Last night I watched His Girl Friday again, for the nth time.  It’s one of my favourite ever films.  One of those sharp sassy black and white movies with machine-gun fire dialogue, wit, edge and amazing screen chemistry.  It tells the story of a group of unscrupulous newspapermen, including one ‘newspaperman’ who is a woman, covering the case of convicted murderer Earl Williams, who is due to be hanged in the morning. Earl escapes and – well, to say more would be a spoiler.

But the extraordinary thing about the film is that it’s so FAST. Not only fast, devious, nimble-footed,  and bewilderingly cynical. It is at heart a coruscating satire of the amorality and immorality of newspaper folk  But yet, we love them.  Many people have gone into journalism after watching this movie, on the misapprehension that all journalists will be as clever, witty and beguiling as Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell (they’re not.)  And though both the leads, Grant and Russell, behave appallingly we love them, and we want them to fall in love.

If you’ve never seen it, do so; if you’ve seen it as often as I have, you haven’t seen it often enough.

All this is the segue for a wee bit of a discourse about movies and authors and the like.  On this website I’ve featured a number of long and sometimes quite scholarly (cue Archie Tait and Stuart McGregor) articles on movies, books and TV.  And in a little while I’ll be featuring a major piece by Stuart on the graphic novel author Warren Ellis.  Yes, Debatable Spaces does occasional venture beyond me blathering about my new novel release and pimping my own work (oh, by the way – Artemis goes on sale in – shut up Palmer!)

I was watching His Girl Friday as part of my current venture of teaching on a course in film  up at  the University of York.  It’s a job that came about by the usual circuitous route (my entire life is a series of random coincindences) and for me it’s been a great chance to reconnect with old movies and new movies in a rather more systematic fashion than has been my wont over the last year or so.  And a chance also to think about what movies mean, and how they work, which is invaluable to me in my other role as a screenwriter and co-producer of a feature film.

So what’s the story with His Girl Friday? Why is it so good?

Firstly, I’d argue, it’s a prime example of that cultural movement known as Pulp.  Think Raymond Chandler, think Dashiell Hammett; think also Billy Wilder’s fast and furious comedies, or the gangster movies of Jimmy Cagney (which I’ve also been revisiting).  They’re different things in different genres, but the one thing they have in common is blistering speed.  Paul Cain wrote a pulp crime novel called Fast One; that could be the name for that whole movement.  Compare and contrast with the novels of George R. R. Martin, which explore a world in a thorough and detailed and – though hugely exciting – slow fashion.  But in the 30s and 40s the vogue was for fast and furious; you get to the point, you make it, you move on.  In White Heat, for instance, by the third shot we know that Jimmy Cagney is about to rob a train.  In Reservoir Dogs, we spend AGES listening to the guys nattering on before we realise a bank job is about to occur.

There’s no right or wrong about this; it’s just the issue of how pace in storytelling can change.  I find that fascinating.  And when you watch an old movie by Howard Hawks or Preston Sturges, the first reaction is panic – my God, this is all happening so quickly, can I keep up?  We cod ourselves that we live in the age of fast editing and multi-tasking brains; but the average modern action blockbluster is a snail compared to the racing hares of yesteryear.

Then there’s the hat. Rosalind Russell’s hat. And her suit too – big shoulders, very mannish, sexy in a totally empowering way.  His Girl Friday is one of the great feminist movies of all times because Rosalind’s character is, from first to last, one of the guys; but on her own terms.  She’s ambitious, ruthless, smart-witted, fast-talking.  Allegedly, Russell hired her own screenwriter to amp up her own dialogue so she had just as much witty repartee as the guys; if so, that proves the actress  became her character. Take no shit, Rosalind.  Get in there and do the job.

Nowadays, it’s much rarer to see such a powerful and guileful woman in a mainstream movie; we live in the age of Lady Gaga and Beyonce.  It’s  still a world of empowered women – both those ladies certainly are – but to see Rosalind’s brand of  edge and wit and velocity in a female character  in a movie is not as common as it ought to be. Film-makers, take note.

If I may just slip in a week academic beat; there’s a famous semiotic study (stay with me! don’t flee!) about the pop singer Madonna, by academic John Fiske (in a book called Reception Study, edited by James Machor and Philip Goldstein).  According to the editors, Fiske ‘construes fans as active viewers and listeners for whom Madonna’s persona and music become a “site of semiotic struggle between the forces of patriarchy and feminine resistance of capitalism and the subordinate.”  ’  Phew.  And according to Lucy, a 14 year old Madonna fan, as quoted by Fiske, ‘she’s tarty and seductive…but it look alright when she does it you know, what I mean, if anyone else did it it would like right tarty, a right tart you know, but with her it’s OK, it’s acceptable.’

‘Reception study’ by the way is that academic discipline that deals with the way that real people – you and me – respond and react to cultural phenomena.  Its method involves talking to people, finding out what they really believe, then discussing those conclusions.  So it’s not some arid theoretical discipline; it’s an evidence-based study of the phenomena of our everyday life.

And what Fiske learns about Madonna is that she dresses like a whore on stage in a ‘post-modern’, ironic, empowering way.  Girls feel good about themselves watching Madonna sing; she’s no dumb blonde.  She’s using exaggerative versions of the icons of sexuality (those conical breasts!) to say, Hey, look at me, I’m  a woman and I’m sexy and I’m cool with it.

But the hat worn by Rosalind Russell playing the role of Hildy Johnson – especially when tipped back, as it is in the photo above – tells a different story.  This woman is sexy but  doesn’t have to flaunt it.  She just wants to do her job, the best she can.  She’s not playing any artful erotic game; damn it all, she’s best ‘newspaperman’ in the business! That’s actually, to be honest, a little bit more feminist than Madonna’s schtick.  It’s also inspirational. And, for a film made in 1940, it’s a beacon and a symbol for all women in all audiences everywhere.  No more dumb blondes; this is the  way of women in the future.

All that is conveyed by the hat; not just the hat the whole demeanour of the character; not just the whole demeanour of the character, but the very tang and pace and dash of the film.  The film means more than just the story in other worlds.  It’s the epitome of a whole way of being.

That’s as much semiotics as I will perpetrate in this blog; forgive me my moment there.

Interestingly, the feminist subtext to the movie arose by chance. In the original version – - a hit Broadway stage play called The Front Page by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur – the role of Hildy Johnson was played by a man.  But after hearing his secretary read the lines, Hawks decided to make  Hildy Johnson a woman; which turned out to be an act of genius.   A whole new subplot and subtext arose; a love story within the satirical comedy.   (In the 1931 film Hildy Johnson was played by Pat O’Brien; in the 1974 version Hildy was played by Jack Lemmon.)

There now follows  a visual retrospective of some of the works of Howard Hawks (1896-1977):

How careers begin…this early (1927)  crime drama was directed by Joseph Von Sternberg and written by Ben Hecht, who wrote the play of The Front Page, on which His Girl Friday is based. But – uncredited – Hecht’s cowriter was the young Howard Hawks.

After producing more than 60 movies, and directing quite a few silent movies, this was Howard’s  first talkie:

An all-male cast… a pressure cooker environment…does that ring a bell?

In an interview with Joseph McBride (in the book Hawks on Hawks) the director spoke  of his approach to dialogue in this movie: ‘People liked the scenes because they were underdone, because they were thrown away. Nobody emoted in the pictures that I made.’  This is the very definition of what makes a Howard Hawks film; a casual thrown away approach to dialogue that roots the characters in the real.  I’ve worked with directors who used this as their defining aesthetic – ‘Just throw the line away’. ‘Don’t act it, just throw it away,’  etc etc. The opposite approach is to be big and emotional and for a character to ‘beat his chest’.

Of course, some directors and indeed actors still to this day prefer ‘big’ acting. Think Al Pacino in Scarface… (as opposed to Paul Muni in Scarface, the Howard Hawks’  movie with the same name – see below.)

This is a stunner of a movie; Muni is brooding; the acting is laconic.  Muni has a trick with a coin that is mesmerising.  This is still, post-Godfather, one of my favourite gangster movies.

This is the one where Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn inadvertently adopt a leopard.  Hawks has travelled the road from an all-male cast (Dawn Patrol) to directing a movie which has one of the best roles for a woman ever.  His strategy for the writing /directing of female roles both here and in His Girl Friday was identical; just treat ‘em like men.  The women are just as sassy, just as bold, just as annoying as the men.  This utterly non-sexist approach also underpins the writing role of Starbuck (Kara Thrace) in the rebooted Battlestar Galactica; in the original series, Starbuck was a guy.  In the reboot, Starbuck is a cigar-smoking whisky-swilling fist-fighting gal; same difference, huh?

Only Angels Have Wings features Cary Grant again, in a comedy about a guy who runs an air service. This is one I haven’t seen; must rectify!

And now we see Hawks’ range – from comedy back to war movie; this one was the highest-grossing film of its year.

His Girl Friday followed, in 1940, with this crap poster for a great film:

Then it was To Have and Have Not…Based loosely on the Ernest Hemmingway story, this was Lauren Bacall’s first role. She was spotted on the cover of a magazine by Hawks’ wife Slim; Hawks trained her how to pitch her voice low. And on the set, Bogie and Bacall fell in love…one of the greatest movie romances of all time, of the off-screen variety.  William Faulkner worked on the script, with Ernest Hemmingway.

Hawks once broke his hand when he hit Hemmingway in the face, to prove to he knew how to throw a  punch.  Hemmingway laughed like a drain and the hand never healed.  Sigh. Those were the days.

No, no, what am I saying – the writer should hit the DIRECTOR. That would be more like it…

(I’m kidding, honestly!)

Moving swiftly on to The Big Sleep, up there with The Maltese Falcon as one of the greatest detective movies of all time based on Chandler’s famously brilliant but narratively incoherent novel. (No one, not even the novelist, ever figured out who killed the chauffeur).  And in this we get more of that unique Bacall/Bogart chemistry. (If you look hard, you’ll see the title The Big Sleep underneath the words BOGART AND BACALL, which tells you all you need to know about how this film was marketed).

By 1948, a change of direction – from the maker of sassy contemporary comedies and hardboiled noir thrillers and war movies, we have….a Western. Perhaps the greatest Western ever. This is (as memory serves) the Western in which they cry ‘Yee-hah!’ , as parodied in City Slickers.

John Wayne, Montgomery Clift, Walter Brennan, the cattle drive across a river. THE river. The Red River.

From there it’s a small step to science fiction… The Thing From Another World is based on the short story Who Goes There? by legendary SF editor Joseph W. Campbell. Years later John Carpenter re-made it as The Thing. The Carpenter version is a much better thriller, and those opening shots of the dog in the Arctic snows are stunning.  But, bluntly, the dialogue in the Carpenter version is workmanlike and the performances are vivid but not richly observed.

In the Hawks’ version, however, you get great dialogue, great character, great faces…shame the action peters out but it’s still a classic.

Around about now, 1949, Hawks put Cary Grant in a dress:

The premise of this movie (I Was a Male War Bride) is that Grant is a French officer (!) during the War who marries an American girl; but the only way he can travel to America to be with her is under the terms of the War Brides Act. Hence, the cross-dressing…this  is not one of the best known Hawks’ movies but it’s a sheer delight.

After knocking out a musical starring Marilyn Monroe,

Hawks returned to Westerns with Rio Bravo, his rebuttal to High Noon, a film which he and John Wayne loathed for its wishy-washy liberalism. And so instead of a story in which the townsfolk refuse to help the Marshal, we have a story in which the community rallies round. Even the town drunk (played by Dean Martin) shows his mettle, and there’s even a song.  For my money High Noon is a greater film; but this is still fab.

Then in 1967 Hawks made another Western with similar themes, also starring John Wayne.  Another cracker, though it’s quite some time since I’ve seen it.

This had a screenplay by Leigh Brackett, the (female) screenwriter who wrote The Big Sleep and also wrote The Empire Strikes Back; she was a successful SF author too, in the Edgar Rice Burroughs’ mould; I have a couple of her books on my shelf. When Wayne is about to shoot a bad guy in the belfry of a church, he says, ‘Let’s make music.’  This is the film in which Wayne makes his horse walk backwards…an under-taught skill in many drama schools.

Then it 1970 it was back to Westerns and Wayne with Rio Lobo; to be honest, I don’t think I’ve seen this one (yet!)

This isn’t the comprehensive list – and I’ve left out the silent films, none of which I’ve seen. But it’s an extraordinary back catalogue.

And, despite the range of genres, there are clear common factors in these movies.  First, the dialogue – fast, snappy, vivid, wonderful. Second the depth of characterisation for even the minor roles. Third, the in depth casting; which is another way of saying Second, because a great and perfectly cast actor can conjure up a character in almost no words.  Think of the guys sitting around the table waiting for Earl Williams to die in His Girl Friday; even one of them a lived-in  face, with laconic throwaway delivery. We know nothing about these guys but they are utterly real.

Here’s one of the best bit-part actors Hawks ever worked with; Walter Brennan:

Never has an actor looked less than an actor…and in Red River, he steals the movie.

All these distinctive  common factors make it possible to  instantly recognise a ‘Howard Hawks’ film.  But in his own time, Hawks was regarded as a journeyman director; it’s the films  which were famous, not him.  But then,  in the 60s, Hawks was rediscovered as an ‘auteur’, namely a director with an individual voice and vision.  And that’s absolutely right, and a great corrective to a culture which (at that time) often disparaged the vital and hugely creative role of movie director.  And from that moment on, the director’s role has come to be regarded as pivotal to the creative vision on any and every film.  And the cult of the ‘auteur’ has come to dominate the international film industry. Which again is fair enough; since directors do work terribly hard, and you really can’t make a movie without one.

However…

Oops. Here we go.  Rant alert!

Like all or most professional screenwriters, I have come to hate the word and concept ‘auteur’ .  Not because of what it means, but because of what people THINK  it means.

In other words, there’s a whole assumption in the film industry that every director should be an ‘auteur’ and hence should write or rewrite every movie he or she directs.  But this is silly.  A writer who also directs is fine – that’s what Quentin Tarantino does, and he was getting high value writing jobs before he became a director. The same is true of John Huston, and Preston Sturges.

But if there’s already a writer in place, and if that writer knows his/her stuff, then it’s a director’s job to support that writer’s vision, and talent, in a collaborative way.  It’s called script editing. Stephen Frears, one of the greatest directors in the world, is great precisely because he understands that process perfectly. He began his career working with Alan Bennett, one of the finest writers in the world; and Frears knows he’s a better director if he trusts his writer.  And when I was teaching TV at the National Film and Television School (the very cradle of British auteur theory), Frears arrived for a term’s teaching and raised hell with the directing students who were refusing to work with the writing students. He told them how it SHOULD  be done; and taught them how to give script notes, the rarest and most precious of skills.

The problem really is that the word ‘auteur’ has been corrupted and abused to mean the opposite of what it originally meant.  Originally, it emerged from the very reasonable and smart  point made by a bunch of French critics  that the supposed ‘hack’ directors of Hollywood often in fact had a very distinctive ‘authorial’ influence on their movies.  Hawks was one of the directors singled out, as was Alfred Hitchcock – both directors who prided themselves on working with top notch writers, as opposed to those directors (like Jean Renoir) who largely wrote their own stuff.

And  the American critic Andrew Sarris, whose article on the auteur theory really started the hare running, also included Hawks among his pantheon of top ‘auteur’ directors. But he also relegated directors like Billy Wilder, Stanley Kubrick and David Lean to the second tier, which proves that for all his cleverness, the man was a fool; and his version of the ‘auteur theory’ was in effect no more than a way of codifying his own preferences/prejudices. I mean, let’s get a grip here. (Wilder in particular pretended not to be bitter at Sarris’s sniping, which means he was REALLY pissed off.  But Wilder was truly one of the greats; if he’d only ever made Some Like it Hot he’d be a genius, but he did a whole lot more…)

And now, ‘auteur’ is loosely used to mean a director who writes; or a director who RE-writes, usually in the process snaffling a co-writing credit.  I’m treading on eggshells here, because there are so many stories I could tell to illustrate this general point, but I can’t, for fear of not eating lunch in this or any town again.  I cite the example of a well known screenwriter who recently told me (no, I can’t tell THAT story.)  The only example I can/will give is of the time I worked on a Bill episode by a new director who went on to be quite famous, but whose script meddling was notorious and highly unwelcome.  He wrote a significantly changed draft of the script I’d written, not in a nice or collaborative way, breaking all the rules of good conduct on that show, and when the script editors saw the result they were appalled.  Because it was bad; the wrong tone, the wrong rhythm, no sense of the characters I’d created.  Luckily, in that environment – on a show where the writer’s voice was respected – I got most of my stuff back. But elsewhere, this kind of meddling is widespread and condoned, nay, encouraged.

But how is this different to having Howard Hawks rewrite your script?  His whole method depended on collaborating so closely with the writer he became  the de facto cowriter; he would also sometimes work with actors on set, reworking their lines, sometimes changing the character’s character.  Why is that allowed?

Well, because that’s part of the collaborative process, and as long as the writer is there, or welcome to be there, no one minds this stuff.  In fact, we relish it; we like being part of it; we ‘get’ it.  And Hawks was smart enough to know that you can impro lines and bits of business on set; but if you meddle with the heart and soul of the story, the invisible narrative structures carefully put in place by the screenwriter, the whole house of cards will fall down.

Many writers, including the gloriously outspoken William Goldman, have spoken out against the prevailing cult of the ‘auteur’ director, on the grounds it ignores the vital role of the screenwriter.

Goldman even claims (in Adventures in the Screen Trade) that Jean-Luc Goddard, one of the originators of auteur theory, said in an interview “that the whole thing was patent bullshit from the beginning, an idea devised by the then young scufflers to draw some attention to themselves”  Of course, being Goldman, author of a book about his experiences in Hollywood called Which Lie Did I Tell?, this quote from Godard  may be apochryphal.

Goldman also offers a classic example of the preposterousness of auteurism:

“Peter Benchley reads an article in a newspaper about a fisherman who captures a forty-five-hundred-pound shark off the coast of Long Island and he thinks, “What if the shark became territorial, what if it wouldn’t go away?”  And eventually he writes a novel on that notion and Zanuck-Brown buy the movie rights, and Benchley and Carl Gottlieb write a screenplay, and Bill Butler is hired to shoot the movie, and Joseph Alves, Jr. designs it, and Verna Fields is brought in to edit, and maybe most importantly of all, Bob Mattey is brought out of retirement to make the monster.  And John Williams composes perhaps his most memorable score.  How in the world is Steven Spielberg the “author” of that?  Why is it often referred to today as “Steven Spielberg’s Jaws”?… There’s no author to that movie that I can see.”

One American critic has coined the term Schreiber theory (from the Yiddish word for writer) as a counterbalance to the prevailing auterist approach.  However, only screenwriters subscribe to this theory; and no one takes us guys  seriously.

And, getting back on track, I would argue that  Hawks is a great director BECAUSE he worked with such great writers. And he knew  it too.  He was asked why he rarely took a writing credit on his movies, and he said, ‘Because if I did, I couldn’t get such good writers to work with me.’

He did have a very particular method, however, based on working long hours with a writer, and working on scenes by each person taking a character and busking lines.  And out of this came the kind of dialogue that Hemmingway (one of his collaborators) called ‘oblique dialogue’ and Hawks himself called ‘three cushion dialogue’.  Because you hit it over here, then over  there, to get the meaning. Aaron Sorkin uses a similar  type of three cushion dialogue in The West Wing.

That’s collaboration; and Hawks is an auteur ie a great and distinctive director because he was a great collaborator.  And his particular directorial style is virtually unmistakable. Okay, maybe sometimes you might wonder if a film is directed by Hawks or by Billy Wilder – also a master of three cushion dialogue. But it’s certainly pretty special.

Interestingly, for me the weakest film of his is The Thing From Another World  because of the lack of thriller tension.  And though it’s SF, that’s definitely a thriller story.  His other films are all in genres where thriller tension isn’t that important. In the screwball comedies, it’s character that counts. In the kind of Westerns he made – as opposed to the Sam Peckinpah or Sergio Leone action Westerns – it’s character that counts. Even The Big Sleep, a classic detective noir, it’s not the thriller tension that matters, it’s the characters, as they are revealed by the machinations of a (as all concerned admitted) at times impenetrable narrative.

However, it would be interesting to see what had happened if Hawks had managed to (as he tried to) get the rights to the Bond movies; instead they were snapped up by his former assistant director Cubby Broccoli.

Imagine how Hawks might have re-envisioned that suave secret agent:

BOND: Hello.  My  name is Bond. James -

BOND GIRL: Will you shut up and listen to me?

BOND: – Bond. Hey! You’re not meant to -

BOND GIRL:  Guys like you, you drive me mad!

BOND: – interrupt me. (SOBS)

Ah well, we’ll never know.

Character is at the heart of these Hawks movies.  And he choose his collaborators because a) they liked to work with him and b) they were great at dialogue and c) they were great at character. Hence his long term relationships with, in particular, Leigh Brackett, Ben Hecht and Charles Lederer.

Anyway – rant over.  Now I have to track down Rio Lobo and Dawn Patrol, to fill in the gaps in my Hawks-watching…

I’ve been mulling about opening lines . Don’t know why. Another reason to avoid writing all the stuff that comes AFTER the opening line.

Isn’t this just the greatest opening line of a science fiction novel, ever?

          It was a bright cold day in April and the clocks were striking thirteen.

That’s from George Orwell’s 1984  of course.  And the sheer ordinariness of the prose and the observation are beautifully counterpointed by the science fictional weirdness of a world where clocks strike thirteen.  It grabs, utterly.

Another favourite opening line of mine is from Larry Niven’s Ringworld:

     In the night-time heart of Beirut, in one of a row of general-address transfer booths, Louis Wu flicked into reality.

It’s the same trick; the juxtaposing of the ordinary with the extraordinary.  And with no shilly-shallying, you’re into the world of the story.

In civilian literature, there are some classic opening lines that always get quoted.  These two for instance:

     It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.   (Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen).

     All happy families resemble one another, each unhappy family is unhappy it its own way. (Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy).

The trick here is to create an omniscient narrator making generalisations about life that will be exemplified in the story that follows.  The calm confidence in the tone of both authors assures the reader that everything in the remainder of the novel will be the really good stuff, from the best of writers; not at ALL your usual crap. 

In fact both assertions are open to debate.   I acknowledge no such universal truth about single men in possession of a fortune. It may have been true in Austen’s world, but I only have her word for it.    And I don’t necessarily agree with Tolstoy’s theory about families either; but his air of authority sweeps me along.  That’s class.

Compare that with the opening line of Philip Pullman’s  Northern Lights:

    Lyra and her demon moved through the darkening Hall, taking care to keep to one side, out of sight of the kitchen.

There’s no omniscient narrator there; no generalisations about life.  Just one person doing one thing, as observed by a neutral observer who says what he sees with the minimum of commentary. 

But the first four words play the ‘strikes thirteen’ trick; strangeness is introduced by the unusual name (Lyra) and the casually mentioned fact that Lyra has a ‘demon’. 

Lyra then moves without adjectives (she doesn’t move furtively, or swiftly, or skulkily) through a Hall (not ‘hall’) that’s darkening (so we have a mental image of fading light) whilst taking care to keep to one side (so we imagine Lyra’s position in this darkened Hall), out of sight of the kitchen – indicating that’s where the jeopardy lies.

In totally self effacing prose, Pullman has therefore told us who our heroine is, how strange she is, where she’s moving and that she’s in some unspecified jeopardy.    No pyrotechnics; but you just HAVE to read on.

Robert E. Howard however (one of the great stylists of SFF) uses bolder prose in the opening line of his Conan novel, Conan the Conqueror:

     The long tapers flickered, sending the black shadows wavering along the walls, and the velvet tapestries rippled.

No protagonist; no jeopardy; no self effacement.  Instead, openly poetic prose which balances two -ed words i.e.e. ‘flickered’and ‘rippled’ . with a sinuous ‘wavering’ in the middle.  Nothing is static; candlelight is flickering shadows are wavering; tapestries are rippling (implying a breeze, though a line later we find there IS no wind in the chamber.)  It’s sensual prose that defines a period (the past, when dwellings were lit with candles and decorated with tapestries)  and hence evokes a WORLD that we are going to enjoy inhabiting.  It’s ‘more is more’ writing, a far cry from the unobtrusiveness of Pullman.  But equally beguiling.

The opening lines (I’m cheating, it’s more than one line) of Paolo Bacigalupi’s stunningly good The Wind Up Girl are:

    ‘No! I don’t want the mangosteen.’  Anderson Lake leans forward, pointing.  ‘I want that one, there.  Kaw pollami nee khap.  The one with the red skin and the green hairs.’

This is one of the best opening chapters I’ve ever read,  and it combines Pullman’s unobtrusive putting of images into the reader’s head  with Howard’s sensual poetry. In the English words, we see Anderson Lake leaning, and pointing, and we see what he points at too; so our eyes are swivelling around as we read.  But we also have the Thai words, which I assume have the meaning ‘The one with the red skin and the green hairs’, but since I speak no Thai, I just hear them.  Kaw, Pollami, Nee,Khap. It has the rhythm of waves lapping a shoreline; and the words look good on the page too.  I bet this line isn’t half so effective if you actually DO understand Thai.  ‘Mangosteen’ is also a magical word.  ‘I don’t want the cucumber’ wouldn’t do the job nearly as well.

Here are the opening lines of The Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe, another of SFF’s great stylists:

     It’s possible I already had some presentiment of my future.  The locked and rusted gate that stood before us,  with wisps of river fog threading its spikes like the mountain paths, remains in my mind now as the symbol  of my exile.

This is a great blend of future tense and present tense writing.  Wolfe tips us the nod that exciting things will happen to the narrator, Severian; he even tells us that Severian will be exiled.  So we ANTICIPATE much jeopardy to come.  But he also, at some length, describes a single image; a gate.  It’s locked, it’s rusted,  it has spikes; yup, we can that pretty vividly by now. But as well as evoking his exile, the gate (because of the fog wisping through it) reminds him of mountain paths; which tells us that Severian lives in an area with mountains, which have paths. So we’re seeing two things at once, through the deftest of similes.

Wolfe puts images in our heads; but he also foxes our brain with devious tense work.  This is a line by someone in the far future recollecting an image he saw many years in the past which gave him a presentiment of what happened to him in the not-so-far future.  Talk about time travel!  It’s dazzling prose, yet somehow it’s never confusing. (The STORY is confusing as it develops, not least because the narrator is horrifically unreliable, but moment by moment with Wolfe you always know what you’re seeing.)

For sheer intriguingness, it’s hard to beat these opening lines from Alastair Reynolds’ House of Suns:

    I was born in a house with a million rooms, built on a small airless world on the edge of an empire of light and commerce that the adults called the Golden Hour, for a reason I did not yet grasp.

Beautiful; rhythmed; magical, visual; and utterly gripping.

But if it’s take-no-shit pulp prose you’re looking for, try the first sentence of Lilith Saintcrow’s Working for the Devil:

    My working relationship with Lucifer began on a rainy Monday.

How can you not want to read more!

No one does it better than Stephen though, the King of gripping prose:

    Almost everyone thought the man and boy were father and son.  (‘Salem’s Lot).

But almost everyone is clearly wrong, or the sentence wouldn’t be structured like that.  So we ask: Why!!!!

Last up is Neil Gaiman, in my favourite of his books, 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 card tricks, and thought a lot about how much he loved his wife.

Wonderfully restrained evocative prose, with a laugh-out-loud  funny joke in the middle sentence.  After this great start, the book gets even better.

But isn’t it wonderful when a novel STARTS so well?

The T Party sesssion was an eye-opener for me in terms of the quality of the work, and the exemplary, detailed, utterly professional and extremely insightful level of critiquing.  This is a great Writers Group and I support it; and I hope to go along to one of their sessions at the George Pub in London sometime.

I also took part in a panel called Writing 101: How to Become a Writer, with Jaine Fenn and Stephen Deas. We all talked about our different experiences in becoming writers and tried to pass on tips and words of wisdom. Jaine’s break came after a meeting with a commissioining editor at an Eastercon; Stephen’s cunning plan was to self-publish a book which, darn it, turned out to be so good he got an agent and a publisher. My approach was many-fold, since I have ‘become’ a writer many times. First I was a TV and film writer (my strategy; become a script editor first). Then I was a radio writer – and this came about after I joined a writers’ group called Paines’ Plough. They produced a rehearsed reading of my 45 minute play GIN AND RUM – written in a day, in a writers’ group session – and it was seen by a radio producer who loved it and made it into a radio play. And the rest of my radio oeuevre (as they say) flowed from that.

And finally I became an SF novelist, and my strategy there was – John Jarrold! Best agent ever. I wrote a book, John read it, and sold it. And it strikes me that of all these different fields of writing, novel writing and SF writing is the easiest to ‘break into’ – because there are simply so many places to start, and there isn’t the hostility to newcomers that you get (I’m being utterly candid here) elsewhere. Self-publish; join a writers’ group; write a novel and send it to an agent; attend cons; keep writing. Of course you’ll only succeed if you’re good; but the doors really aren’t closed.

In fact what struck me forcibly at the Birmingham Eastercon is HOW MANY WRITERS THERE ARE.  We had a room full of them in Writing 101.  A blogger who I met last year (Adam Christopher) came up to me and told me he now has several book deals lined up – which I’m thrilled about.  Everyone I met in the bar was a writer or wanted to be a writer. And it’s clear the lines are well and truly blurred.  It’s not a case of fans going to cons to meet writers and wondering how it’s done; EVERYONE is doing it.

Occasionally I wonder – why?  I mean, why do people write? Why do I write? It’s not for the money (hollow laugh!) Although I’ve managed to make a living as a professional writer for, er, 21 years; and some writers of course make millions. (My first ever job was working for TV writer Murray Smith, the only Brit TV writer to earn a million pounds in a year – and that was a long time ago…)  But really, get a job as a dustman and if you average it out, you’ll probably do better financially, and you’ll have a lot less stress.

No, writing is a drug.  And I am a facilitator.  Later today I’m going to London Film School to work with an outstandingly talented group of international students – a Mexican, an American, a Brazilian and a Serb – on their feature film projects, now at first draft stage.  Last term I assessed four other writers on the same course – brimming with talent!  My boss at the London Film School Brian Dunnigan is also of course an accomplished writer – and I’m currently script editing his movie JOURNEY INTO SPACE (of which, more anon.)  I have many many friends who are writers who were formerly my students on other courses (at the National Film and Television School and Leeds Metropolitan University) or who were commissioned by me during my stints as a literary manager and development executive.

The wealth of talent is astonishing. But there is a problem. Yup, you’ve got it – too many writers!  All chasing the same jobs. So that’s why writing as a career really isn’t the shrewdest of choices – be a banker instead!  But it’s not a career of course, it’s a passion.  Writing is something you do because you HAVE to do it.

Why is that? Is it because we learn more about human nature through the act of writing about it? Duh! Writers spend all their time writing; it’s other folk who are out there living life, and learning about human nature!  Do we become wiser, kinder people through the act of writing? Duh! Spend an hour in the bar with a bunch of writers and you’ll soon learn what vain, avaricious, ungrateful oiks we all are.  Does writing make the world a better place? Duh!  Campaigning for world peace or inventing a cure for cancer or setting up a bank that doesn’t fleece its customers would all be ways to make the world a better place. We just write books.

I think I write for the same reason that I read; I love to get lost in different worlds.  And I love to CONNECT with readers  (or viewers, or listeners) in a way that touches their souls, with something I have created.

Books, let’s face it, are like children.  In the case of Peter F. Hamilton, big fat children who talk all the time (and none the worse for that!)   But unlike children, books can be shaped and created and moulded; you can be the god of the book you are writing.

Which is not the case with children. I have one, she’s fifteen years old, and she’s the best thing I’ve ever done.  But she’s not mine; she’s her own creature.  Children – let me be clear about this – are better than books. And living life is more important than writing about it.

And yet – must write that next chapter. I need to know how it comes out!

However, sigh, the world is an imperfect place.  Writers DO have to pitch.  Especially in the movie and television industries.  To be a screenwriter, you need three things: a calling card script, a thick skin, and a talent for pitching.

These thoughts have been in my mind recently because I’ve been taking place in an impressive venture run by my friend Hugo Heppell, Head of Production at Screen Yorkshire.  Hugo has been doing an amazing amount to encourage and develop new and not-so-new writers up in Yorkshire, and this year he has created three different schemes which came together last weekend in a weekend at Bradford University with literally dozens of participants.

The three schemes are First Sparks – an opportunity for writers to work with a professional script editor on developing a feature project to the point where it can work as a calling card script – or even as a producable script. I’ve been attached as script editor to 3 projects on this scheme – and all have proved to be a delight and a joy.

The second scheme is Triangle, which has been simmering away up there for some months and involves putting together writer/producer/director teams who develop a project with the advice of seasoned producers and then, ideally, MAKE THE MOVIE.

And the third scheme, in which I’ve been involved as “team coach”, is Pitch Factor. Yes, it’s a course in how to pitch!

Pitch Factor reached its culmination last weekend, in that 2 day workshop in the University of Bradford.  I chaired a morning panel about the dark arts of pitching, which featured producers Alex Usborne (of Picture Palace North), Caroline Cooper Charles (formerly of Warp Films, and now freelance), screenwriting guru and director Alby James, and Hugo himself.  And we talked a little about best and worst pitches. (I restrained the urge to describe my own worst pitches – it would have taken days to recount them all!)

Caroline spoke about the brilliant pitch she heard from the writer/director of Hush (Mark Tonderai) in which his vision and passion were so great that it was obvious this film WOULD get made.  And so it was, with Warp producing and  Hugo as executive producer.  Hugo then screened some amazing one minutes pitches from the Tribeca Film Festival.  Take a look at this – worst pitch ever? Surely it is! Though I wonder if this guy is like the contestants who deliberately give bad performances on X Factor to win a bet at the pub.  And Alex – magnificently – delivered a real live pitch, for a documentary set in Sheffield which was funded and produced on the basis of the pitch.

I was somewhat awed at Alex’s pitch and the Usborne Guide to Pitching.  Of course, he was mainly talking about how producers pitch – for writers it’s different, but you do have to do it.  I’ve pitched to the BBC, to ITV, at the AFM, at Cannes, to my wife (that one got me a co-habitation deal) and to any number of development executives over the years.  Does that make me an expert on pitching? Far from it.  I always come away from meetings thinking, ‘I wish I’d said X’, or done Y.  But the art of pitching – for writers – is to say enough to create interest in the project. After that – it’s the project itself (whether in script or treatment form) that has to do the work. But the pitch prepares the way.

Or, embarrassingly, not.

But what IS a pitch?  Is it a formal presentation with slides and photos? Or a casual conversation in which the project is described, but not in any detail? The answer is both, according to the context.  American companies tend to prefer more polished pitches; British companies (except for Working Title) often prefer the Pitch Informal.  But if you’re pitching with a director, then it does all get more intense. 

To be honest, I’ve only once in my life had to pitch a project with a director and a producer in the room. That was for my BBC Film The Many Lives of Albert Walker, in which I told the story to head honcho Jane Tranter and got us the gig.  “We’ll have that,’” she said; and that was the film greenlit…

Usually, for most of my career, it’s been just me, schmoozing a development person.  Since I’ve become a producer however , I’ve had to learn how to pitch more assertively and theatrically, sometimes with a coproducer in tow.  Once, I had to give an “elevator pitch” – that’s a very brief  pitch made  “as if” you’re pitching to a studio exec in the elevator between floors.  That was about 3 weeks ago; I elevator pitched my movie in exactly sixty seconds  to a room of 70 or more people; and I still bear the scar tissue.  Another time,  I had to pitch a movie in ten seconds to an American exec who was an hour late for our meeting.  Um, that pitch was crap.  And all too often, I’ve given very passionate pitches – complete with arm waving and spittle spraying – only to find that the development exec is staring at me with glazed eyes, having lost the plot round about scene 421.  Oh, er….

But the value of Pitch Factor for me is that it’s about encouraging writers to learn how to THINK ABOUT their project.  Because to pitch a story, you have to know a story.  You have to be able to describe the sort of story it is – thriller, romantic comedy, shoot ‘em up, whatever – and what the idea of the story is, in just a very words.  That’s “front-loading” the pitch, letting the listener in on the overall concept and tone.  ‘It’s a stylised action thriller in which characters karate kick while flying, set in a beautiful world that only exists in the characters’ imagination.’ (The Matrix’)  ‘It’s about a teenage girl who wants to take revenge for the death of her father, who hires an ornery, drunken, foul-mouthed lawman to help her get her man.’ (True Grit).  That’s the concept or premise of the movie – sometimes called the log line – and if you know the story well enough to summarise it that briefly, YOU KNOW THE STORY.

Pitching, in other words, is a form of oral storytelling.  The director of my noir thriller Inferno is always pitching it to his pals and colleagues, because he knows that telling the story out loud is a way of identifying the faults and cracks in the story. (‘Phil – this story has no darn ending!’)  And so for me, the four mentoring sessions I did before the Pitch Factor Weekend were all about the processs  of script editing via pitching. Because if I hear a story and it doesn’t work – that means the writer needs to do more work on the story.  It’s an almost infallible rule of thumb. (In fact, when I’m script editing or teaching, I very often ask writers to pitch the story verbally – even if I’ve already read their script.)

Anyway, back to the Bradford weekend.  The afternoon session on the Saturday was devoted to mentoring and coaching.  I heard my Pitch Factor participants re-pitch their projects, sharing the mentoring duties with the delightful Jeremy Dyson, a member of the League of Gentlemen and also the author of the hit West End show Ghost Stories, who studied screenwriting at the Northern Film School (where Hugo Heppell and I both worked as tutors.)  Jeremy relished his mentoring role, and seemed to thoroughly enjoy hearing the varied pitches – from thrillers to comedies to horrors and also including one movie idea about a one-eyed racing cat called Midge.

On the following day the Pitch Factor participants were treated to an exploration of the development and pitching process by Alby James, followed by the main event – a real live pitch to a panel of people with actual power, AND A CASH PRIZE.  The winner was the extremely nice Jessica Sinyard, who pitched a drama set in Australia with a powerful ecological theme.  The script is already written and has won a screenwriting award at an American festival; I wish Jessica well in her continuing career.

My One Palmer Rule for Pitching would be:  DON’T be yourself, but be a better, calmer version of yourself. Because at the end of the day, when a producer hears a writer’s pitch – he’s learning something about the writer as well as the project. Do you have passion? Energy? Sincerity? Do you really want to write this project? 

And the Second Palmer Rule of Pitching is: Have a good story. 

And the Third Palmer Rule of Pitching is: Don’t spit.  And if you do, aim the spittle over the producer’s head.

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.

Crime has been good to me over the years. One of my first and best jobs in television was as a script editor on the cult BBC series The Paradise Club, created by Murray Smith, starring Leslie Grantham and Don Henderson. It was a seedy London crime drama with shootings and heists and yakuza, set against a backdrop of deliciously improbable and larger than life characters. Murray was himself a larger than life character, who had served in the Foreign Legion and (so he claimed) had a close association with an SAS. As a member of a shooting club, Murray owned a gun, a formidable Sig Sauer which he once showed to me during a difficult script conference. He pointed it at me, smiled his evil smile, and even though I knew the gun was unloaded, I immediately modified my notes and told him what a great script it was – don’t change a word, Murray!!!

After Paradise Club I worked for years as a regular writer on The Bill. Later I worked as a script editor on crime dramas like McCallum and Taggart, and wrote thrillers and noir film scripts. I spent a large part of one year hanging out with the West London murder squad, attending post mortems and drinking with coppers. I once spent an evening with an armed robber who had recently been abducted at gunpoint and hustled into the boot of a car, before being dumped on to the street in Glasgow. (I never had the courage to ask him why.) Another armed robber gave me a guided tour of all the banks and sports arenas he had armed robbed; only later did it occur to me that I would be appearing on the CCTV cameras loitering outside banks with a convicted blagger. ‘Guv, who’s that sinister looking Welsh bloke? Put him on the surveillance list…’

Then one day in the Science Museum, standing under a massive space rocket which hung from the ceiling, a vast phallic remnant of the days of space exploration, I had the germ of an idea that eventually evolved into Debatable Space. My aim was to write in a genre I love, with as much passion and bravura as I could muster. I wanted it to big, bold, and crazy (and in all honesty, I would say that it is.)

In writing Debatable Space, I became aware of the many differences between writing drama and writing prose – there are more words! Many many more words. (Actually, that really is the main difference. That, and the absence of producers, script editors and heads of drama all adding their wise and tactful insights to the evolving text.) I also experienced the joy of knowing that in telling this particular story, money was no object. This is a book with numerous space battles and bizarre aliens and black holes and flaring suns. If it were made as drama, it would cost the equivalent of 2,000,000,000 episodes of The Bill…

I also relished the freedom I felt I had to switch genres and styles, whenever the characters felt like a change. It’s a book about slavery, and entrapment; but in writing it, I’ve never felt freer.

As well as being a book about evil, though, it’s also a book about joy. One of my most truly joyful experiences in cinema was seeing the trailer for Raiders of the Lost Ark as a young man. It evoked the wonder of childhood, impossible stories of derring-do, and had a retro nostalgic tang that was fabulously compelling.

Debatable Space is born of a similar impulse. With Raiders, Lucas and Spielberg set out to make a movie that was like the movies they watched as kids. And in similar fashion, I wanted to write a story that evokes the spirit of wonder and delight that I remembered from reading science fiction as a boy. I’d buy and read a half dozen novels a week, and when I didn’t have money I’d stand in W.H. Smith and read the books that way. I’d borrow SF novels from my Uncle Bob, who had shelves and shelves of them in his motor repair garage. And I’d lose myself in strange worlds, from A.E. Van Vogt to Asimov’s Foundation universe, to the Known Space of Larry Niven.

It was Niven’s vision of weird, witty aliens and a morally conflicted hero that has most haunted my memories. The cowardly puppeteers, the furry Kzinti, the space yachts propelled by the solar wind…that was my starting point. But in the process of evolution, Debatable Space became more than just a rip roaring space opera. It become a biography, and a political allegory (evil rich humans controlling an empire by means of remote control technology – hel-lo?) and an ensemble show about a bunch of misfits bonded by humour and a mission.

But does that mean I’m now a science fiction writer? Well yes I am, and proud to be so. But a large part of me is an unrepentant genre-buster, with a love of mixing it up as much as possible. I love Blade Runner – a science fiction film noir. Alien, of course, is an SF horror movie. And The Matrix is a science fiction allegory of Jesus. Bring it on…!

Genre-busting is one of the most lively strands in modern SF, too. Jon Courtenay Grimwood and Alastair Reynolds do wonderful things in the world of SF noir. The astonishing Neil Gaiman gets his books on the SF shelves but, so far as I can gauge, manages to be a genre all of his own. And Peter F. Hamilton, one of my favourite SF writers, seems to be a Victorian novelist writing triple decker novels with rich, bravura characters, who also has a penchant for aliens and techno-talk. (And his Gregor Mandel novels are of a course a fine example of the busted genre of SF detective novel, following in the tradition of Asimov’s Elijah Baley and R. Daneel Olivaw.)

Casablanca was once described as a thriller, a love story, a political drama and a musical all rolled into one. And for me, one of the joys of SF is the freedom it offers to play with style and genre with complete abandon. Any story can be told in the SF genre, in any style, with any degree of political seriousness, or not, and with no limits on the degree of intellectual seriousness at work. So long as it’s exciting, and extrapolative…it can be SF.

I worry, though, that after Debatable Space I will no longer be allowed to write in other genres without putting an extra ‘M’ in my name. But even so, after a writing career living on the proceeds of crime, it’s a liberation to be a ‘British SF author’.

To me, that’s an invitation to have some serious fun…