don’t use personal email addresses

All credit to the fella for finding my personal email address, but there’s a reason it’s personal. That address is the one I’d give you because I know you. It is one I do give editors and I have often given to writers I’ve hired, because it’s the one that gets straight to me immediately and I want you to be able to do that.

You know this, you wouldn’t ever use someone’s personal address, but this fella doesn’t. This is yet another reason why I cannot decide whether the emailer was a new writer or an old company spamming me with SEO offers.

If it is an individual, a new writer, then you could argue that finding this address fits in with his claims of researching the publication. Except that publication quite prominently displays their business email address for me. And if you don’t know that because you don’t read this publication you claim to love, there is a general email address for me everywhere else. LinkedIn, my website, I don’t know: I have a general-purpose email address I give out anywhere in order to keep my personal one for friends like you.

Incidentally, he ended his email with that phrase “if you don’t want to receive any more emails, reply with the word unsubscribe”. I’m going to be generous and assume that he has seen this on other emails and thinks it’s professional. And to be fair, my reply to him did not actually use the word “unsubscribe” as such, but then it also didn’t say a lot of rude words that I felt were quite adequately implied.

1) Do the easy research

Most of this has really been variations on how a pitch should be polite and should have something it is actually pitching. It’s been about how a pitch intended to get work has instead guaranteed someone won’t be hired. Truly, it’s all been about me, about what I thought on receiving this series of emails.

So let me look at it from this writer’s perspective. He wants me to commission him to write for this particular publication and if he lacked any ideas, if he found ways to spam me, he was probably not doing it deliberately. Genuinely, I can’t be sure, but let’s say it wasn’t deliberate, that this wasn’t an attempt to get a reply at any cost so that I can be added to some spam company’s mailing list.

It was still never going to work.

Because while yep, I am an editor, I am a producer and I couldn’t quickly count how many publications, sites or services I’ve commissioned writers for, there is one very easy fact to find out about me. I do not edit the publication he wants to write for.

That publication does not hide who the editor is. None of them do. If you want to know who to pitch to, it is supremely easy to find out.

You could just ask me.

There. I’ve got all of this off my chest and, even if it doesn’t seem like it, in a much calmer way than the two previous attempts to talk to you. I’ve deleted those two now, but to give you a flavour of them, I think they both used the phrase “flying fuck” a lot.

Scene and not seen

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This was hard for me. I ran a workshop about scriptwriting last weekend and I was required to teach a group of teenage writers how to format scripts. I did try telling them to just get it right, but for some reason they wanted more detail.

Look, you know and I know that scripts are laid out in certain formats and they are different to prose fiction, you would never accidentally write in these layouts. What you would do is read scripts. Read enough scripts, you get it. Film scripts are pretty rigidly formatted, television comes in a couple of different forms, radio is bit more relaxed and theatre is a Wild West.

But read scripts, you get it.

I don’t expect any writer to happen to know the millimetre dimensions of every indent, but I will not accept a writer who thinks it doesn’t matter. Who thinks script formats are solely done because there’s some secret club that has agreed it all.

Instead, scripts are laid out in their various ways for very specific reasons, all of which are long-won over decades of you writing and other people making the show out of that script. Some poor sod will count your INT for interior scenes and your EXT for exterior, for instance, as they try to balance the budget between days of location filming versus building studio sets.

There are reasons, they’re practical, none of this is hard. So what I told the group was that if you send me a script and it isn’t laid out correctly, really you are telling me to stop reading. Rather than showing me you’re a free spirit who won’t be confined by arbitrary layouts, you’re shouting that you don’t read scripts.

There’s no reason you should read scripts, unless you want to write them. If you do and yet still can’t be arsed to read any, I struggle to see why I should read yours. You could be a natural, brilliant talent, but you’re not. Get it right, I said to this group, because it’s not as if it’s hard, and read scripts because you’re a scriptwriter, you’re surely interested in your own field.

However.

I also explicitly told them that I know instantly when you’ve got a format wrong. I know from the first glance, before I’ve read a word, I know it’s wrong. I said it was that obvious.

It turns out that I lied.

I still believe what I said and I obviously didn’t set out to lie to them, but something happened shortly before the workshop and something happened shortly afterwards. What makes it worse is that it was the same something.

It was that I read the script to the pilot episode of “The Last Ship” by Hank Steinberg and Steven Kane, distantly based on the book by William Brinkley. I enjoyed it very much, I bought the episode off iTunes to watch, and then I bought the next episode, then I bought the season. By the time of the workshop, I think I’d seen six episodes and the day after, I re-read the script.

So there I am, barrelling along, enjoying it again, seeing the differences between the draft and the final production, having a fine time.

Until I noticed that it has no scenes.

There isn’t a single scene heading and I hadn’t noticed. I’d got so caught up in the reading that despite all the rest of the format being full-on script, I completely failed to notice that there wasn’t one single INT or EXT in 54 pages. When I did notice, around 30 pages into the re-read, I went back to the start and checked it out in case I were mad or the copy of the script I got was peculiarly incomplete.

It wasn’t. Rather than say what you’d expect, such as:

EXT. FLIGHT DECK – DAY

the script instead says:

CUT TO
XO MIKE SLATTERY (40’s) walking on the FLIGHT DECK, crossing with NAVY SEALS DANNY GREEN and FRANKIE BENZ (both 20’s). He shakes Danny’s hand.

I do feel for the poor sod working out the budget, but then the great majority of the script is set on a ship which appears to clearly be a real one shot on location. So I suppose that one big EXT is somewhat implied.

There’s no lesson here, certainly not for you because you didn’t sit down to get lectured at, but also not for me. I was wrong about seeing deviations from the format instantly. I lied to those teenage writers. But I’ll lie in the same way again, I’ll always write INT and EXT. But I was wrong.

It’s just that instead of instantaneously recognising something was off, it took me one and a half reads of the entire script to notice. Instead of seeing it on page one, then, it effectively took me 84 pages.

I’m suddenly reminded of when novelist Paul Auster stopped writing chapters. I can’t remember which novel it was now – I want to say Oracle Night – but the entire book is a single chapter, just as this script is a single scene. With the novel, it was oddly compelling. I don’t understand how, except that late at night, figuring I’ll just read to the end of this chapter, I was a bit tense.

“The Last Ship” script is an exciting, absorbing read. My concern for the poor budgeting sod is too great for me to ever try abandoning scenes, but it is true that ditching them makes this feel like a faster read, that it pulls you through instead of pausing to plant an INT or EXT flag.