Writing Assignment Tracker III

Just as I always find myself scrambling madly in the final days before a writing deadline arrives, so the final days of the working year also tend to find me trying frantically to deliver on a number of projects, all at the same time.  Every year, for the last four years, I have delivered a first draft screenplay in the week before Christmas.  This year is no exception.  Recently, I have been polishing the first draft of a script that I drafted earlier in the month, and which I sent off earlier today*.  I’ve also been taking a couple of meetings on what will hopefully be my next project, and signing a deal on a script that has already been written, not to mention concentrating on what I should call my main project (in case they’re reading this), the writing assignment that I’m tracking here.

Here is the updated chart, for those of you following with bated breath:

Step	Name	Time Allocated	Date	+/- Schedule
1.	First Draft Treatment	1 month	15/11/12
	Initial Step Outline	2 weeks	26/10/12
	Initial Step Outline client comments	4 days	30/10/12
	First Draft Treatment	2 weeks	16/11/12	-1 Day
2.	First Draft Treatment client comments	3 weeks	06/12/12
	Client comments	2.5 weeks	03/12/12	+3 Days
	Conference call to discuss		06/12/12
3.	Second Draft Treatment	10 days	16/12/12
	Writer response	2.5 weeks	20/12/12	-4 Days
4.	Second Draft Treatment client comments	4 weeks	13/01/13
5.	First Draft	12 weeks	07/04/13
6.	First Draft client comments	8 weeks	02/06/13
7.	Revised First Draft	4 weeks	30/06/13
8.	Revised First Draft client comments	2 weeks	14/07/13
9.	Second Draft	4 weeks	11/08/13
11.	Second Draft First Set	6 weeks	22/09/13
12.	Second Draft Second Set	6 weeks	03/11/13

What can we see here?  Well, the client generally turns around their work on time, while I’m usually late, that’s the main thing so far.

The client in fact did a great job of collating all their disparate notes into one comments document (a six page, bullet-point document broken down into headlines / characters / page notes).  They spoke with one voice, with a largely clear sense of what they liked and what they disliked about my 25-page treatment.  They then did me the courtesy of talking through all of it on a conference call, allowing me an opportunity to push back, or seek clarification.

And it was good news and bad news.  A lot of positive responses to scenes, characters, the main love story etc.  But a sense that we’re not there yet on the heroine, or even on the overall script structure.  So it’s two forwards, one back.  As a writer you always think, sigh, here we go again, but to be honest all their notes make sense.  And I’d rather find this out after the first draft treatment than after the first draft script.  That’s what it’s there for.

But then it was up to me again, to interpret the interpretation, to analyse the analysis.  So I spent the last couple of weeks conducting an MOT on the project – opening her up, fiddling on her carburettor and so on.  I re-read the book on which the script is based.  I worked my way back through the analytical process by which we arrived at our initial creative direction.  I’m a holistic sort of writer.  I can’t just take a load of notes and change this, this, and this, and leave the stuff that we like where it is.  I need to step back.  I need to see the bigger picture.  I need to think about ‘what kind’ of movie I’m writing, and try to make sure that this is the right / best / most perfect expression of that.  It’s why I always rewrite from page 1.  Everything in its right place.  I sometimes wonder if I’m over-thinking things, or over-complicating things, or denying myself the expressionistic licence to just see where the story goes.  But I is what I is.

So I’ve fudged my response.  Instead of delivering a second draft treatment in ten days, I’ve taken two weeks to write a ‘response’.  This is partly because of the aforementioned pre-Christmas gridlock – I’ve been caught out on time, I’ll admit – but also because an intermediate step felt appropriate.  It’s a ‘This is what I think you were saying.  This is what I think the implications are.  These are my recommended solutions / changes, and these are the implications of those.  What do you think?  And are we all still on the same page here?  Is this still the movie we all want to be making?’ sort of document.  Charging onto another 25 pager without cross-checking my reading of their reading seemed premature.  That’s my justification, at least. 

(Incidentally, why did the original project plan give me 10 days for the second draft of the treatment, but give them another 4 weeks for responding to that?  I would have thought those timings should have been flipped.  But, there you go, nobody has a crystal ball.)

So I’m behind schedule.  And now it’s Christmas, and New Year, and I imagine it will be the middle of January before I get the official ‘Second Draft Treatment’ out – a whole month behind.  But I haven’t received any angry letters from the client’s lawyers, yet.  People are sympathetic to the process and, of course, to the time of year.  And I’ll make up for lost time on the first draft.

On which subject, I still have to say that I’m finding the project schedule – and, by the same token, the payments schedule – lopsided in favour of the first and second drafts.  It has always been the way – you do the work on the treatment, but you get paid for the draft.  I’m not going into figures here, but I’m getting approximately 7% of my fee for the two treatments, but about 35% for the first draft.  And I can almost guarantee you that the treatment work will take longer, will be harder work, and will be more critical to the successful outcome of the project.  But people pay for scripts, with characters and dialogue and stuff.  At least, that’s what they think they’re paying for.

A new model, a simpler and fairer model would – I humbly submit – be 33% treatment (and revisions), 33% first draft, 33% all subsequent revisions, limited by time of contract.  None of this attempted delineation between drafts and revisions and polishes – I’m a page one rewriter, there is no delineation.  Just: outline, draft, revisions.  Third, third, third.  All in favour?

Anyway, onwards and onwards, and I’m enjoying the journey.  And at least I’m being paid something, so what the hell am I complaining about when and how and why it gets paid?  Idiot boy.

Happy Christmas to you all.  Here’s to a productive – and on schedule – 2013.

* Just got an email from the client on that script I sent out earlier today.  ‘On page 30 – so far amazing!!!’  Loving the real-time script feedback.  Though now I’ll be worried if I haven’t heard from him in another half an hour...

Writing Assignment Tracker II

Well here we are.  The first update to my previously blogged-about idea to track a writing assignment from start to finish, comparing the various contracted steps to the reality of what I deliver, both in the number and description of those steps, and in anticipated vs actual delivery dates.  Essentially, how accurately can a contract predict the writing journey?  Here is the updated chart:

 

Step	Name	Time Allocated	Date	+/- Schedule
1.	First Draft Treatment	1 month	15/11/12
	Initial Step Outline	2 weeks	26/10/12
	Initial Step Outline client comments	4 days	30/10/12
	First Draft Treatment	2 weeks	16/11/12	-1 Day
2.	First Draft Treatment client comments	3 weeks	06/12/12
3.	Second Draft Treatment	10 days	16/12/12
4.	Second Draft Treatment client comments	4 weeks	13/01/13
5.	First Draft	12 weeks	07/04/13
6.	First Draft client comments	8 weeks	02/06/13
7.	Revised First Draft	4 weeks	30/06/13
8.	Revised First Draft client comments	2 weeks	14/07/13
9.	Second Draft	4 weeks	11/08/13
11.	Second Draft First Set	6 weeks	22/09/13
12.	Second Draft Second Set	6 weeks	03/11/13

 

Thoughts on the above.

 

1.       Remarkably, I’ve ended up delivering the ‘First Draft Treatment’ within a day of the anticipated / due date.  But this doesn’t tell the whole story.  It’s not like I’ve gone away, spent four weeks writing, and come back and delivered on my first contractual obligation.

2.       As the chart above also shows, there was an interim step, a relatively detailed beat sheet, delivered after two weeks.

3.       Note the very prompt turnaround of the client comments on that first document – only four days, and over a weekend (though the LA time difference helps with that, I think).

4.       But even within this, there is a more complicated picture.  I am dealing with one person – we’ll call her the Development Executive, although she’s also a lead producer on the project – and I have been sending her documents once or twice a week throughout this process.  The early stages of the process started with me writing an eight page document – one page of ‘vision’, three pages of main character biogs, four pages of outline – which, after some back and forth and expansion, became the beat sheet (those character biogs were included at the front of the beat sheet).  The DE (as I’ll call her) then collated and, in some cases, pushed back on the notes from the rest of the producing team (two further sets of producers), before emailing them to me and then talking me through them (on the 30^th).  I then developed the beat sheet into the full treatment and, again, ran it by the DE a couple of times before, collectively, we decided it was ready to go back out to the full team.

5.       I’ve also had two further face-to-face meetings with the DE in this time, one of which also encompassed a very enjoyable trip to the V&A Hollywood Costumes exhibition (for reasons which will become clear when and if I’m allowed to mention the project by name) – highly recommended.

6.       So I have to conclude that it’s coincidental that all this took almost exactly four weeks.  It’s just how long it took.

7.       I don’t think the First Draft Treatment is the finished article, by any means, but it has advanced the idea sufficiently that it feels like a new document for the rest of the team to read, and without taking it so far that we have run ahead of ourselves should ‘realignment’ be required.

8.       The system appears to be working very well at the moment.  The DE’s notes have been prompt and smart, asking all those questions that I wish she wouldn’t ask because I know I don’t have answers for them at the moment.  She is helping me to shape the project in a way that (I imagine) a producer does with the musicians in a recording studio, and the work is already infinitely stronger as a result.  The lesson here is clear: get yourself a good script editor from the start.

9.       The fact that she also collates the notes into one coherent response from the producing stake-holders is also invaluable.  I’ve worked in environments before where your role as a writer appears to be that of Israel-Gaza mediator (poor-taste comparison in the light of current events), and somehow to try to satisfy two or more contradictory opinions.  I would recommend that you insist on dealing with only one voice from the client side.  It’s not your job to help them make their minds up.

10.   All this would also go to demonstrate the valuable lesson that taking a writing assignment isn’t just about signing a contract, having a meeting or two, then taking their money and delivering a document at some vague point in the future.  It is, like all good business, about managing relationships, putting in however much time is needed to get the job done right, listening to and responding to feedback, and over-delivering wherever possible.  This 101 of How To Run A Business applies as much to the airy-fairy world of creative writing as it does to running a fruit and veg stall.

11.   We’ll see whether the client takes the full three weeks to respond.  I doubt they will, as they like the pace that the DE and I have established and seem keen to keep it going (see this post for the importance of momentum).  So I would guess at a week or so.  The question is what do I do in the meantime?  My head is very much in this project, and the contract states that these clients have ‘first call’ on my time, as and when they choose to get back to me.  However, I’m not going to just sit on my bum, and I have of course been pushing other projects forwards as I’ve been writing these early documents.  It looks like, in fact, I might be about to dive into the first draft of a totally different project, and so I may be able to make headway on that this week.  Then I’ll have to set that to one side to work on the revisions to the treatment.  But I may be able to finish that draft while this client is reading my second draft treatment, so that I’ll finish that script just as I’m ready to start the first draft on this one.  Should (could) all fit nicely.  Self-employment and managing your career as a freelance is all about trying to find these serendipitous synergies in your project management schedule (he says, trying not to sound too much like an efficiency consultant.)

 

Watch this space for the next exciting instalment.

Writing Assignment Tracker I

Two posts in one day.  Like waiting for the number 19 etc.

So here’s my new blog topic.  I’ve recently been lucky enough to be engaged to write the screenplay adaptation of a popular novel (I won’t go into more details of the project at the moment).  I’ve just received the final copy of the contract from my wonderful agent Sean Gascoine, in which the terms of the engagement were broken down.

I don’t believe these terms are confidential, so I thought it would be instructive to my blog readers to see how an assignment like this is broken down, both in terms of steps and time allocated.  I’ve typed it all out below. 

I started work on step one (first draft treatment) this week.  My intention is to keep a record of the timings on this project, and any other notes which feel appropriate, in this blog.  A real-time writing assignment tracker, as it were.  See if we end up ahead of or waaaaaaay behind schedule, and see where there was perhaps too much or too little time allocated in the contract.  Maybe at the end I’ll be able to say what it was all in aid of.

Hope you enjoy.

Step	Name	Time Allocated	Estimated Date
1.	First Draft Treatment	1 month	15/11/12
2.	First Draft Treatment client comments	3 weeks	06/12/12
3.	Second Draft Treatment	10 days	16/12/12
4.	Second Draft Treatment client comments	4 weeks	13/01/13
5.	First Draft	12 weeks	07/04/13
6.	First Draft client comments	8 weeks	02/06/13
7.	Revised First Draft	4 weeks	30/06/13
8.	Revised First Draft client comments	2 weeks	14/07/13
9.	Second Draft	4 weeks	11/08/13
11.	Second Draft First Set	6 weeks	22/09/13
12.	Second Draft Second Set	6 weeks	03/11/13

Wow.  That’s over a year’s work.  Hadn’t thought it was that much.  And I was planning on getting a first draft out by Christmas...

Any comments on this basic proposal at this stage?  I presume we all agree that just because it says 1 month for the first draft of the treatment, doesn’t mean I need to take the full month, does it?  I’m almost done.

Well, we’ll see how it all goes.

Be careful what you sign

Just a short post, back after a long break.  I’m planning a more regular blog update this autumn, to coincide with a new script I’m writing.  Details to follow.

My message for the morning is something that is weighing heavily on my mind at the moment.  Three or four years ago, I worked on a project, an original idea that was then commissioned (for a nominal writing fee) into a screenplay by a producer.  The project eventually went nowhere, the option lapsed and I started working on a new idea, in the same rough territory but with a totally new story and characters.  This new script got picked up and fast-tracked into production.  But the fast track has now got stuck in treacle because the original producer is refusing to sign a quit claim on the first script and the new producers – even though the two projects are no more connected than two different cop movies that both just happen to be cop movies – won’t proceed without it.  So it looks like the new project is dead in the water, all because of an old project for which I got paid peanuts and which went nowhere.

The lesson is brutal but clear.  Be extremely careful what you sign, always.  If possible, and if the amounts of money are so small as to be just a token gesture, don’t sign anything.  Retain control of your intellectual property as long as you can, all the way till the point of purchase.  Even if you’re working with people you might have considered friends (a subject for a whole nother blog).

As you can tell, I’m pretty bitter and twisted about this.  But you live and learn, and then you share your learnings.  Keep the pen in the pocket and, wherever possible, keep lawyers a good time zone or two away from your life.

Brighter blogging to follow!

Momentum

A short post for a Monday morning, written in a style reflecting its content; which is to say, quickly.

It occurs to me that my preferred method of writing has shifted in the last twelve months.  There’s an old question, “how long does it take to write a screenplay?”, which has an old answer: “about six months, but only the last two weeks are actually spent writing”.  This has been very much my style, over the past ten years or so.  Research and plan and structure and character outline and procrastinate as much as you can, until there’s nothing left to do but write the damn thing.  Lock yourself away, cabin in Wales etc, eight to ten pages a day, two weeks later you’re done.

The new shift is an evolution of that process.  Almost a year ago, I was brought in on a rewrite job that had a very tight schedule.  I had two weeks to deliver a page one rewrite, after which there would be a go / no go decision on production.  So, in theory, this job would accord to the equation above, just without the first five and a half months of contemplative prep time.  As it turned out, I spent the first week finishing another job and still doing some rather compressed research / plan / structure / procrastination work.  Which left me a week to write a totally new script.  And so I did it.  Monday to Friday, 9am to 6pm, one quasi-monastic lifestyle and twenty pages a day.

It wasn’t even that hard.  I’d won the job off the back of a pretty detailed beat sheet, so its back had been broken.  (Sidebar – why didn’t I get paid for that?  A gnarly old question...)  Then it was a case of getting into a routine.  Four hours in the morning, three or four pages an hour, the odd cup of coffee and invigorating stroll in between.  Then a bit of lunch, bit of an email, maybe look up some points that needed clarification.  Then the same again in the afternoon, two till six.  Home for tea, crumpets and bedtime stories.  There are worse ways to spend the day.  True, you’re knackered in the evening, and not great company, but it’s only for a few days.

And it wasn’t a bad draft.  It was a first draft, sure, but it would have been a first draft even if I’d taken two or three or four weeks to write it.  And in some respects, I think it was all the better for being written very quickly.  Primarily, I felt like it had momentum.

It was a thriller, so this element was particularly important.  But surely all good stories have momentum, a desire to see what comes next, a breathlessness, an excitement.  I became my own most demanding audience member.  I found myself writing in (roughly) ten page chunks, which in itself isn’t a bad way to think about your script.  I’d write ten pages in the morning.  Then I’d re-read them after lunch, wondering if I had crammed as much action, tension, complication and entertainment into those ten pages as I possibly could.  A bit of a review, a bit of a tweak.  Then I’d look ahead to the next ten pages.  Where were they taking my story?  Were they answering the questions I had set up, and posing new ones?  Would I end the next section in a dramatically different situation to how I had started it?  And then I’d go on and write it.  And in the next morning I’d review, tweak, look ahead, rinse, repeat.

Like I said, it worked pretty well.  It wasn’t perfect, but at the very least it was a coherent expression, in screenplay form, of the ten page beat sheet I had earlier.  And, at the very very least, people who read it could start to evaluate it as a potential movie, rather than as a prose document.  And that is the other great advantage of the First Draft Splurge Technique (as I’m about to patent it).  Good or bad, at least it’s a screenplay.  Good or bad, at least it’s a hundred pages, with scenes and characters and dialogue.  Then, as we all know, the real work begins, but at least now you have a starting point.

[The one danger of this approach, to my mind, is that it’s harder to change things once they have made it into a script, than when they are just a bullet point in a beat sheet.  Character traits, lines of dialogue, scene order all have a way of rooting themselves into the story – at least in the writer’s head – once they are chiselled into the first draft, and so subsequent changes are that much harder to make.  But this is a relatively minor disadvantage, and one which training and a sense of professionalism will allow you to overcome in time.  It’s massively outweighed by the energy and momentum that this process can generate and, of course, the fact that you now have a script.]

So, to summarise (these things are never as short as I intend them to be – a lesson on rewriting there), I’ve adopted this as my general approach to my first drafts.  I’ve written four new scripts in the last twelve months using it.  Two weeks is for pussies.  Prep and prep and prep and prep till you can’t prep any more.  Then twenty pages of first draft a day, for a week.  Screenplay, bang.  Easy.  Last week I beat my own personal record.  Day 1: to page 10.  Day 2: to page33.  Day 3: to page 58.  Day 4: to page 92, end.  I hardly stopped to blink.  Momentum in writing equals momentum in the script, or so I’m increasingly finding.

I’d welcome comments on this post from other writers with their own approaches to the first draft.  Hollywood rewriters will probably tell me one week is for pussies.  They do it OVERNIGHT.

Reflections

I’ve let this whole blog thing drift.  Four posts in 2012, none since 13^th March.  Simply not good enough, Williams.

I had planned to write a post on Friday, but was scratching around for a topic.  I’m in treatment land at the moment, pushing four separate – and very different – projects forwards until one of them gets the momentum, or money, necessary for me to start writing the script.  So I could have written about treatments.  I’ve also been doing a bit of teaching, at the Met Film School, and was going to write about what teaching teaches the teacher (answer, probably more than it teaches the students).  I also thought about writing about the view from my office window, and how the farmers tilling the land around me never fails to strike me as the most apt metaphor I’ve yet come upon for the creative process.  Prepare, plant, water, reap.  Repeat – if you’re lucky.

But then on Thursday my wife and I got knocked by a very sad piece of news, and our lives took a sudden, unexpected and unwanted diversion.  A blog isn’t the place for mawkish public grieving, but it has given me a few small reflections about life and writing that I might as well share – if only because they’re occupying my own thoughts at the moment.

The first is this.  Life bumbles along without much incident, by and large, and that’s the way we like it.  A certain level of comfort is reassuring – particularly the older you get, and the more responsibilities you take on.  But this is why normal life doesn’t make for very good art.  Every now and then, however, your life will take a turn for the dramatic.  Suddenly – and it usually is quite sudden – you’ll find yourself in a state of quite bewilderingly intense emotion.  This could be love.  It could be fear.  It could be anger, or pain, or ecstasy, or grief.  And you’ll realise that this is where drama exists.  This is where art exists.  You are existing on such a dramatically different plane that nothing else becomes important.  Indeed, it’s only on this plane that you get a sense of what actually is important.  I think back to that maxim from screenwriting 101: “Are the events of this story the most important events in your protagonist’s life?”  If they aren’t, then keep looking.  And if they are, spend as much time there, and as little time as possible in the normal, boring part of their lives.

Secondly.  Art is training for life.  That’s how I’ve always thought of it and, in recent days, I’ve felt it to be true.  You watch a film, or read a book, or look at a painting.  You experience a hero’s journey and consider their reactions to a set of circumstances, and consider whether your own response would be similar, or different, and why.  And through this process, you begin to develop a philosophy about life.  Your own, unique philosophy.  What makes sense to you, and what sounds like nonsense.  Call it your faith.  Faith in the way the world should work, and faith in the way you might cope when it doesn’t work as it should.  It can be religious, spiritual, humanist, anarchist.  But you think about it in the boring days, so that you’re prepared for the days of drama. 

I’ve leant on my faith a lot in the last few days, and it’s helped me out.  I’ve heard “It wasn’t meant to be” or “Everything happens for a reason” a lot.  I understand these are meant to offer comfort, and peace, hinting as they do at a grander plan.  But they haven’t really helped, to be honest (though the kindness of the people expressing those sentiments has).  It’s not that it wasn’t meant to be, it’s just that it didn’t happen.  Things don’t happen for reasons, they just happen.  And that’s okay.  That’s been enough for me.

So, as an audience member, don’t forget to go through that training process when you engage with someone else’s story.  And, as a storyteller, don’t forget the responsibility you owe to your audiences.  You could be a life saver.

Thirdly.  Sadness is a part of life.  Once the rawness and shock of a sudden loss subsides, sadness remains.  But that sadness is not something to be feared, or resented, or buried, or ignored.  It’s just there, like a knot in a tree trunk.  It might fade with time, but it will always be a part of your story, as much as the wonderful days, as much as the memories you cherish.  So I’m aware of the sadness; not wallowing in it but accepting it.

Fourth and finally.  There aren’t any silver linings from all of this, but when you go to dark places and you make it out again, you emerge – as any hero’s journey professor will tell you – with an elixir.  Some knowledge, some tool or weapon.  I’m not magically enlightened now, and I wish I hadn’t had to go on this journey, but I do think that I’ll come out of this a better writer.  We’ll see.

An odd blog, and largely for my own benefit, as you might have figured out.  But thanks for letting me share.  Back to boring normal life for a while, I hope.

Real people

Just a quickie today.  I know I always say that, but there’s lots on – more on that below.

I’ve got four new scripts I’m working hard on at the moment and they have one thing in common: they are all based on real people.  One is a romcom that is very loosely based on a true story I heard about many years ago, so for that sake of this blog post it’s the exception to the rule.  But the three other projects are all directly based on real people who did real things: one is a modern-day war tale of unspeakable heroism which I’m trying to replicate as faithfully and unsentimentally as possible; another is a period tale about a now-dead man who did something incredible, and about whose life certain facts are known and well documented; and the third is a sort of a hybrid tale – a fictional story based on a real person.  In projects one and three I have met and talked with the people I’m writing about, and in the second project I have spoken to people who knew the man in question.

I’m writing about this today because I spent yesterday afternoon with a director talking for three hours with one of the ex-military guys featured in project one.  I recorded the interview and I’m going to spend this morning transcribing my notes from our conversation.  But I know already what I’ve got.  It’s fucking gold dust.  It’s moment after moment, nugget after nugget of pure, compelling, original, distinctive and totally real dialogue, character and narrative material.  The sort of thing that I would usually spend hours trying to dredge up from some long-forgotten part of my psyche, and even then it wouldn’t be a fraction of the quality of the material generated by our meeting yesterday.

It has prompted me to think three things, in particular.

1.  If my plan with this war project is to replicate people’s thoughts, words and deeds as accurately and faithfully as possible (I’m taking UNITED 93 as a reference point) then what is the actual role of the writer?  In an ideal world, I won’t ‘invent’ a single line of dialogue in this script – it will all come verbatim from interviews and transcripts.  And yet I do think I have a role, and it’s the same role the writer always plays.  It’s knowing what to look for.  It’s shaping, finding a structure, giving a direction, making it ‘movie-shaped’, to use Jane Goldman’s expression.  The only difference is that the raw material is coming from the outside, rather than from within (although, if we’re being literal, most of the within began without too, so it’s not technically a difference after all.)  It does make the writing process easier, though.  Not only do you have this database of raw material for you to turn to if you’re ever running dry, you also have certain set-in-stone elements – characters, timings, events – that force you to focus your thinking.  I always prefer half a dozen immoveables to a totally blank piece of paper; at least then I know what I’m working with.  (The danger comes when outsiders to the project consider those immoveables more moveable than you do, but that’s another war to fight.)

2.  Real is always better than made-up.  It just is.  Audiences know it, and film-makers know it when they see it, that’s why they get so excited about it.  It’s no coincidence that all four projects I’m working on are based on the truth: it just gives a surer basis on which to build a project.  That doesn’t mean they all need to be documentaries, or docu-style.  They can be dramas, of course.  Just founded on something real, something true.

3.  (The following is Stating The Bleeding Obvious, but it bears repeating.)  So it follows that, if you don’t have anything really real with which to start, or to which to tie your characters and actions, then it’s your job as a writer to get as close to it as possible, every step of the way.  Real emotions, real dialogue, real behaviour, real-world ‘you wouldn’t believe it if they made it up’ improbability.  This is Good Writing 101 of course, but my meeting yesterday – with ‘a real person’ – reminded me of that.  Real rules.  Fake blows.  The rest is detail.

And so, back to it.

My theme

This is likely to be one of the more self-indulgent blog posts I've written, for which I apologise.  But I write what's on my mind, and today it's this.  That said, I'll try to keep it brief.

I'd like to take you on a train of thought journey on which I found myself yesterday afternoon.  I was gazing out of my office window, as you do when you're a writer, and found myself staring at a bird (don't ask what kind of bird, a smallish brownish one) and wondering what it was doing as it sat on its perch.  (The answer is it was probably staring back at me, wondering what I was doing.)  And I found myself thinking, wow, that bird's got it good.  A few worms a day, and a nest, probably a Mrs bird and some chicks somewhere (you can see I'm pretty big on the whole ornithology thing).  That'll do nicely for the bird.  Granted, it has a brain the size of my little toe, could be eaten by any of a number of predators, and doesn't have Sky Sports or Guinness or Mozart.  But it doesn't have freezing pipes, council tax or Take Me Out, either.  On balance, life could be worse for that small brown bird.

My mind then – for reasons which would become clear later on – made the connection back to an exquisitely awkward meeting I had with the producer Paul Webster, then at Kudos Films, about three years ago.  Chalet Girl was in production and Paul wanted me to pitch some ideas.  Very thrilled I was, too.  So I pitched a dozen of my finest, mintest ideas, and they all fell on stony ground.  Which is fine, it happens.  So then we started spit-balling around themes and worlds, as you do, and Paul asked me what I considered to be some of my guiding themes as a writer.  I have to say I wasn't prepared for this question, but I answered as honestly as I could, at the time, which was that I didn't think I had a guiding theme.  I didn't – I don't – consider myself a polemical writer, a political writer, a drum-banging, let-me-tell-you-how-to-live-your-life writer.  If I had a theme, it was that people shouldn't listen to what other people are telling them.  A no-theme theme; your basic existential, individual, small-c conservative ideology.  Of course, I didn't say any of that.  What I said was "I don't really feel like I have anything to say," which is a different thing altogether, and which didn't go down well at all.

This then swiftly reminded me of the time when, on an eQuinoxe writers' week in Germany, my very first tutor in my very first session let me guff on for about twenty minutes, telling her what I thought was wrong with my script, before she finally piped up and asked me what my theme was.  And then of course I realised that I didn't have a theme, or any unifying message (yes, that word) to bind the material together.  That's what was wrong with the script.

And then my mind leapt nimbly, like a mental mountain goat, onto a tale told by another mentor, on another course, of how he would write a new script, and get really excited about all these new characters and situations and gags and whatever, and then he'd re-read it and think "Huh.  This one again."  Basically the same theme, obviously an important theme to him, which turned over and over in his head, day and night, and which as a result found its way into everything he wrote.  Not a bad thing.  Just, good to be aware of it.

If I were a film student now I'd go through some famous directors or writers and list the themes that inform their work, but I'm not really (or haven't been for a while) so I'll limit my external references to Stanley Kubrick (I did my dissertation on him, so am on reasonably firm ground).  He basically made eight or ten movies with exactly the same storyline.  Man vs machine.  Ape vs spaceship.  Individual vs society.  Chaos vs order.  Look at the films, from Paths of Glory to Lolita to Dr Strangelove to 2001 to A Clockwork Orange to Barry Lyndon to Full Metal Jacket to Eyes Wide Shut.  Same tension, same conflict, same explosion.  Same story.  Same theme.  (You might argue that it's the only theme and, if you want to be reductive, that all movies, all art are about the same thing.  But this seems a particularly well-defined, not to say obsessive, thematic territory for one artist to return to time and again.)

And as I continued stroking my beard (I was daydreaming, so I had one) I wondered whether I do have something to say, these days.  I think I'm a better writer, I have better craft skills and I can more readily entertain people, but do I have a theme?  The don't-let-other-people-tell-you-how-to-live-your-life idea is still there, and is something I believe in almost above anything else (probably why self-employment is the only option for me).  But this theme can be rather self-defeating when you use it to inform your drama.  You get lots of angry kids spitting at their parents, and affairs, and alcohol-based-suicides and not much else.  Not great for a romantic comedy writer.  So where does that thought lead?

And then I thought about Chalet Girl, and my favourite, proudest moment.  Felicity Jones on top of the mountain, at dawn, laying to rest the memory of her dead mum in the chill Alpine air.  And I thought of the other scripts I've written, and am writing, and my favourite moments in them, the key points of dramatic transformation.  And it struck me that there was one thing that linked them all.  A small detail but to me, in that moment, an important one.

They all happen outside.  They all happen with our characters somehow getting back in touch with nature, first physically and then, I guess, emotionally.  In the prairie graveyard.  At the top of a building.  At the end of a railway station platform.  And, sure, a lot of that will have been driven by my wannabe-director's eye for the sweeping sunset shot (though not quite as sweeping as those in War Horse).  But it's also where these scenes feel like they ought to happen.

And I thought about how I love living in the countryside.  And walking the dog.  And watching birds, whose names I don't know.  And driving round the safari park at Longleat and learning about the dynamics of the lion pride.  And thinking about how our ape-like ancestors moved from sea to land to sea to land over eons of evolution, and developed all these curious habits, and abilities, and appendages, all for an evolutionary reason, all with a particular purpose.

And then I realised that that was it, and why my mind had made the link between that happy bird and the meeting at Kudos.  That's my theme.  It's not an original one.  If I can throw some Greek out there, it's probably γνῶθι σεαυτόν, or 'Know Thyself', the line from above the entrance to the Oracle at Delphi.

To my very limited understanding of the world, Knowing Thyself involves knowing thy natural self, thy animal self.  What can we learn from the bird sitting on its branch, that we may have forgotten?  What can an understanding of how we evolved over all those millions of years teach us about how we should live today?  What is all that technology, all that energy expenditure, all that concrete in our cities concealing from us?

And I feel like it's the job of me, the writer (I shy away from 'artist'), and those like me, who have the time to stroke their imaginary beards and consider the birds, to remind us all of that from time to time.

I'm not saying it's a fool-proof theory.  We've developed important and elaborate social institutions to co-exist, and to look after those less fortunate than ourselves.  We've developed Sky Sports, Guinness and Mozart.  And clearly "survival of the fittest" has deeply nasty, eugenic connotations (and that's not really what informs evolution, anyway).  We're not animals any more.  We are better than that. 

But, for all that, in any given situation or decision, I would argue that reconnecting with our natural self, our natural state, our natural values, will probably solve more problems than it causes, do more good than harm.  It's Kubrick-lite, I suppose – it's ape vs spaceship again, but the ape takes it on points.  So anyway, that's my theme, or one of them at least.  And that's why so many big moments in movies happen outside.

So I've got a theme.  Excellent.  Now, what am I supposed to do with it?

ps 1 – Chalet Girl has been showing on Sky Movies Premiere this week – great to see twitter abuzz once again with nice comments about our little film – it's definitely about 9:1 in favour of 'my favourite film everrrr' vs 'the biggest piece of shit I've ever seen', and I'll take that ratio;

ps 2 – BAFTAs, Sunday night – all round enjoyable, personally would have given Director and Actor to Tinker Tailor, and adapted screenplay to the matchless Moneyball, but my only real gripe was with Adam Deacon winning the Orange Rising Star award, NOT because it should have gone to the not-even-nominated Felicity Jones (although it probably should) and NOT because Deacon didn't deserve it (I've never seen his films, and he eventually gave quite a charming acceptance speech) but because it was such an unfair fight.  Everybody was predicting Deacon would win because he has a massive Twitter following, had a website dedicated to this campaign, and has a core block of young, Orange-using fans.  And so it was.  But this voting process totally undermines the award, and is insulting to the other nominees.  Well done to Deacon, and I know BAFTA has to keep Orange happy, but this has got to change.

ps 3 – I said I would try to keep this brief.  As ever, I failed.  Poor blog readers, you get my first draft, not the finessed and heavily edited ninth.  Way it goes.