Archive for December, 2009
It's coming to that time of year when the pundits start issuing their lists of the Best of '09...I thought I'd add to the pile with my own three favourite SFF films of 2009.
Well actually I can't manage 3 - I have to stretch to 4. And in reverse order:
Number 4) is District 9, a wonderfully funny and also terrifically exciting action SF set in South Africa, in which the hero turns into an alien. Peter Jackson executive produced this gem, and it was directed by Neil Blomkamp and written by Blomkamp and Terri Tatchell.
Number 3) is Star Trek, directed by J.J. Abrams and written by Robert Orci and Alex Kurtzman. I've seen some negative comments about this on the web - on the lines of, it's 'just' a Hollywood blockbuster. But I thought it was fast and furious and funny and very clever. I love the fact that Abrams - with his US TV background - has the courage to mix slapstick humour, like Kirk's balloon hands, in with moments of intense drama. I watched this in a packed cinema, and the audience oohed and aahed just as audiences ought to...This is space opera and it rocks.
Number 2) is The Watchmen, a faithful (thought purists might say otherwise) version of Alan Moore's comic book which was visually extraordinary, and morally challenging. Some found it a bit slow-paced and digressive; I thought it was a work of drama that had the courage to take its time. And it was sexy too - great to see a Hollywood movie that isn't afraid to admit that humans have bare bodies beneath their lycra.
But up there as number 1), my favourite film of the year, as well as being my favourite SFF film, is Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds.
Despite the dumb spelling of the title (it's an in joke that is so "in" only Quentin gets it), this is a serious, intelligent, thought-provoking, exciting, hilarious piece of a work from a film-maker who just gets better and better. (Death Proof worked perfectly, in my view, as a B movie with real characters and great performances; and Kill Bill is kick-ass action rendered into astonishing visual poetry.)
I read quite a lot of hostile reviews of Basterds, taking exception to the fact that a) Brad Pitt's men keep scalping Nazis, which is not very nice, and didn't happen in real life and b) the final sequence has an event (I SHAN'T SPOIL IT!) that also didn't happen in real life. Oh, and lots of reviewers seemed to think that Tarantino had lost his mind, and simply shot random scenes from different films then tried to splice them together in a last minute frenzy.
However, I found it to be a very carefully constructed, rich, and utterly entertaining piece of cinema. And I loved the fact it is based on an alternate history scenario in which the course of the Second World War was changed by a bunch of characters out of a Sam Peckinpah movie. (The fact the film uses alternate history means that - like Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle - it most emphatically counts as SF, not just 'war movie.')
Basterds begins with a shockingly suspenseful sequence in which a Nazi colonel murders a family of Jews - all bar one, Shosanna, who escapes, and plans a dark revenge. She is the heroine of the movie, and the best thing in the movie; this is a luminous and wonderous performance from Melanie Laurent, who is even better than Christoph Waltz as Colonel Hans Landa.
The story of Brad Pitt and his Apache style guerrilla warriors is woven around Shosanna's story, skilfully and beguilingly. But Tarantino - a master of postmodern genre-mashing - is too smart to make a dumb 'scalping Nazis' movie. He makes the dumb scalping Nazis stuff his enjoyable B-movie-style subplot, and THEN builds a structure of complex drama around it.
I adore Brad Pitt for giving such a selflessly comedic performance; he stomps around like Popeye in an Ingmar Bergman movie. He knows it's silly, and Tarantino knows it too. That's the gag; diversity of tone and clashing of genres are the things that light Tarantino's fire.
So here's to the Basterds! And let's hope next year brings as many great movies.
My Number 4: Beware, spaceship over Jo'burg!
Er, Mum, I have a lobster's hand, is that normal?
Why can't I get my head into this poster?
Space...the final frontier....SO cool.
The Watchmen, in their jim-jams.
He's definitely a basterd.
Actually, she's not, but she fights on their side.
And this is Shosanna, our feisty Jewish heroine.
As a post-Christmas treat, I went to see a classic movie at the BFI (formerly the National Film Theatre). It was The Red Shoes, 
by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, an oldie and goldie.
It's a sweet, colourful, beautiful film with acid in its veins. It tells the story - the deceptively simple story - of a young composer who writes the music for a ballet based on the Hans Christian Anderson legend of the red shoes. And it intertwines that with the story of the young ballerina who dances the lead role in that ballet, and is acclaimed. It's the classic 'star is born' formula which Simon Cowell milks to this day, but which he did not invent.
As always with Powell and Pressburger's movies, I watched this piece growing amazement. For the films of these two men - close collaborators who wrote, directed and produced their films jointly in Coen Brothers style - are not structured or conceived in orthodox ways; they don't fit the template for 'popular movie'. They are simple, yet complex; conventional, yet bafflingly weird. In A Canterbury Tale, the main story concerns a man who pours glue on women's hair in wartime England; but the real story is about England itself, its buildings, its music, its people. And in The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp we are introduced to the old fartiest of old farts - an elderly, bald moustachioed military man (who resembles the period newspaper cartoon caricature known as 'Colonel Blimp', a by-word for reactionary military types) and then we flash back in time to see what the old fart was like when he was young, and dashing, and magnificent.
I saw a screening of Colonel Blimp in front of an audience of young screenwriters in Yorkshire - and they were visibly stunned at the strangeness of the approach, and the acidity of the wit. These Powell and Pressburger films are the most bizarre blend of hokey oldfashionedness and audacious art.
And so The Red Shoes - which I saw many years ago, and vaguely remembered as being a rather pretty ballet drama - slowly and eerily evolved into a tragedy about the mania of art. The driving force of the story is Boris Lermontov, impresario and chief of the Ballet Lermontov, whose genius is such that he can transform other, ordinary mortals, into geniuses. He's a talent spotter and a mentor rolled into one; he inspires the young composer Julian Craster into creating a work of shimmering wild brillance; and he has total faith in an untested ballerina who he has discovered, despite the reservations of all his trusted advisors - and his judgement is totally vindicated as she dances with passion and grace and terrifying frenzy.
A long section of the movie consists of an uninterrupted but edited version of the final ballet, merging stage magic and movie magic, and conjuring up poetry and colour in motion of a kind that would give James Cameron's Avatar a run for its money.
And that, pretty much, for a good hour or so, is the story of the movie! The ballet company goes about its business. They stage a ballet. It's successful. And the legend of the red shoes - magic red shoes that dance and dance and dance until the dancer who wears them dies of exhaustion - helps launch the career of two artists.
But then, slowly, the real story unfolds. I won't give away the final twist; but I will say that there's a reason this is one of Martin Scorsese's favourite movies. For this is a movie about power, and about art. And above all it's about the mania of art - the belief that nothing, nothing, nothing matters more than creating beauty that will last for eternity.
This, of course, is not true. Friendship is more important than art; love is more important than art; raising a child is a greater achievement than writing a poem, or making a movie, or writing a novel.
But it doesn't always feel that way. Every time I read a blog or an article about the process of writing, I can smell the heady exhilaration of creation; the supreme conviction that nothing matters more than the white-hot frenzy of creating a work of fiction, or a piece of screen drama. Often, for much of the time in fact, the process of writing is boring; much of it is sheer hard labour; but every now and then, the work writes itself - the characters come to life - the dancer becomes the dance - and very few things can beat that joy.
That's why writers write; it's not for fun, it's for the opposite of fun. It's for those moments of exaltation. Creativity is a dangerous drug; though, fortunately, a legal one.
And this is the real story of The Red Shoes. It's about a man - Boris Lermontov - who forsakes his humanity in order to enable others to create great art. He is of course a madman, and a fool, and a devil.
But sometimes, I have to admit, it seems like a tempting trade...
Over at SF Crowsnest, they've compiled their list of the top 100 SFF novels of 2009....I'm glad to see Red Claw is in there, at number 17....
More great movie SF in the pipeline it seems - James Cameron is to produce (but probably not direct) a version of the fab 1996 movie Fantastic Voyage, featuring a bunch of miniature explorers inside a human body. The same advanced motion capture technology used in Avatar will be used to the full.
I actually have a novelisation of this movie - written by Isaac Asimov!
Mark Charan Newton has written an excellent recap of the firestorm of comment that followed his controversialist piece on why SF is dying, and fantasy kicks butt.
I've added my two penn'orth to this debate; and in a nutshell, I feel that great SF is being written at the moment, but for some reason it's not at the cutting edge of that elusive thing called 'zeitgeist'.
Maybe this will change very soon when Avatar hits the cinema screens, which is very soon now. This could be the SF movie that does what the movie of Lord of the Rings did. (I can still remember audibly gasping at the shot of Gandalf on the high tower - it felt as I'd stumbled up into a whole new level of cinematic intensity.)
Early reports suggest that Avatar is the cinematic experience of a lifetime; though the story isn't as strong as it might be. And if that's so, it's a pity. But just on the basis of the trailers I've seen, this is a film that exhilaratingly makes the audience feel what it's like to be an alien on an alien planet. And that in itself has to be worth the price of admission.
When I was out in LA about a year ago I was told by an exec in a company that was famous for doing big science fiction movies that SF was now 'out'.
Since then, however, Roland Emmerich is now slated to direct a movie of Asimov's Foundation trilogy, there' s a whole slew of SF projects in development involving aliens in American high schools, and now we have Avatar.
A new dawn, or a minor blip? Let's see...
I've been making some minor changes to this website - so minor, you haven't noticed them!
But it occurs to me that much of what appears on this site consists of idle whitterings about this and that, which no one is ever going to want to read a second time.
But some of the blogs I've written are more substantial. I've started a series about writing, I've written longer pieces about books like 1984 and The Bloody Red Baron, and I've also started a feature called Movie Zone/TV Zone, where I alternate between my own pieces about movies & TV and features written by guest bloggers, like Angell, who wrote this amazing piece on The X-Files.
So in future, if you want to check back on anything that's appeared here, look to the left and down a bit to the section called Debatable Archives.
The Book Zone contains a collection of longer blog essays - 'blessays'? - about books.
Movie & TV Zone has the same for, er, movies & TV.
Science and Ideas contains a couple of blogs I've written recently on the Orbit site, plus other stuff as it occurs.
The Writer's Quest is a series I've just started on the art and craft of writing, based largely as my experiences as a script editor, development executive and screenwriting tutor. I've written Part 1: I hope I don't shilly-shally and take too long to write Part II. So watch this space. No, not this space, the space to the left of the blogs, under Debatable Archives.
I've been blogging on the Orbit site about evil, and it came as something as a shock to me to realise quite how dark is my own soul.
In real life, I'm pretty cheerful, and inclined to look on the bright side of things. My glass is always half-full, not half-empty; though, if it's a Friday night, not for long. And a lot of the stuff I write tends to have a lot of humour - and indeed downright silliness - in it.
But there is, in my underlying assumptions, a dark cynicism about humankind.
Not all humans - just some. The pack leader humans. The policitians, financiers, arms dealers, drug barons, gang bosses. I accept there are great differences between each of those groups - though if you had a choice between sending a drug dealer to jail for a year, or a senior banker, which would you choose? But these are Alpha People - many of them Alpha Males, though not all - and I hate them.
I hate them because they are predators, in a society which cries out for less predation, more cooperation. Sometimes they are posh twits, who have inherited all their money and power; sometime they earn their dosh and power the hard way.
But even the posh twits are smart. They know how to protect their own position, to cling on to power. And so we have a wickedly divided society rife with injustice, and beset with crises - the near-collapse of the financial system, global warming, and an expansionist war of dubious legality in Iraq in which we, the British and American peoples, have been forced to be complicit.
Wow. Lighten up Phil!
Of course, most of the time I write fun stories in the hope that others will think they are fun to read, or hear, or watch. I've written dark political thrillers for radio - including one richly-researched piece on military interrogation, and another piece on industrial disasters. But even those 'polemical' plays are full of humour, with characters who engage with each other, and hopefully engage the audience.
I wrote a gruelling piece about a psychophatic murderer for BBC Television; but though based on truth it was, at the end of the day a thriller - and hence, meant to entertain.
Writers are part of the showbiz world - we're not here to preach, or to spread doom and gloom.
Nonetheless, my life experiences, and my readings of history, have left me with the conviction that, if the predatory pack leaders get to lead, there is no limit to the horrors of which humans are capable.
And that's why, in Debatable Space, I have the Cheo presiding over an empire of evil in which all the human species are embroiled, and hence complicit. I don't think - as some have suggested - that the people of the future will be more evil than we are. But they will be just as easily led. The great thing with technology is that it makes the job of the evil dictator easier than ever before; and so, in my far future dystopia, it only takes one evil man to stain with evil all of humanity.
In Red Claw, I expand on this concept. If you are born into an evil empire, will you challenge it, or just accept it as 'the way things are?' In my nasty future, most people go along with it. They are taught, as children, that this is what you must and must not do. And if they rebel, as young adults, they will regret it briefly, before 'vanishing'.
This is the story of the Hitler Youth, projected into a future universe.
Some readers have questioned the credibility of the main premise of Red Claw - this isn't a spoiler by the way , it's stated fairly clearly from the outset - namely that the humans on this alien planet intend to terraform it, killing all indigenous life.
That, I concede, is a terrible thing to do. But unlikely?
I think not. If humans want to colonise space they have to find planets which are a) Earthlike in every respect with an oxygen-rich atmosphere or b) similar to Earth in terms of size and distance from the sun, and with water in abundance, in order to be readily terraformable.
Perhaps really nice humans would choose to terraform barren planets like Mars - or gas giants like Jupiter. But it would be easier, and more economic, to colonise the planets which are colonisable.
And which therefore are almost certain to already have life.
This is the unstated but omni-present assumption of my Future History; given a choice between the easy way and the hard way, humans will always choose the easy way.
Or at least, they will if they are led by predator pack leaders.
Bankers are a classic example of predator pack leaders. All political commentators agree that the astonishing and imbecilic and utterly selfish behaviour of bankers in the US and UK and around the world is the product of 'group think' - the tendency of tightly-knit groups of people to become so obsessed with agreeing with each other that they lose sight of reality. But I prefer to think of it as 'pack think' - the pack thinks only of itself, and its own welfare. And, frankly, the banker pack are doing very nicely.
George Bush was also a predator pack leader. He didn't get himself elected to the post of President - he was helped to power by a cabal of powerful people, many of them Texan oilmen. And he did his best, throughout his Presidency, to protect the interests of his pack. And in that - though in nothing else - he succeeded triumphantly.
I wrote Debatable Space out of rage at the Bush years; I wrote Red Claw out of rage at unfettered predator capitalism. So be warned: these are dark dystopian visions from a man with a lot of rage.
But also - fun. Writing is fun, reading is fun; it's the rest of life that's scary as shit.
Some great comments from Cara on myth...I was planning to write this exact same blog and now I have to dig in and think of something fresh to say on this topic.
I've just read Mark Charan Newton's fiery blog on Why Science Fiction is Dying and Fantasy Fiction is the Future.
Normally I take a very mild attitude to other people's point of view. If that's what you think - then fine, go ahead and think it.
But on this occasion, Mark has hit me where it hurts. It's a very low blow indeed.
And I am enraged.
Science Fiction is not dying! Fantasy Fiction is not the future! And I can prove the fallacious error of Mark's thesis with two compelling arguments.
Firstly, I don't want this to be the case.
Secondly....
Actually there is no secondly. I don't want this to be the case - but Mark is quite right. SF sales are diminishing - not by much, but they're certainly not growing. And fantasy sales are booming. And hence, the genre I love so much is shrinking, and becoming less 'cool'.
Damn, I appear to have punched myself on my own jaw, and am now reeling and blinking.
Let me tackle it a different way. Why are SF sales being whupped by fantasy sales?
Mark proposes four reasons, and three of them I think are incorrect. The reasons are these:
1) More women than men read books.
2) Culture has caught up with our imagination.
3) Literary fiction is eating up SF.
4) Modern fantasy audiences have grown up on the films of Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings.
As far as point 2) is concerned: I really don't think this is true! Yes, computers and mobile phones have made the concept of 'cyberspace' an everyday reality not a fictional notion. But we haven't colonised space, we don't have sentient robots, we haven't disovered aliens, we don't even have a colony on Mars or the Moon. The future still has much to offer; and in any case, science fiction is much more than an extrapolater of events. It's a genre of fabulous ideas, in which the implications of future progress are explored in thrilling stories about real characters. That's the kind of SF I read and love.
Point 3) is a clever one; but the fact that Margaret Attwood has written an SF novel isn't going to affect the sales of established SF writers. If anything, it makes it more possible for SF writers to go 'mainstream'.
I'd dispute point 4) too. Yes Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter have made fantasy into big box office. But what about 2012? Independence Day? The Watchmen? Star Trek? All the comic book movies? Not to mention all the amazing SF on TV. Science fiction movies and TV series have a huge huge fanbase, and yet for some reasons viewers of SF movies don't read SF novels in the same numbers. (Why? Well I'm trying to figure that one out.)
Point 1) is a killer: yes, women do read more books, and it seems that by and large they don't read 'blokey' hard SF. (I'm basing this on anecdotal evidence, admittedly - if the publishers know more or different, I'd love to hear it.)
However, I do recall being on a panel at a Sci Fi London event where a female fan asked, sweetly and devastatingly, why SF writers are always so obsessed with 'getting it [the science] right.'
And her words struck me like a body blow. Here was a fan who wanted to be told stories. She didn't want books which taught her all the science she'd so far managed to avoid by not doing physics and chemistry A Levels. And so the whole geeky, anoraky dimension to hard SF was, for her, like a huge Keep Out sign.
And yet! SF - of the hard and space opera variety - is all about concepts and ideas and amazing extrapolations of scientific insights. Like the many-world theory, or the astonishing properties of black holes, or the commonsense -defying theory of quantum physics. These concepts give a backdrop to a world of the extraordinary, where wonderful events can occur as a matter of course. And it is or should be no harder for the lay reader to grasp these concepts than it is for readers of Dan Brown to follow his historical and esoteric digressions.
'Hard' SF , therefore, shouldn't mean SF that's 'hard,' and on which you will be tested by stern faced boffins.
And, personally, though I love the SF of ideas, I get bored when it's gadgety and geeky, all about the machinery (plot and otherwise) and not about the story and the characters.
But should we - those of us who depend on, let's face it, making a living out of this stuff - abandon all hope and start writing heroic epic fantasy? Or is there a way to revitalise the SF genre, to make it be and appear to be less 'blokey'?
There's a killer argument here, and its name is Battlestar Galactica. I was working on TV crime dramas when it first came out, and wasn't part of the first wave of fans. I then started watching it when I ran a writers' group in Brighton, after all the women in the group told me I had to watch it.
At about the same time Zanna, my former script editor on The Bill - who is now an academic, a poet, and a theatre director, and generally the last person you'd expect to be an SF fan - also told me to watch it. She actually gave me the DVD of the introductory mini-series, and suggested (subtextually - she's a master at gentle, courteous subtext) that I'd be a fool and a wastrel and a knave if I didn't watch it.
So I did, and I was hooked, and I'm only a few episodes away from the climax of the final series.
But why is this show so beloved by female fans? For it is a "blokey" show if ever there was one. It's all about hardware and spaceships - the Vipers, the Battlestars, the Cylon ships. There are even long scenes in the engineering bay in which spaceship mechanics talk about the mechanics of spaceships. There is jargon aplenty. All in all, there is little - very very little - of what one might call "girly" stuff. And yet women love it. They don't just love it, they adore it, in their millions. It's SF! It's Hard SF! Why????
I think there are three reasons.
First, it's bloody good. It's smart, complex, morally ambiguous, and has characters you can engage with, and care about, and be exasperated by. Women fans are smart, just like male fans; they want stories that challenge them, and make them think and feel.
Secondly, it's sexy. Genuinely sexy. It's not the old-fashioned pulp cliched stuff with big-breasted Amazons with no brains; the women in this show are sexy, the men are sexy, and the Cylons (Number 6! be still my beating heart!) are the sexiest of all. And it's sexy in a totally non-sexist way. The beautiful young women in this show are often seen in revealing vests; but the gorgeous young men wear the same uniforms. And the old guys - Admiral Adama and Colonel Tigh - are also seen in the same revealing outfits, and dammit, they may be old and gnarly but they look good.
Thirdly, the women are just like men. They can be vicious. They can be cruel. Kara Thrace (Starbuck) is a swaggering arrogant jock who punches her senior officer and smokes a cigar - and we love her.
My theory is that the show is made a bunch of men who know nothing about women, so they write them just like men. And women, it seems, like that approach - because it's not condescending, and reflects a fundamental truth about our genders: women can, and do, kick ass.
So I don't see any reason why contemporary SF - which at its best is sexy, challenging, and full of great stories featuring real vital characters - should be tarred with the "blokey" brush.
But, it seems, it is.
And my suspicion is that this is why fantasy sales are booming...the old fans are as loyal as ever (hence, great sales for Al Reynolds, Peter Hamilton, John Scalzi and other established SF types) but the newer fans tend to be women, and they tend to prefer the fantasy and urban fantasy genres.
So, how to persuade these readers to try what's available within the genre I most love?
Well I don't know - I wish I did. But I'll end by quoting Kim Stanley Robinson, a wise owl, who in this piece wrote:
I say this as a happy fan and an awed colleague: the range, depth, intensity, wit and beauty of the science fiction being published in the UK these days is simply amazing.
Or to put it another way, Mark: Science Fiction kicks the ass of Fantasy Fiction!
I've been following the tweets and blogs of Edgar (Shaun of the Dead) Wright recently, which are great value, though sometimes odd. But I've been hugely impressed at the casual way he name drops - 'as Quentin (Tarantino) said to me and Tim Dalton' kind of stuff. Which you'd expect of course from a film-maker who's broken into Hollywood; but it still impresses the hell out of me.
Neil Gaiman's tweets are also good at casually name-dropping - he saw an episode of QI recently, in the actual Green Room. Thus implying, without saying so in as many words, that he and Stephen Fry are bosom buddies.
Sigh.
Sadly, name dropping is the one of the many things I'm hopeless at. After working in film and television for a fair number of years, I've met my share of famous people. But my casual name dropping anecdotes always manage to make me sound like, er, a dope.
For instance - I had dinner with Alan Davies and Josie Lawrence once, in a smart Soho restaurant - and was seized with a violent coughing fit that lasted about twenty minutes. Alan's gracious good manners never ebbed, but as the quarter hour struck I could see a hint of terror in his eyes. Josie, bless her, dodged my coughy spittle adeptly.
I met Harry Potter actor Richard Griffiths on the set of a TV show and we had a nice chat. (You see! That's not a proper anecdote!)
I was once horrendously late for the screening of a David Puttnam film, and the man who ushered me brusqely to my seat was, um, David himself. And he recognised me of course, though gallantly never mentioned it again.
I once script edited the great and legendary Colin Welland, and started out with the conviction we would become firm friends and rugby mates. Instead, I decided he was a pain in the arse, and we've never worked together since.
One time, I met the beautiful actress and impressionist Ronni Ancona in a London club, and momentarily forgot my own name.
HER: 'Hi, I'm Ronni.'
ME: 'Um, um, um.'
On another occasion, I almost met Richard Gere when he gave a talk at the National Film and Television School, where I had a part-time role as a tutor; but I didn't.
I did meet Martin Sheen, several times, when he was doing a show at the Royal Court Theatre and I was working there. And actually we had a few nice chats. But my only actual anecdote was about the time when I was watching a dress rehearsal of the play in which Sheen was the star (The Normal Heart), when a member of the backstage crew suffered a fit. All of us who were there backstage were frozen, not knowing what to do - but Sheen realised something was amiss, leaped off the stage, put the man in the recovery position, and galvanised the rest of us into helping.
This is a great story about Martin Sheen of course - but I'm the Zelig in that anecdote. I just stood by and watched.
The people whose friendships I treasure tend to be other writers, who are famous among their peers and to their family, but not celebrity material. I realise therefore I will never make the pages of Heat magazine; except, perhaps, in the back of shot, having wandered into a photograph on my way to the bar.
All in all, I name drop in much the same way that Inspector Clouseau drops priceless Ming vases.
I've been mulling about the Robert Jackson Bennett post about How to Write a Story over on the Orbit website. It's a funny, brief and utterly brilliant little essay. And it's makes me feel a warm glow of anticipation about this guy - I haven't yet read Robert's debut novel Mr Shivers, but this blog alone marks him out as a talent to watch.
Tattoos! Who'd have thought it?
It's focused my thoughts on a feature I'd like to start running on this blog - about the art and craft of writing, both for the screen and the printed page. I've been lucky enough to spend a large part of my life working with other writers, as a script editor and teacher of screenwriting. I've read the books, most of 'em, I've worked with some great talents like Murray Smith and Geoff Deane, and I've generally hung around with people who know what they're talking about. And I can recommend a few sites and resources for those who want to learn more about writing and screenwriting - Danny Stack's blog for instance, or the Writers Store Zine (email ezine8@writersstore.com to subscribe), or the Wordplay site run by the guys who wrote Pirates of the Caribbean. Indeed, there's a whole flourishing subset of the blogosphere called the scribosphere, a phrase allegedly coined in the course of this blog thread.
And to kick things off, over the space of four long-ish blogs, I have some ideas which I would recommend to new writers:
Find yourself.
Find your story.
Find your structure.
Find your audience.
Most books about writing deal entirely with point number 3) - structure. And as far as screenwriting is concerned, there are books that tell you all you will ever need to know about act structure, turning points, mid points, inciting incidents, negating the negation and going to the end of the road. Many of these books are quite good - but they never give the whole story about the craft of telling stories.
Writing, as we all know, is 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration - but perspiration is easy. Any fool can sweat buckets. And the sheer dogged discipline of sitting down at a computer and typing out words, and revising them, and revising them again - well it can be fairly hard work. but it sure beats commuting for a living.
But the 1% - that's infinitely harder.
One of the first jobs I ever had, in my early 20s - soon after leaving my plum job as a lavatory attendant at London Zoo (er...) - was as literary manager of the Royal Court Theatre, which was then and still is one of the pre-eminent new writing theatres in the world. And that's where I learned about Finding Yourself.
I learned it mostly from meeting other writers. I read an astonishing script by a writer called Nick Darke which was set in Cornwall, in rich idiomatic Cornish dialogue, and it brimmed with humour and life-force. Then I met the writer and - damn it all he was brimming with humour and life-force and was born and bred in Cornwall. Nick was the first and best hyphenate I ever met - he wasn't just a writer, he was a writer-lobsterfisherman. And the extraordinary quality in his scripts was an extraordinary quality in him.
Many writers are less extrovert and less extraordinary than Nick was - in fact, I doubt there's ever been anyone quite like him. But all writers have a special quality inside them - over and above their talent - and it's what emerges in their work. David Hare has an extraordinary attentiveness, he absorbs from those around him, and you can see it in his plays. Hanif Kureishi is seductive and charming - and his work seduces, and charms. Caryl Churchill is quietly brilliant and, like a Marvel superheroine, absorbs the best from those around her and creates something even better.
Shy Writers who wouldn't say Boo to a commissioning editor will - if they have talent - also have a secret power of some kind, a special quality that defines and makes unique their work. And that's what makes the work sing.
Of course, there are quality-less hacks with no talent who still manage to get commissions - but that's a separate argument.
And, of course, talent and 'specialness' are no damned use unless you have a great story and know how to tell it. But that's the 99% bit, which I'll talk about another day.
As part of my job at the Court I ran a series of writers group workshop, inspired by the ideas of former Court Literary Manager Keith Johnstone about improvisation and mask work - his book Impro was our starting point.
And I learned in these workshops a huge amount about creativity, and how to tap into it. We had an exercise called the Five Minute Play which basically meant picking a title out of a hat and writing a play, there and then. There was nowhere to hide; you couldn't do the hoovering to avoid writing; it just had to come.
Then, the perspiration work, we worked on the plays, we got actors in to perform them and improvise around them, and we even did a performance of these short plays on the main stage of the Royal Court.
Some years later, however, I was hoist by my own petard. In all the Royal Court workshops, the writers did the work, I was just the facilitator. But then I took part in a writers group run by a company called Paines Plough; and in the final session, we had a 'lockdown' in which we weren't allowed to leave the building until we'd completed a stage play.
Space was at a premium, so I was forced to write my play on the roof of the building, overlooking the London boulevard the Aldwych, with pigeons flocking above the fire escape and dancing in air near the pigeon nets. And so I wrote a ghost story set on the roof of an office block, with pigeons dancing overhead and a pigeon net, and a fire escape which features prominently in the story. The play was called Gin and Rum, and after the Paines Plough readthrough it was optioned and produced by BBC Radio Drama. The script evolved a little bit but the final version was pretty much what I wrote in a day on the roof, and it's one of the pieces I'm proudest of.
And because of that experience, and my Royal Court experiences, I do tend to have scant patience with writing gurus who obsess about inciting incidents and mid-points. Yes, I do use these concepts as a screenwriter; and yes you do need to know them But the hard work of building up a story is the easy bit; it's the easy bit that's hard.
It's Finding Yourself, as a writer, that's hard.
Because, of course, you can't 'find yourself' by looking. That's the worst thing you can do! Instead, you have to immerse yourself in the kind of stories you love, and immerse yourself in life, and try and fail a while, until the note sings pure.
And when you Find Yourself, you're not engaged in some namby-pamby spiritual quest. Your objective is pragmatic, and hard-headed; you're finding a Voice. A tone, a note, a style, an approach, that is exclusively and undeniably You.
It's the Writer's Quest, it is a great and noble thing, and it has three stages:
Find yourself as a writer.
Sell your writing.
Live off the interest.
But sometimes, writers who've found themselves manage to lose themselves again, and start writing dross. This can be a) because they neglect the vital 99% - writing really is a job, or b) because they just forget what it is that makes them Them.
I've mentioned this before - and I hate to bang on about it - but though Stephen King is one of my favourite writers ever (along with Dickens, Willkie Collins, Margery Allingham and Larry Niven) I really really HATE Wizard and Glass, which is Book 4 of The Dark Tower. I hate it not because it's terrible (it's actually much better than The Waste Lands, which is Volume III). I hate it because it no longer sounds like Stephen King. His tone is missing, his personality is missing, the indefinable 'yarning away the day' feel is missing.
Here, for me, is the real Stephen King:
Almost everyone thought the man and the boy were father and son.
They crossed the country on a rambling southwest line in an old Citroen sedan, keeping mostly to secondary roads, traveling in fits and starts.
This is the opening of 'Salem's Lot. It' s not first person narration,which King uses often elsewhere, but it feels like it is. It feels like a guy is leaning on a fence post, looking us dead in the eye, and drawling out a yarn. 'Folks around here, we all reckoned they were...' - it's that kind of tone.
And when King's books have that tone - whether first person or third person - they are unsurpassable. The Gunslinger, Book 1 of The Dark Tower, has a very different style to King's other books - but it's the same Voice. Direct, focused, looking you in the eye:
The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.
The desert was the apotheosis of all deserts, huge, standing to the sky for what looked like all eternity in all directions. It was white and blinding and waterless and without feature save for the faint, cloudy haze of the mountains which sketched themselves on the horizon and the devil-grass which brought sweet dreams, nightmares, death.
This is by no means "typical" Stephen King prose. It's heightened, poetic indeed, and doesn't have the no-nonsense, 'yarn told by a man sitting on his front stoop' casualness we associate with his books. It's not purple prose because the words are exceedingly well judged and the cadences are hypnotic ('all eternity in all directions'....'white and blinding and waterless and without feature'...'sweet dreams, nightmares, death'.) But the first line is pure King - brief and tantalising and as perfect as faintly-faded denim. And the rhythm is the same as the 'Salem's Lot opening lines - a one sentence first line to catch the reader's lip in the hook, a longer second para to reel the reader in.
This shows that like most writers, King has several styles - he is not and never has been a one-trick palomino. He can do conversational first person idiomatic; he can do third person poetic. But there's a common quality to both books, to all the really good King books; it's his attitude to the reader. King will always "We" the reader. He doesn't push us away - he invites us in.
In The Gunslinger - a bleak and seemingly immoral tale of a gunslinger who murders and massacres scores of people - he still manages to invite us in. His tone is not You, it's We. He does it through his casualness of tone ('He passed the miles stolidly, not hurrying, not loafing'.) He does it through a folksy, homespun quality to his narration and some of his dialogue - his 'folks like us' quality. And he does it through occasional strokes of writerly genius that compel us to share the story, not merely witness it. In this book, it comes when the Gunslinger (aka Roland) is told the tale of the woman Allie, who is brought back from death by the Man in Black. And Allie is told that if she wants to know the secret of DEATH, she merely has to say to her husband a single word: the word Nineteen. If she does, he will tell her the truth about Death, and she will go mad; so she knows she must never do it. She must never say the word NINETEEN.
Try it. Try it now. Try not thinking the word NINETEEN. Close your eyes, and don't think it, now.
Agonising isn't it?
That's what I call genius; and the trick he plays there is the hallmark of how King tells story. He makes us complicit.
Isaac Asimov, by contrast - still one of my favourite authors after all these years - uses a different trick. He 'I's the audience. Not so much in his actual fiction, which is efficiently and almost dispassionately written, but in his forewords and afterwords and all the science essays in which his huge great ego beguiles us. Asimov's personality was as great as his talent; who could not savour it?
At a dinner table, you can bet, King will tell some yarns, but he'll listen even more. Whereas Isaac will monopolise the conversation, and everyone will love it. Their writing style and writing identity is defined by who they are; and they know it. Writers are guileful; they know the tricks they pull. Once they have "found themselves", they delight in revealing themselves to the reader with all the innocence and naivety of Gipsy Rose Lee.
Style, voice, favourite storytelling tricks and techniques, favourite kinds of story, dominant themes - these are all hallmarks of a writer, and constitute the gestalt that define that writer. It's a lot of stuff to know, and it can take years to "find" it - or it can happen very easily very fast. It's like dancing. Some people, damn it all, can just do it.
And so there's a process, which you can often see very vividly when you're following a writer's career, when it all "falls into place". And suddenly you know who that writer is, and they know too. The TV writer Paul Abbott began his career as Jimmy McGovern's producer, and his early work had the shadow of McGovern all over it. But by the time he wrote the series Clocking Off, Abbott was a truly original talent. You can nowadays count on the fingers of all the people on a busy Tube train the writers who copy him; but Abbott himself is a true original.
In similar fashion, Neil Gaiman - one of my favourite writers ever - wrote very early in his career a book about Douglas Adams called Don't Panic. And in his early novels, in my view, you can feel in his prose that influence, those Douglas Adams moments and Adams-ish whimsicality of tone, peeking through.
But then Gaiman wrote more, and more - his range was broader - his control of technique was so extraordinary - his imagination was and is so vast - that it's preposterous to think of him as under the shadow of anyone. He exists in a tradition of English comic writing - but he also and equally exists in the tradition of Marvel comics - and he has embraced the land and history of myth and made it his own. Gaiman is a unique talent; but it didn't happen overnight. He grew unique.
And, intriguingly, my favourite of Gaiman's books is American Gods, which is the only Gaiman I've read (apart perhaps from the glorious avant-garde Signal to Noise) that doesn't feel like Gaiman.
Maybe I'm imagining that; so let's compare and contrast. Here's the Gaiman of The Graveyard Book:
There was a hand in the darkness, and it held a knife. The knife had a handle of polished black bone, and a blade finer and sharper than any razor. If it sliced you, you might not even know you had been cut, not immediately.
And here's the Gaiman of Neverwhere:
'No, please. Stay just where you are,' said Mr Croup. 'We like you like that. And we don't want to have to hurt you.'
'We do,' said Mr Vandemar.
'Well yes, Mister Vandemar, once you put it like that. We want to hurt you both.'
And here's the Gaiman of American Gods:
Shadow had done three years in prison. He was big enough, and looked don't-fuck-with-me-enough that his biggest problem was killing time. So he kept himself in shape, and taught himself coin tricks, and thought about how much he loved his wife.
Those are tiny excerpts of course, but for me there is a tiny but significant difference in tone between the first two, and the third extract. The man with the knife - the man called Jack - in The Graveyard Book is scary and evil and murderous - but not really! Despite the explicit menace of the words, this is a fairy-tale tone, a make-believe tone, as befits a book that is read by children as well as adults. And Neverwhere - not a kids book surely? - has that same lightness. Mr Vandemar and Mr Croup are evil assassins - but not really! It's just make-believe. They are comic villains, not real villains.
But as for Shadow - the hero of American Gods - yes, really. He's the hero not the villain but he's scary. You do not fuck with this man. The menace is palpable, and isn't in inverted commas. This is a deadly serious book, which takes us dark into the evil heart of America, and whose subject and subtext is myth (there's a con artist called Wednesday - if I say "Don Blake", you'll guess the twist.)
The genius of Gaiman is that he found himself early, and never lost himself. I don't think I've ever read a bad Neil Gaiman, or indeed heard a bad thing said against him as a human being. And that shines through in his works; humanity distinguishes them.
Of course many great writers have been arrogant shits - Proust, for instance, or T.S. Eliot. But "great" writers aren't always the ones we turn to when we want a story to savour; so writers with humanity can sometimes, I'm pleased to say, win the day.
In life, Finding Yourself is a process of epiphany and self-discovery; in writing, it's more pragmatic. Trial and Error is therefore very important. You may be a very funny person, great at telling jokes; but if your comic fiction is a yawn, you haven't found your writing self. Sour people can write funny scripts; funny people can write terrifying scripts.
So as a writer you find out who you are through what other people tell you. Hence, Woody Allen can't do Bergmanesque tragedies, though he yearns to do so. (But he can do "Woodyesque" tragedies, like his great movie Crimes and Misdemeanours which is drama not comedy, but has the same tone and similar verbal riffs as the comedies. It's in his range; Woody can reach those notes.)
Writers are arrogant buggers though (I know, I am one.) None of us like to think we are limited; none of us want to be pigeonholed. But though it's possible for a writer to range from genre to genre, and to change styles sometimes radically, there's still that core of "rightness" you have to find. If you miss, you make Interiors, or you write Wizard and Glass. But if you hit the mark, you write His Dark Materials, or American Gods. You write the thing that's like nothing you've done before, but is still truly "You".
None of this is abstract theorising; it's the day to day practical basis of trying to be, and then being, a writer. You hunt for the magic. You create circumstances that force you to be spontaneous. You write stuff that isn't good for as long as it takes until you learn how to write stuff that is good.
A piece of writing, essentially, is the progeny of mad passionate sex between the writer and the story. And if a different writer tackles that exact same story, the DNA of the offspring will be different.
Or to put it another way: the magic is the product of the magician and the spell.
So you have to be smart about who you are and what you are best at doing, in order to control the magic. Because the 99% perspiration has to be in the cause of a story worth telling, which you can best tell.
And tattoos - well, they certainly help.
Ep 4 of Misfits screens tonight. If you've missed it so far, you can catch up here.
I'm in love with this show. It's funny and dark and nasty, and all the main characters are totally unlikeable - and hence, I love them all. There's the gobby Irish one, the gobby chav one, the sexy slutty one, the socially incompetent nerd, and the (actually rather pleasant) black athlete - all of them serving Asbos, They are the much feared underclass; if they moved up a social tier, they'd be yobs; and they are never ever nice to each other. But I care about them, each and every one.
The brilliant conceit of the show is that they all have superpowers which are useless for fighting crime, and essentially just exaggerate the anxieties and fears these characters have anyway. The telepathic girl (Kelly) is constantly enraged when she hears people thinking she's a slag. The nerdy one (Simon) can become invisible - but no one notices him anyway. And the black athlete (Curtis) can turn back time - and don't we all wish we could do that, when we see what a mess we've made of our lives?
Ep 2 was my favourite so far - so very rude, and shocking, and yet with a big big heart.
This show is made by Clerkenwell - producers of the John Hannah Rebus, and the supernatural drama Afterlife. I worked with Clerkenwell 'head honcho' (as movie people like to say) Murray Ferguson during my time at Scottish Television - he's a softly spoken gent with impeccable taste. And my friend Petra Fried is now Head of Drama at Clerkenwell, and Executive Producer of Misfits.
Together with the equally rude True Blood, this is my favourite show on telly at the moment.
I went into Borders on Charing Cross Road last week... a sad experience to see such a lovely bookshop in its dying days. I looked for bargains - but didn't have the heart to buy any.
But I was however mightily cheered up to see this for sale. It's the box set of that forgotten cult series - the Rebus episodes featuring John Hannah. Of course most viewers now associate Edinburgh detective John Rebus with the wonderful Ken Stott, who plays him in the most recent version. But almost 10 years ago Hannah did four episodes, of which I am proud to have writtten (strictly speaking, co-written, since I was the rewrite guy) one.
Television history records that Hannah wasn't 'right' for the role, and maybe that's true. But I think the gritty, atmospheric film noir approach of these four eps was wonderfully true to the spirit of Ian Rankin's brilliant detective novels.
I had a double involvement with Rebus. Initially I was the development executive at STV in charge of getting the books to screen. I commissioned ace Scottish writer Mark Greig to work on a treatment, and we were lining up Ken Stott (!) for the lead role.
Then Hannah's company - Clerkenwell Films who now make the stunning Misfits - got involved and Mark and I, in the nicest possible way (Clerkenwell are one of the loveliest and most honourable indie production companies around) were elbowed aside.
But later, I came on board to do my co-writing job on The Hanging Garden, and Mark wrote the next episode, Mortal Causes. We were by then firm friends, and since we shared a villain - Cafferty - we both took the view we were in effect writing two halves of the same story.
My episode screened four days before 9/11 and the Twin Towers terrorist attack, and got a great audience. The next episode, Dead Souls, appeared a few days after 9/11 and was bumped back in the schedules till very late because of the rolling news coverage, and (understandably) hardly anyone watched it. And Mark's episode - Mortal Causes - was pulled altogether, because it had a contentious racial violence theme, and those were, remember, very tense times. Mortal Causes wasn't screened till several years later, even though it's a truly fine piece of television drama.
So it's great to see all four eps together in a box set, a unified series at last...