Some people talk about creativity as if ideas just pop up for them fully formed, and sometimes that’s how it can seem. For me, I quite often get the essence of a concept in one go, then need to work at it by applying bum to seat and fingers to keyboard to map out and structure what I’ve come up with. It makes sense that something as substantial and unwieldy as a screenplay needs a good chunk of time to pull into fruition (but if I believe screenplays to be substantial and unwieldy, is that any wonder..?).

But it’s not like that for everyone. Paul Andrew Williams, who wrote and directed the multiple award winning London to Brighton, wrote the whole script in just a few days, for instance. Veteran scriptwriter Tony McHale recounts tales of how he has done some of his best scripts for the BBC’s flagship 50 minute shows in three days, getting a buzz from the need to crack it first time and without the usual multiple rewrite phase to go through.

Part of the issue is around knowing pretty much where you’re going, and approximately how to get there, and then just launching into it with abandon. That’s something I’ve done on some projects, including ones featured on this site. Breaking In, for instance, was in rehearsal before the final third was written, and it wasn’t until I’d done a whacked out course that got my brain jumping through hoops in new ways that I wrote the last chunk that pulled it all together. A Ghost in the Garage was a question of running with a conceit – the inherent nonsense of portraying a family’s holiday slideshow on radio – and then coming up with stuff that made the most of it. And the Hellblazer script was my second attempt at a full comic script, nailed in a week with not much to go on beyond the idea of playing with the colours on the page and the relationship between protagonist John Constantine and an old lady inspired by Michael Moorcock’s character Mrs Cornelius.

So, going with it can work just fine. But…that assumes a lot of tacit knowledge on the writer’s part if you’re going to get anywhere. Knowledge acquired by listening to tall tales told by my father, a natural storyteller; years of reading books and comics; a lifetime of watching films and television; the influence of some brilliant English teachers; and the bones of training in writing comics from the London Cartoon Centre, and in scripting plays from Nottingham’s Sandfield Centre.

In other words, before putting pen to paper to tackle a script, I’d got a wealth of experience to draw on, and was ready to take on projects of my own scale and choosing. Contrast that gentle approach with National Novel Writers’ Month as an exercise, which cajoles people into knocking out 50,000 words of prose over November. That can be entirely too rude an awakening for many people, who all of a sudden realise the difference between having a good idea and creating it so it has structure, themes, characters, plot and the rest. Which is why so few complete their pieces, many of them despondent at the product of their labours. Sure, it’s a learning curve: but why start out from the pits of Le Mans first time at the wheel when you can just cycle to the shops to get used to being on the road?

We’ve got a wealth of tacit knowledge at our disposal. Cultivating it is about applying appropriate challenges and frameworks to operate in, to develop different facets of your skillbase, and acquire your own personal and maybe unspoken rules of thumb for dealing with issues such as characterisation, scene transitions, and dialogue. ‘Show don’t tell’ is one useful adage that needs to become second nature to be effective. ‘Start the scene late and get out early’ another. And so on: these are shorthand pearls that, with relevant practical experience, become a living part of the writer’s approach to craft.

The issue is turning these nuggets into strategies that writers will actually practice, rather than treat them as clichés that don’t apply to them because they’re too creative for that stuff. And the trick, based on training I’ve experienced which I’ve used as a model for my scriptwriting classes, is to give people an experience in exercise form, discuss other contexts in which the experience crops up, and codify it as a strategy so that it can be remembered and utilised in the future when it’s needed. And the more engrained those learnings become, the more quickly you’ll be able to apply them in the context of your own writing – or choose not to apply them when another strategy will prove more useful.