Reigning In The Twilight Zone

Yesterday, the impossibly evil James Moran blogged it the hell up, on the subject of his writing process.  If you haven't read it yet, and think you're getting the link right now then you're insane, because I want you to read this post first.  You'll get the link at the end, now settle yourself and commit.  No speed-scrolling down!  I'm not some cheap word-hooker you can skim before linking off into the night.

One of Moran's passages particularly thrilled me (oh dear God, what's the matter with you people?)...

"The best thing about having the outline worked out so clearly is that it lets me go really fast. So fast, in fact, that I don't have to stop to think - my brain goes into that slightly disengaged, slightly zoned out mode, that lets the words flow and the characters say things before I've even worked out what they're going to say. Obviously it's still me thinking up the words, but it makes it feel like some weird magic is afoot."

He's talking about what I think of as The Twilight Zone.  It is, without question, one of the very best places to be in the world.  

When you hit The Twilight Zone while scripting (or prose-ing, or drawing, whatever) the pages fly out of you like glorious eagles.  You lose awareness of the world.  Times flies, or freezes, or something.  I have no idea what it does.  In truth, it probably ticks along as usual.  All that matters is that the script is hurtling, zooming and you are focused without even trying.  It's like a trance.  Like being at the eye of a tornado, where it's quiet.

For me, it lasts maybe an hour at a time.  Hard to tell.  Certainly doesn't happen every day.

Like Uncle Jimbo Moran, I listen to music while writing.  Some people don't, or can't, do this.  For me, the trick is to play music with which you're very familiar.  That way, your brain needn't waste any of its precious reserves concentrating on these strange new sounds.  

Reign In Blood, the seminal 1986 thrash metal album by LA veterans Slayer, is my favourite ticket to The Twilight Zone.  It's not so suitable if I'm writing comedy, but it sure provides the ultimate backdrop for horror and all things adrenalin-fuelled.  The album is a mere 29 minutes in length.  29 amazing minutes of caffeined-up hyper-metal, awash with Satanic, murderous lyrical imagery.

I'm certainly not suggesting Reign In Blood as your own Scriptwriting Album, unless, like me, you've lived with the album since its release.  I feel like I haven't properly listened to the record for years, though, as it's almost always churning away in the background while I'm in that Zone.  I'm dimly aware of the opening track Angel Of Death screaming blue murder... and then the Zone becomes all... until the closing torrential rain sound FX of Raining Blood's final few seconds brings the album to a close.  Throughout, the album has been psyching me up, driving me along, making me type faster, but I haven't been consciously aware of it at all.  In fact, it seems to zip by in a heartbeat.

It's wonderful.  Wondrous.

If you're already acquainted with The Twilight Zone, then I'm very happy for you.  Isn't it great, etc.  If not, you owe it to yourself to find yours.  Music may have nothing to do with your method.  Maybe your own Zone lurks in an entirely silent void, in that golden hour before the kids come home from school.  Maybe you'll find it in the mysterious hiss of white, green or brown noise (you can download some free white noise files here) or the trickling thrum of a rainforest or other ambient environment (also at that link).  You might even enter The Zone in your local cafe, when the chatter of those around you becomes a blur and the creative centres of your brain shift into pin-sharp focus.

Of course, The Zone isn't just about your environment and sounds.  It's about preparation.  If you've devoted hard thought to your characters and story, then your brain is free to create the finished product. In the same way that it shouldn't be distracted by new music, it shouldn't be distracted by having to make decisions which you should already have made, regarding plot, character, story, everything.  Every time your brain has to switch gears to re-examine the blueprint and fill in structural gaps, the spell is broken.

Just like most other writing methodologies, it's also about what works.  Find whatever works.

How do you enter The Zone?  Tell me with a Shriek From The Abyss, aka 'a comment', below.

You are now at liberty to head over to James Moran's post on his writing process.  If you've stolen any of my blog-ornaments while here, don't try to sell them to him or anyone else - they carry special UV watermarks.  Leave them on my doorstep at midnight, no questions asked.  Good day to you.

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Five Ways To Kill Audience Satisfaction

Being a writer tends to taint your experiences of film, TV or novels, albeit in a way which can improve your own work.  While absorbing fiction, I'll inevitably analyse why I'm enjoying, or especially not enjoying, a story.  Finding faults can be brilliantly instructive, in terms of avoiding the same mistakes - provided, of course, that it's not simply an issue of taste.  You don't learn much from not enjoying a gangster film, for instance, if you don't particularly care for the genre.

Here are five of the mental notes I've made over the years, while trying to work out why some stories leave you feeling instinctively dissatisfied.  There's no exact formula for making audiences happy, with that indefinable sense of 'fiction fullness', but we can certainly try to avoid these pitfalls...

1) IMPORTANT CHARACTERS TURN UP LATE
I've seen this happen in two horror films in the last three months alone.  The protagonist has been established, then between half and two-thirds of the way through the story, new people turn up.  Key distinction here: these characters aren't newly-introduced incidental characters like gas station attendants or waiters.  No, they're behaving like protagonists.  To all intents and purposes, they are protagonists.  In fact, in both of the films I saw they were Good Guys, on a (rather late) mission to rescue people from Bad Guys.  This feels instinctively wrong, as if the writer has only just arbitrarily decided to throw them into the story - or she's become bored with the protagonist's plight, or even the protagonist themself, since these Newcomers are behaving like heroes.  At the very least, they should have been seeded into Act One.  But even then, there's a potentially fatal snag when...

2) THE PROTAGONIST DOESN'T RESOLVE THE MAIN PROBLEM
Yes, if those Newcomers actually do manage to sort stuff out, that's unsatisfying to say the least.  We want to see those Original Protagonist deal directly with the threat they've been facing - it's no good, watching them rescued or helped by magically materialising outside forces.  This is mainly because the OP has had the longest journey.  They've been through the most hardship and are ideally the least equipped to deal with the main problem or threat.  So their eventual triumph over adversity is bound to be the most entertaining.  We're rooting for them to overcome all... so if someone else does it for them, we're deflated like a cheap air-bed.

Sometimes, often in TV drama, the protagonist needs to be instrumental in solving someone else's predicament.  I recently watched an episode of an otherwise good drama series from a few years back, in which our regular protagonist tried to help a guest character overcome their terrible problem.  Come the final scenes, it felt very much as though the guest character would have overcome it anyway, without the protagonist's help.  Needless to say, this was deeply unsatisfying, and could so easily have been fixed.  So here's a good question to ask yourself: if your protagonist was air-lifted clean out of this plot, would the whole story collapse?  If not, you've got real problems and need to carry out some surgery.

3) COINCIDENCE OVERSTEPS THE MARK
Sure, we'll swallow the occasional small coincidence in a story.  Two friends bump into each other in a big city?  Okay, we'll buy that.  Fine.  When coincidence plays a major role in the story later on, though - that's when our brows furrow, we become restless and suddenly we can hear The Wheels Of Plot grinding and creaking (more on that in a moment).  Plot should be a big chain of events, each of which follows logically on from preceding events, so that we understand and sympathise with how this story developed in a logical fashion.  Attempt to serve plot with a great big coincidence and you run the very real risk of that chain's links flying apart.  It's like hurling a basketball at a domino which stubbornly refuses to topple onto the next.  Here's a useful general rule: we're much more likely to accept a coincidence which gets the hero into trouble, than one which gets them out of it.

4) THE RULES OF THE WORLD ARE NOT DEFINED
This is especially dangerous in the more fantastic genre fare.  Real-world drama has an in-built set of rules.  We know that world and so it needs less explanation.  If we're in a heightened, supernatural, fantastic or otherwise unfamiliar world, though, we need to know the rules.  This doesn't mean we have to be force-fed them, Fight Club-style, in the first 10 minutes.  They should be ladled on throughout, with the artfulness also reserved for character detail and general colour.

Why are the rules important?  Because if we don't know the rules, it's likely that we're unclear on the nature of the threat faced by our protagonist.  What are the stakes?  What's the worst thing that can happen in this story and world?  If our protagonist is a ghost, can they actually die in any meaningful sense?  If we don't know what they stand to lose, we're far less engaged and liable to switch off altogether.

5) CHARACTERS DO STUPID THINGS
Now, this one's interesting, because it certainly isn't always a mistake.  If characters didn't do stupid things, they wouldn't get themselves into the scrapes and conflict demanded by all good drama.  So many stories - so many 'inciting incidents' - are launched by characters doing stupid things.  Drama practically demands foolishness, folly and flaws.  But here's where the Creaking Wheels Of Plot come back into play.  If characters do stupid things because, for instance, the film would be over if they didn't, that's when the writer feels our wrath.  We hear the Creaking Wheels Of Plot and it's a terrible noise, reminding us that this is just a figment of someone's imagination and a clunky figment at that.  The spell is broken.

I've been deliberately vague about the other fiction to which I've alluded, but can give you a precise example of this one, which will give you a mild spoiler for the otherwise excellent horror film Wolf Creek.  About two-thirds of the way through, a protagonist (there are three in this film, which is one of its many strokes of genius) escapes the evil antagonist's house.  She then goes back inside, and for the first time, we hear the infernal din of those Creaking Wheels.  It's the film's sole flaw.  Incidentally, I'm giving you this example because I once interviewed its director Greg McLean as a journalist and put the criticism to him.  Here was his response: "Guilty! Absolutely. Without giving too much away, there's no reason in the world why she'd do that. What the fuck is she doing? I watch it and I go, 'Mmmm... okay'."

Needless to say, I've generalised throughout.  Rules are made to be broken, and all that, but I think it's best to have very good reasons for breaking the majority of the above.

What about you?  What regularly disconnects you from fiction and/or leaves you instinctively dissatisfied?  Tell us about it, in the comments below.

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How Big Brother Gives Us Story Fuel

I put it to you, dear reader, that the popular TV reality show Big Brother can help us storytellers.  Before you perpetuate the notion that it's the sworn arch enemy of TV drama, consider this for starters:

Big Brother is jam-packed with people saying the exact opposite of what they mean.

This is gold-dust for writers.  It helps remind us that our characters should rarely speak their brains in a direct, on-the-nose fashion ("Daphne, I love you but I also feel insecure!").  It can be devastatingly effective when they occasionally do, but these sudden outbursts of unexpurgated truth are all the more powerful because they momentarily deactivate the filters through which most of us - and especially characters in drama - speak.

Great thing is, people inside the Big Brother goldfish bowl - whether celebrities or extroverted members of the public - can't help but crank those filters right up.  The amount of mistruth in their speech is heightened - just as it is in scripts and prose.

Take this as an example: Tammy from Tamworth has been nominated for eviction, but absolutely doesn't care and in fact she can't wait to get out!  To the point where, when she does get evicted, she goes so far as to shout "Yes!  Thank you!" and jump for joy, just to show how incredibly fine she is with the nation booting her out the door.  Or she might announce she's prematurely leaving mid-week, because she's bored of the whole experience and has achieved what she came here to achieve... as opposed to simply being scared shitless of rejection.  You won't get a better example of people saying the exact opposite of what they mean and how they really feel.  Drama fuel, right there.

People in Big Brother are also trapped with each other for weeks, so they will generally only explode into direct conflict when either absolutely cornered or they simply can't take any more.  So there's more passive aggression going on than you could shake a tweet at.  There's also a whole host of bubbling, brooding tension, often conveyed solely by the look on one housemate's face when another leaves the room.  Good scripts thrive on this kind of Purely Visual Information and Big Brother is shrewdly to pile in as much as possible.  All this stuff may very well reflect the tension in the family you're writing a kitchen sink drama about - or your sitcom set anywhere, since the vast majority of sitcoms are all about people being trapped.

Then there's the fact that, in almost every Big Brother contestants' head, they are the star of the show.  In fiction, even Scene 43a's hotel doorman should come across as a real, rounded person with hopes, fears, personality and a past - even if none of those specifics actually make the page.  That doorman in your script shouldn't think of himself as a bit-part with two lines: in his head, he's the centre of the universe.  Thinking this way may well help us write smaller characters who manage to transcend that ghetto of fictional people who act as if they only blip into existence when the protagonist is around.

Yes, yes, of course, I know - Big Brother is absolutely awash with ludicrous artifice.  It's as fake as a unicorn's wig and shallower than an ant's paddling pool.  And as much as I still love it, there's now inevitably far too much second-guessing among housemates as to how the public will perceive them.  What I'm saying, is that some of that very fakery can be used to your advantage, as a writer.  The tension, passive aggression and all those bare-faced lies about emotions and feelings may well fill a small tank in your brain, ready to be siphoned off later into your fiction.  Reality TV can often be way more real than most give it credit for.

Oh, and one last theory, which may or may not relate to drama: in Big Brother, even though it's undoubtedly on a very subliminal level, the housemates equate eviction with death.  Whenever someone gets evicted, they're in floods of tears as if they'll never see them again.  It's seriously like the end.  Eviction is inevitable in the Big Brother house - it picks those housemates off, one by one, like the scythe-wielding Reaper himself.

Could it really be a coincidence that Big Brother evictees ascend a staircase on their way out?

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What's Your 60-Second Story?

This post contains spoilers for The Evil Dead and John Carpenter's The Thing.  Albeit mainly via the medium of clay.

Hello!  I've only just caught up with Lee Hardcastle's remarkable claymation videos - in particular his web series which presents 60-second versions of horror classics.  I've enjoyed them on two levels: namely, being greatly entertained, and having a subsequent think about story-related matters.

If you haven't seen it already, give Lee's take on The Evil Dead a spin, then come back to me, further down the page.  I'll make a cup of tea while you do so.



Great, isn't it?  As I say, it's also got me thinking about the tentpoles of plot.  The pillars which hold your story up - each of which topples forward to knock the next pillar over, like dominoes.

Obviously, to a certain extent, these 60 seconds are sped up for comic effect and you could argue that it does omit key information/moments.  But actually, there really aren't that many.  It certainly leaves out the group arriving at the remote log cabin, but if we're talking essential stuff, then the story can be enjoyed without it.

It also skips most of the third act, rejoining the story for the final splattery confrontation by the fireplace.  And why does it do that?  Because much of the first half of that third act is a great big run-around between Ash and his undead love, Susan.  She gets possessed, they fight, she seems to die, he buries her, good lord she's alive again, he decapitates her.  This stuff is tremendous fun to watch onscreen, but 'stuff' is exactly what it is: flesh and muscle in between the bones of the actual plot.

If you've got a story in your head and you're wanting to get it down somewhere, it might be a worthwhile technique to ask yourself what the 60-second version of this story would be.  It might well help you boil everything down in your head to the main events.  You could even write a single page of script - which roughly equates to 60 seconds onscreen - for just such a 60-second version.  Picturing it frenziedly acted out with clay is optional.

If you've written a script and it's over-long, the 60-Second Story technique could also be of use.  Again, write out the key moments which would fit into one single minute.  These may well differ from the bullet points of your outline, but provided it does so in a good way, that's all right.  The 60-Second Story technique will hopefully help you identify the flab - the stuff, the flesh - which you may regrettably have to hack out because there's just too much of it.

Lee Hardcastle's latest video, a Pingu remake of John Carpenter's 1982 classic The Thing, is not only very funny and entertaining, but perhaps even more instructive than The Evil Dead.  Take a look:



Brilliant, yes?  Now, then: this one's more thought-provoking than The Evil Dead because there's no dialogue at all, save the odd squawk from comedy penguins.  The story's told completely visually, but even in this hyper-fast, exposition-free deliveryof the tale, you get the general idea.  A dog arrives at an icy outpost and spreads itself around like a virus.  The key set-pieces - the ones which move the story and the threat on - are here, intact.

1) The dog arrives.

2) The dog transformation scene introduces the threat to the crew.

3) The open-chest scene hammers home that any penguin here could be The Thing (or The Thingu).

4) The blood-test scene determines who is who.

5) The dynamite scene sees the crew seemingly destroy The Thing.

6) ... or have they?

So those are, very basically, the story's six plot pillars.  Pretty much everything else in the film itself is the fleshy stuff - the way the humans react to their plight, with rising paranoia, dwindling trust and a whole load of shouting.  There's also wonderful suspense, misdirection and all the rest of Carpenter's tools in this, his true masterpiece.

You've got to have the flesh on those bones - of course you do.  Flesh is good.  Flesh is the stuff which makes that story organic and alive - more than just a cold framework of domino-toppling causality.  Besides, without it, your movie would be far closer to 60 seconds than 90 minutes.  Yet these videos remind us that it's vital to know your flesh from your bones.

Once you know your pillars, you can have immense fun with the stuff which happens in between them.
                                            
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Eight Ways To Annoy People Whose Help You Want

Hello you!  Here are a few tough-love pointers about approaching people in the scriptwriting, TV, film, prose and generally creative industries.  Specifically, via e-mail.  I'm sure this won't apply to you, because you're lovely and you know better.  But it might.  And that being the case, you may find this useful.  Here then, are Eight Ways To Annoy People Whose Help You Want...

1) Appear in someone's inbox, out of the blue, and immediately ask if they'll read your project.
If you really must do this - although you shouldn't - at least put some effort into that e-mail and a little finesse.  A pro script-friend of mine recently described receiving a really abrupt e-mail from a complete stranger, asking if he would read their script.  The e-mail barely introduced the sender and didn't even end with a sign-off line.  That's a great way to make a terrible first impression.

When you've written and finished a thing that you like, it's easy to build up a head of zealous steam, to the point where you assume the world is waiting to read it.  Take a deep breath and calm yourself.  Approach your contact-to-be politely, lightly and in a personalised way which doesn't make them think they're Number 227 in your Xeroxed Introductory E-Mail campaign.  As I said, ideally don't ask them to read your project in this opening salvo.  You wouldn't do this during an opening exchange at a party, so why do it in Cyberworld?  And Good God...

2) Attach your project to your introductory e-mail
Don't do this, ever.  It's rude, even though it might not seem that way to you.  It's the equivalent of striding up to someone at a scriptwriters' festival, saying hello and shoving a hard-copy of your script into their bag.  Bear in mind that most writers - me included, sadly - can't read other writers' scripts, for two reasons: lack of time to read anyone else's work and legality (if a writer reads your script, then has a similar idea down the line, or is already working on a similar idea, you might turn out to be paranoid and insane and all, like, "You stole my idea!  I sue you!  I appear in your garden at 3am, harming myself and shrieking!").  So when you send someone a script right off the bat, that seemingly innocuous PDF of yours could well be violating the recipient's personal, professional and legal boundaries.  Once someone receives a PDF, I'm pretty sure it's impossible to prove they haven't read it, if things should turn all weird and litigious later on.  So don't put them in that position.

3) Attach your project to your introductory e-mail, because the recipient's colleague/boss/whoever has suggested you send it
This is still rude.  I know, because a good few years back, I did it myself.  A TV show's producer suggested I send a script to his script editor.  With a head full of zealous steam (beware, oh beware, the zealous steam), I rattled off an e-mail to the script editor and attached the script.  Never heard back from that script editor, and quite rightly so.  I still regularly wince at the very thought of it and groan at the fact that I'm possibly forever filed away in that guy's head under "Presumptuous Amateurs".  Even if someone else has recommended you send a script, still take that deep breath and write that polite, to-the-point introductory e-mail, explaining that X suggested you send them your script.  Do they have time to read?  That's much nicer, isn't it?

4) Play down the size of the favour
This is admittedly a relatively small pet niggle, and may be exclusive to me and my brain, but I doubt it.  Don't play down the size of the favour you're asking this stranger/new contact.  I'm talking specifically about saying "I wonder if you could do me a small favour...".  Oh, it's only small, is it?  I'll be the judge of that.  This is the kind of thing it's so very easy to write without thinking, but well worth a mention.

5) Chase them up on a read
If a relative stranger agrees to read your thing, for free, in their own time, don't chase them up on it within six months.  Seriously.  That's just wrong and will irritate the Christ out of them.  You have to be prepared to play the long game here.  I've waited literally a year for industry folk to read scripts, and personally wouldn't chase them before a year was up.

If that impatient demon in your brain - the one entirely composed of zealous steam - forces you to chase someone up, at least do it indirectly.  Message them about something else - ideally something which isn't asking for another favour.  Nine times out of 10, this will jog their memory and provide a subtle prompt.  It still runs the risk of annoying them, but it's a lot better than a "Did you get my e-mail?" e-mail, a week after the first.  While I'm at it, let's all agree never to write "Did you receive my e-mail?" e-mails any more.  It's 2011.  The vast majority of e-mails get through.  We know this, and yet still we persist with this irritatingly transparent tactic.

6) React badly to notes
So this stranger has read your thing for free and given you some thoughts.  You dislike and/or disagree with one or more these thoughts, so decide to fight your corner.  You passive-aggressively - or downright aggressively - inform the helpful stranger why they're wrong and/or why they've misunderstood your grand masterplan.  Congratulations!  They didn't particularly want any response to their notes (all those questions they asked in the notes were rhetorical, by the way, for your project-analysing use only) and now you're synonymous with two Twitter hashtags in their brain: #DifficultToWorkWith and #OverlyDefensive.  Tremendous.

7) Ask a huge question, the size of the MOON ITSELF
This one isn't exactly likely to enrage people, and is once again really easy to do without thinking, but it will assuredly make their life harder.  And if you've made their life  excessively harder, they won't thank you for that.  I'm talking about big, wide-ranging questions like "How can I go about getting into scriptwriting?".  That's big.  Whole books are written on that subject.  In fact, are you sure you shouldn't buy a tax-deductible General Script Advice book, rather than ask a pro to write several paragraphs of advice for free?  Then, by all means, you can ask more targeted, specific questions of this person.  This will serve a double-duty: it makes it a lot easier for them to answer the questions, and you seem more clued-up from the very beginning.  Everybody wins, nobody loses, hooray.

8) 'Forget' to thank them
Never forget to thank someone who has given you advice, help and especially notes.  This is possibly the most infuriating thing of all, and there seems to be an epidemic of this behaviour going around.  Almost every industry pro I talk to, shares the annoyance at not being thanked for helping people.  This now seems to be a 'thing'.  Strangers appear in your life, out of the clear blue sky (© Larry David), ask for help/advice/a script read, are given that valuable stuff for free, then fail to even thank the helper.  That's downright weird behaviour, which has certainly happened to me a few times now.  Why would anyone do that?  Besides being supremely irritating and ungracious, it pretty much guarantees that the person will get zero help or advice from me again.  Don't burn bridges.  Don't spread the epidemic.

Writers, producers, script editors: anything to add to this list?  Comment away!  I want stories of people who have contacted you, out of the blue, and proceeded to screw up their chances of you ever helping them.  I'd also like stories from people who have made mistakes while contacting new people.  Let's stockpile this stuff and get a little closer to establishing Best Practice when progressing in this industry and forging new professional relationships.

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Doctor Who Dreams Come Through

Once, when I was very young, I asked my mother a question which understandably bamboozled her.

"Mum... did we ever go hunting for The Master?"

I dearly wish I could remember her exact reaction.  As it is, I can vaguely recall her kindly humouring me by taking a brief moment to think it over.

"No," she said.  "No, I don't think we did".

Turned out I'd had a dream, you see, in which my family crept around our own house, searching for The Master, cowled nemesis of TV's Doctor Who.  The Master had recently scared me witless in The Deadly Assassin, by dint of having bulbous ping-pong ball eyes, the most theatrically malevolent voice imaginable and lurking beneath Gallifrey's political chambers like some horribly decaying Satan with a creepy grandfather clock for a time-and-spaceship.

Contact had been made.  Doctor Who had taken root in my subconscious mind and flourished, until I couldn't distinguish between dreams and reality.  The show had engaged and ignited my imagination, fanning the flames of creativity.  Me and my folks hunting The Master in the darkened corridors of our home in Suffolk's Carlton Colville was almost certainly the first fictional story I ever 'wrote'.

If Doctor Who had never existed, I don't doubt that my brain would have been inspired by something else.  I do doubt, however, that it would have been something which encouraged such infinitely fertile imagination as Who - a show which spans all of time and space. 

That dream about The Master led directly to this:

And this, in which TV's Doctor Who does battle with the, ahem, 'Sontans':

According to my mum, I "never stopped writing".  There are books and books of these Doctor Who tales, all of which feature the word "suddenly" quite a lot.  I still find myself deleting the word "suddenly" from second drafts of scripts all the time.  It's an affliction which affected me suddenly, over time.

Those books eventually led to the lovely headmistress and English teacher at my middle school conspiring to have my stories put together in a couple of bound volumes and placed in the school library.  

Here I am, holding one of those volumes and displaying cheekbones for which I now hate my younger self.  Halfway through my teens, rock journalism swept me off on a violent side current, but it always came back to stories of one form or another.

Ultimately, Doctor Who and the dreams it spawned have led me, via a fairly circuitous route, to write fiction for a living.  I've written prose for the Fourth Doctor, audio adventures for the Fifth, Seventh and Eighth, and come bang up to date with the Eleventh Doctor for audiobook Doctor Who: The Gemini Contagion and The Brilliant Book Of Doctor Who 2012.

My first produced feature film, Stormhouse, has rightly drawn the odd Doctor Who comparison from reviewers - it is, after all, essentially about a terrible entity in a cage and fits the show's classic 'base under siege' template.

Stormhouse had its world premiere at the Edinburgh Film Festival, its London premiere at Leicester Square's FrightFest and will have its US premiere at the Los Angeles Screamfest tomorrow afternoon.  (Update: Lionsgate Home Entertainment have bought it for US distribution and cut a brand new trailer). Now that I really stop to think about all this, it's pretty mind-blowing.  Needless to say, I have a vast amount of things to learn and no end of things to achieve.  But it feels important to always stop, take stock, and never forget where my career really began.  Hunting for The Master in our old house.

I've so much to thank Doctor Who for, beyond the considerable entertainment it has brought, and continues to bring me.  

You see, Doctor Who isn't just a show you watch.  Doctor Who isn't just for Christmas.

It's a show which combines with your DNA, coils tendrils tightly around it and informs your entire creative life. 

You'll never be the same again.  Thank God for that and thank God for Doctor Who.

UPDATE: I'm among the many contributors to Behind The Sofa, a book of people's favourite Doctor Who memories - including people like Charlie Brooker, Jonathan Ross and even Bill Oddie!  It's 100% in aid of Alzheimer's Research.  You can see the site here, follow the Twitter feed here and buy it here. 

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What Writers Always Forget

I've been beating myself up all week, for seemingly being incapable of starting work on the rewrite of a TV series pilot spec script.

It's been at best bemusing, at worst quite distressing.  Why the hell haven't I been able to write a single line of script?  Ridiculous, right?  The script is 80 per cent there.  I've already gone in and stripped out 13 pages of subplot - all I need to do now is write 13 replacement pages to flesh out what's there.  Why, then, in the name of Satan's surprisingly well-groomed beard, can't I do that?  Have I lost faith in the central concept?  In myself?  In life?  Christ - maybe that subplot should stay after all.  Maybe this rewrite is all wrong.  Or maybe a crucial, fleshy valve in my brain has popped and I'll never be the same CREATIVE COLOSSUS again.

The answer is something I already knew, and have known for some time.  I just forget it on a regular basis.  Just as I've known for years that my days are so much more productive when I go for a morning run and get brain and body buzzing. Just as we know that it's best to take regular breaks from typing, before our limbs stop functioning.  And yet we forget.

Here's what I forgot again, in this case: I haven't finished thinking this rewrite through.

Sure, I've 'only' got 13 new pages to write, but if I haven't worked out what will happen in them, and exactly how the retooled story will fit together, then they may as well be 13,000 pages.

The truth is that the new version of the story has been slowly developing in my brain all damn week, partly consciously and partly in my brain's back room while I've been playing angry guitar and baking myself a cake of self-loathing.  I have been working.  Just hasn't felt like it.  And it turns out that my brain hasn't been happy with simply fleshing out the existing story and characters.  No.  It wants to use these new 13 pages as a way to make the ending much more excitingly twisty, to change the point at which one main character dies and, oh, all sorts.  My brain had a masterplan to which I wasn't entirely privy.  Our brains are secretive bastards, but we should place more trust in their ability to deliver the goods.

This post is as much a reminder for me as it is for any writer liable to consider themselves a doofus or a lazy failure, purely because something has been stopping them from sitting down and writing that script.

From now on, every time this happens again, we are going to stop and ask ourselves one simple question.

Have I properly thought this through?

If the answer is no, we will stop giving ourselves such a hard time and focus on the story for a while until we're ready.

That's a pact, yes?

PS None of this gives you carte blanche to never start a script.  There comes a point when beating yourself up is fine.

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Your Script Is Not A Lottery Ticket

Some writers seem to think about their careers and advancement in a rather curious way.

It can be comforting for the writer in his or her ascendancy to think of career advancement as largely luck-related.  That it's a matter of writing script after script - or novel after novel - and firing them into a machine full of other National Lottery balls, which may one day be picked out.

I think this view is, at best, complacent and at worst, dangerous - at least for the writer who holds it.  One thing's for sure: if it really is at all useful to think of a writing career as a lottery, then you are squarely in control of the odds.  There is nothing random here.  When entering a scriptwriting competition, for instance, it can be tempting to find out how many other people are going for it too.  That, however, is the Devil whispering in your ear, reinforcing that whole idea of luck being a big part of this.  If you've sweated blood over the bulletproof script, it shouldn't matter whether there are one or one million other contestants.

People like to talk about the aspects of competitions which seem to make the process more arbitrary - the judges having a bad day, or just not 'getting' you, etc - but I say forget about that stuff.  It doesn't help.  You're just either pre-emptively armouring yourself for a potential failure, or trying to salve wounds which were almost certainly your fault.  Let rejection hurt, but take responsibility for it as you heal, learn and strengthen.  Take the time for a reality check if necessary.  Whatever it takes to ensure that your next script is a decisive step forward.  Don't succumb to that deeply weird Writer Quirk which compels you to sling an imperfect script into a competition "just to get something in".  God knows, I've done it myself over the years and have come to think of it as supremely self-defeating.

A couple of years ago, an 'aspiring' writer publicly contacted a Doctor Who writer on Twitter, asking if he'd like to collaborate.  When Doctor Who Scribe, not impolitely or unreasonably, asked why he would want to do that, the aspiring writer replied that Doctor Who Scribe had been so lucky with his career and it'd be good to give something back, quack quack quack... frankly, I stopped listening after "been so lucky with your career".  Uh, no.  Doctor Who Scribe hadn't been lucky - he'd worked incredibly hard to get where he was, over many, many years.  It felt so insulting and demeaning to what DWS had achieved.  That rather ignorant attitude summed up a blind alley of thought which we must avoid at all costs.

Look, don't get me wrong: of course there's an element of luck involved with building a career.  When it comes to launching projects, for instance, the stars can seemingly align or scatter on a whim.  No doubt about it.  What I'm saying is that it would be a massive mistake to overestimate luck's contribution - or to start talking about how ultimately your fate is in others' hands.  Go down that rabbit hole and, before you know where you are, you'll be whining about the whole "It's not what you know, it's who you know" thing.  And oh sweet lord, that's definitely a whole other blog post.  In short, yes, contacts are really important.  Make them.  You must.  But it's increasingly untenable to complain about being shut out of some imagined 'system' by 'The Man', in a world when you can make direct contact with the vast majority of the TV and film industries via Twitter.

We all have to take responsibility for our careers.  The only armour we need should be our work, as opposed to weird, insidious denial and excuses.  We must write to win.  We must toil away at the furnace until we come away with something amazing.

Your script, your novel, whatever it is, should be the ultimate representation of you.  Your unique brilliance, which no-one else in the world can possibly have.  Your creative DNA, all swabbed up in a PDF.  Even when compared to a winning Lottery ticket, that's priceless.

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The Magic Of Draft Zero

One of the many mistakes made by new writers and indeed some not-so-new writers, is showing their work to people too soon.

That initial urge to share your work ASAP is only natural.  Until other people absorb your stuff into their brains, it exists in a vacuum.  Might as well not exist.  If a script sits on a hard-drive with no-one around to read it, does it make a difference?  No.  Only to you, at this point in time, unless you have an agent who's badgering you to finish it, or at least waiting for it.

Hand in hand with that drive to show people, comes the feeling that whatever you write in that vast, gaping, intimidatingly blank Final Draft file will be read.  Sometimes, that feeling can bring about a terrible paralysis.  You're standing on the brink of a huge vortex of possibility.  Worst of all, there's the sense that This Is It.  No more talking: it's time to do.  Time to prove yourself to the world.  Again.

Me, I love the first draft.  Love that open road, beckoning you to burn rubber.  Most of all, though, I love the fact that no-one will ever read it.

This is because the first draft you hand to Important People should never be the actual first draft, but crucially, the first draft you've decided to show them.  Personal first-draft, public first-draft.  Very different beasts.

With that in mind, I like to call my first salvo Draft Zero.  For one thing, it sounds cool.  Zero-anything is cool besides, off the top of my head, Size Zero.  Zero tolerance, Patient Zero, the Zero Room, Zero Mostel, allowing absolutely Zero to stop you finishing this script or novel.

For another thing, the concept of Draft Zero helps cement the idea in your head that this draft is your own personal sandpit.  Sure, you're taking it seriously and making every effort to construct a strong skeletal structure to which you'll eventually graft muscle, organs and finally beautifully flawless skin, Hellraiser-style.  But at the same time, you have absolute carte blanche to fuck it up.  You can't win unless you're not afraid to lose.  Forget all external pressure and fuel yourself with internal pressure: the burning desire to write this story before you die of anticip-p-p-pation.

Launch yourself into that sandpit and write like the seven winds.  Momentum is everything.  Never look back.  Pretend you're being chased by a shark which devours words (an image which reminds me to strongly recommend Steven Hall's extraordinarily vivid and imaginative novel The Raw Shark Texts).  Some writers continually stop, survey what they've written, then go back to fix it.  If that method works for them, great, but I can't do that.  Momentum, momentum, momentum.  When I realise I've messed up, or that things will need to be fixed later, I make Running Notes, then just keep writing.

When you reach the end of that fun, breathless marathon, what you have is Draft Zero.  And it's yours.  All yours.  A template for future greatness.

You'll go back to rewrite it again and again, restructuring, ironing out the many flaws, de-clunking that often laughable dialogue, starting to introduce or strengthen those lurking themes.  And at the end of that process, that's when you emerge triumphant from your steaming, churning brain-factory with The Actual First Draft.

Draft Zero is your own personal, very private firstborn.  Enjoy the vacuum in which it resides.  In space, no-one can hear you scream that it hasn't turned out quite how you expected.

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Tell Arnopp!

Happy New Year, sir/madam/charming combination of the two.

I've been thinking about this idea for a while. Might not work at all, but there's no harm in seeing if it's of interest.

We writers are often solitary beasts. Very few people understand what we do. Even our nearest and dearest people often struggle to get it. They're broadly supportive, but if someone sat them down and asked exactly what we do, they'd probably find themselves coming up short.

As a result, writers - especially new writers - can struggle to find motivation. It can seem like they're typing away in a void. After a while, that question rears up in the back of the mind: "What difference does it make if I write today or not? Who will know or care?". Of course, motivation has to come from within. You have to sit down and write, as if the whole world is going to care. But a little help with motivation never goes amiss.

Some writers use blogs and/or Twitter as a way of telling the world how many pages or words they've bashed out. That's fine, but not everyone is that forthcoming in a public space.

So here's the idea. At the end of each writing day, drop me an e-mail and tell me how much writing you've done that day.

There are only three rules. And the first one isn't strictly even a rule.

1) I won't be able to reply to you. I will, however, read all e-mails. So you know that somewhere in my brain is the information that, for instance, you've written 10 pages of your World War II drama. And if you stop writing to tell me about a project's progress, you'll know that somewhere in my brain, I know that you didn't finish it and will be pointing an accusatory finger at you from afar.

2) This one's vital: Please don't tell me anything about your story's content. Not one thing. E-mails which start to tell me anything about the story you're writing will be regretfully deleted straight away - as will anything with an attachment. Or anything which isn't Telling Me What You've Written Today. Or messages kindly offering me Viagra. I'm sure you realise this, but this rule isn't because I don't care about your story - it's to protect me legally. Tell me the genre if you like, but that's not necessary.

So to sum up this rule: telling me "I've written ten pages of my World War II drama today" is great. Telling me "I've written ten pages of my World War II drama today - it's about the effects of the war on a family in Chiswick" is not. Just for the absolute avoidance of doubt: by sending your message to tell me you're writing a World War II drama, for instance, you agree not to be mad enough to cry "Rip off!" if I happen to also write a World War II drama, somewhere down the line. (I refuse to believe anyone would be this mad, but you never know.)

3) Please only tell me how much you've written - not how much you're planning to write that day.  Results are all that matters!

So if you're determined to start the New Year with a full head of steam, and would like someone to know what kind of progress you're making - in either scripts, prose or anything else creative - then Tell Arnopp is the 'service' for you! Tell me as often as you like - every day, once a week, once a month, whatever helps. This should be interesting - I may receive no e-mails whatsoever, but I have a feeling a few people might like it.

What's the e-mail address? It's 'TellArnopp at gmail dot com'. Starting now.

Use it only for good.

                                                                            ***

My Amazon-acclaimed non-fiction ebook How To Interview Doctor Who, Ozzy Osbourne And Everyone Else is out now on Amazon UK, Amazon US and Amazon Germany, among others.  You can also get a Triple Pack of this very same ebook (PDF, ePub and Kindle/mobi files) direct from me.  Full details here, you splendid individual.

Running Notes

Hello there, it's me.  I'm taking a short break from writing fiction like some possessed jackanapes, to take a quick tea-break and tell you about a technique I've quite recently started using during script drafts.  You might well do it yourself and I certainly didn't invent it, but just in case you don't already do it, you might want to consider it.  Got that?  *Exhales*

Wait a second, while I have a sip of tea.  I'm gasping.

Right.  I'm currently writing two scripts at once.  Both first drafts.  With deadlines being what they are right now - somewhat pressing - the priority has to be to keep going.  I'm always like that with first drafts - keep going, don't look back, don't let the Devil gnaw your heels, for he almost certainly is riddled with syphilis - but in this case I need to be even more steamrolleresque.

Among the many enemies of first draft momentum - any draft momentum, in fact - are niggling thoughts.  You're working on Page 7, while your hind-brain slags you off for making a terrible job of Page 6.  "Why did she say that?  And because she's said that, this now doesn't make sense".  And the like.  Your hind-brain may well be right, but unless these niggles will seriously affect the structure of what's to come, you can wait 'til the second draft to fix them.

Except your hind-brain doesn't want to wait.  Oh no.  It starts throwing your mental furniture around, protesting that it won't be able to settle until these Page 6 niggles are straightened out.  And while it's up, what the hell were you thinking on Page 3?  You didn't even mention that Jemima and Hieronymous were siblings!  These things must be fixed NOW, godammit, or they might even be forgotten, down the line.

This is where running notes come in.  A simple notepad, by your side, in which you write the likes of 'Page 3: State J & H are sibs'.  There.  The hind-brain is silenced, its moans purged, but you haven't had to go back in the script and break your Page 7 concentration for more than a few seconds. You know that, when you come to that second draft, you can make these relatively small yet important changes.  But for now, all that matters is finishing the first draft and meeting that deadline.

Whaddaya mean, you're writing a spec and so don't have a deadline?  You should have given yourself one.

Oh, for Christ's sake.  Tea's gone cold.  Honestly, you could've told me I was going on a bit.

Good day to you.

                                                                     
                                                                            * * *

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