So, let’s test a creativity model. Specifically, something known as the SCAMPER grid, which is an evolution of the work of Osborn, who I referred to on a previous occasion. Basically, the idea is to transform whatever your input is by putting it through a process…specifically one that begins with one of the seven letters in the word SCAMPER. Simple, huh?

As our raw material, let’s take last night’s episode of The Fixer. In it, our protagonists were charged with protecting Jude, a drug dealer who doubles as a racist murderer. Only, one of them, wideboy Calum, ended up lamping the thug with an iron when Jude was abusive towards him, and knocked him dead. Whoops. The rest of the episode was spent dealing with the consequences of this mishap, and did so skilfully with some artfully plotted and well scripted twists. For no particular reason, I’m attracted to R, and that can stand for a number of things. The one that I like the sound of is Reverse.

Hmm, where can we take that? Well, how about we reverse the relationship of murderer and victim. That way, a new tale begins to emerge. Our protagonist becomes Jude…only, he ends up killing one of his hosts. Immediately, we’re into interesting territory here. And even though the guy is a racist drug dealing psychopath, there’s the possibility of creating something like empathy for him. How can we increase that connection?

Well, maybe he’s taken this path in life because Jude also has mental health problems – an inability to understand other people and the world combined with a hair-trigger temper helps explain how he killed someone in the first place. And if we have Calum taunting Jude over something he’s sensitive about, that’ll explain how he comes to kill him. At which point a second Reversal comes into play – in the episode, Calum killed Jude in response to being taunted about the only photo Calum has of himself with his mother. We can do something similar – Calum teases Jude about his family, all of them crims, and that causes him to flip and kill Calum.

OK, I’m liking the sound of this. Violent psycho Jude is put under protection for political reasons, and in the process ends up killing one of his protectors. Only, the reason he’s under protection in the first place is because he’s a pawn in a bigger game. And now he’s pissed off the people who were looking after him as well as whoever he’d annoyed enough to need protection in the first place.

Anyway, you can see where this is heading: there’s plenty of meat here for a drama inspired by last night’s episode of The Fixer, but that can work in its own right – and title. All from using the process R for Reverse from the SCAMPER grid. There are lots of possibilities for what the other letters can stand for, and here are some to get you started: Substitute, Combine, Adapt, Modify, Put To Another Use, and Eliminate. But that just makes a column: it becomes a grid when there are several possibilities for each letter. And since this is about creativity, I’ll leave it to you to come up with some of your own.

What’s unsaid can say an awful lot. In Mad Men last night, protagonist Don Draper spent some of the time with a potential lover, who runs a family department store. The intimacy between them comes when they go outside and see some dogs there. The store’s dogs have been an important part of her life since she was a girl, and she reveals a softer side to herself when she’s around them. They kiss.

Later, Don is being the co-host of his daughter’s birthday party, and his wife shoos him off from speaking to a single mother who the other women in the neighbourhood find threatening. Don skedaddles away, supposedly to pick up a birthday cake. Instead, he returns much later – with a pet dog for his daughter. Without a word being said, we know where he got that dog. And more importantly we know who he saw to get it. And both of these things also tell us how Don is feeling about his marriage.

The principle of omission is an important one. What could Bill Murray possibly say to Scarlett Johansson in Lost in Translation that would be more powerful than what he whispers in her ear unheard by the audience? Where would the strength of Dead Man’s Shoes be if we knew the truth about Paddy Considine’s brother any earlier in the story?

In linguistic terms, omission is to do with putting the relevant material you want the audience to deduce within the deep structure of the story, rather than on its surface. Huh? Look at the deep structure as what’s under the water, and the surface as the iceberg: that which is explicated. For instance, if someone in a story is revealed to have a receipt for bullets in their jacket pocket, it’s reasonable to assume they also possess a gun. The connection is made in the mind of the audience, which is a far more powerful place for it to happen than in dialogue.

Some friends of mine were renting a flat. I visited them, and there was a substantial hole in the living room ceiling. During the time I was there, I didn’t once mention the hole, and just before I left one of my hosts was curious about why not. I pointed out that they were presumably fully aware of the gap above their heads and the problems it caused, and felt they’d bring it up if they really wanted to talk about something that was a possible cause of tension. Since I didn’t want them to feel bad, I saw no reason to draw their attention to a subject that their other visitors had apparently been more than voluble about.

Life is full of loose ends, and I like stories that have some about for you to ponder when the story is technically over. Robert Anton Wilson’s Illuminatus trilogy (co-written with Robert Shea) is littered with story fragments that haunt you long after you’ve read the books. And the beauty of this is that you’ll seek closure for those issues in the real world, which is heading towards what people mean when they say good art can change you.

Cut to another extract from the interview I conducted with Cerebus creators Dave Sim and Gerhard:

Sim I mean, that was the end of the Illuminatus trilogy - Wilson flat out tells you that you’ve been changed by this book, and something inside your head just rears back from that and goes ‘No I haven’t!’, and at the same time there’s another part right back there behind him going ‘No, we have - let’s all admit to it.’ It’s the same thing…the story about the cop phoning. I wasn’t there.

Gerhard Dave was at a convention or something and I get a call from a police officer in a neighbouring city. He let me know right off the bat that this wasn’t an official police investigation but a friend of his, his son was reading this ‘mind-altering literature’, and he wanted to know what this was all about. And I thought ‘Fuck, isn’t this what literature is supposed to do, alter your mind?’.

Fuck indeed.

Warren Ellis is a writer I have mixed feelings about. On a good day, he can turn a sharp concept into an elegantly written comic, odds are featuring a protagonist who has a more than passing familiarity with one or more countercultures, and deals with the ills of the world partly through sharp dialogue expressing a cynical cosmology. On the other hand…well, just take a look at how much Ellis writes, and tell me how he can possibly hope to maintain consistent quality.

No surprise then, that I’m pretty fussy when it comes to investing in Ellis. I thoroughly enjoyed most of Global Frequency, a 12 issue series that ended up giving rise to a stillborn tv pilot, and have picked up a few other titles over time, particularly enjoying Frank Ironwine, his one-off collaboration with artist Carla Speed McNeil. Frank Ironwine was Ellis’s indie comic riff on the tv detective show, and he seemed to enjoy writing it more than some of the projects he takes on for Marvel.

Three years ago, Ellis returned to the world of the detective in his series Fell, created in a new format for Image. The slimline format has fewer story pages than regular comics (making up for that deficiency with what Ellis calls ‘backmatter’, which serves the function of DVD extras) and is a dollar cheaper, the idea being to give readers a good slab of pop culture for a low entry fee. Also, the stories are self-contained, an approach which usefully contrasts with the nonsensical degree to which Marvel and DC comics need readers to have an exhaustive knowledge of not only the comic they’ve just bought, but maybe half a dozen or so which overlap with it.

Detective protagonist Richard Fell has newly been transferred to Snowtown from across the bridge, where a more civilised existence can be led. Here in Snowtown, smog and murder are the order of the day, and both are ably depicted in the art of Ben Templesmith. Sketchy, vague in detail but clear in feel, Templesmith’s art perfectly captures the confused and messy sense of life in this urban sprawl, and confirms once again Ellis’s flair for bringing out his artists’ strengths.

Fell is a sharp cookie, and needs his smarts to get by in Snowtown. Even friendly faces can mask danger: his developing relationship with the young woman who tends the local bar leads to her branding him on the neck. Their gradual intimacy is skilfully depicted, each issue moving Richard and Mayko’s story forward while concentrating on another dismal crime: their first date turns into a case that Mayko assists Richard to investigate.

The crimes themselves are drawn from less savoury headlines across the world, and if you’re familiar with Ellis’s online presence you’ll have a good idea of what to expect: this is a man who turns his ongoing research into a promotional exercise. What he does with that research is what matters, and in Fell he’s created a world in which his seedy fascinations make some kind of sense. Besides, the plotting is always good for a few surprises, and the dialogue is lean and distinctive.

What Ellis has done in Fell is to create a comic that can be easily appreciated by fans of detective fiction in prose or screen form. If you liked Se7en, if you’ve enjoyed Joseph Wambaugh, if you’re into Homicide, then this is a comic you can relate to. I tend not to read individual issues, so this review is based on Feral City, the first volume in the series, containing the first eight comics but none of the backmatter.

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.

What obstacles can you put between your hero and their goal? That’s the fundamental question that drives most drama, and is one that I’m considering with a smile at the moment having faced and surmounted some ridiculous obstacles today. Thankfully I’m on top of my own dramas, and very much on course for a particular plan of action that’s important to me…and it feels good knowing that I’m going to get what I want having had to fight for it.

The fact that my own Hero’s Journey in this context involves credit cards, PayPal, phone calls to international call centres ten minutes before they close and putting a cheque in the post is neither here nor there: what matters is the sense of victory over forces that could have defeated me. The context is monetary (though the goal is more laudatory); the process is mythic.

Interesting, how we sometimes stray into archetypal episodes in the course of our own lives. Job interviews, dates, encounters with doctors; all can catapult us into a world where the stakes are suddenly high, and we get to be hero, if only on the minor stage of our own life, and possibly be perceived as such by those who see and understand what we’re going through. That’s the option anyway: the alternative is to slink away, mumbling about not really wanting the opportunity anyway, and adding another layer of bitterness to the carapace that keeps the world at bay.

Which brings us to the difference between writers and actors, in a funny kind of way. At the pitching event I went to at De Montfort University and wrote about the other day, the writers were clearly identifiable for their plumage. All together as we were, I couldn’t help noticing that we occupied maybe 30 degrees of the colour wheel’s 360. Specifically, the part that went from muddy brown to khaki green. And believe me, it’s not because any of us were making fashion statements. Far from it.

Contrast with some of the actors I’ve worked with, who are gaudy by comparison: and why not, in a world where they need to stand out as individuals to get parts? I’ve written about this before, but it’s an example that bears repeating: I once spent a weekend working with writers and actors. One day I lunched with the former, the second with the latter. The differences were fascinating: the writers brought their sandwiches and apples along, and munched them in relative silence. The actors flourished salmon rissoles and home made guacamole and chunks of farmhouse cheese, sharing it all between them.

Some people hear that story and feel sorry for the writers, or wince at the behaviour of the actors. It’s a good test of whether you’re more of an introvert or an extravert, perhaps. But I think it goes deeper than that. Many writers want their work to speak for them, and certainly don’t want to have much to do with speaking on its behalf – hence the difficulty some writers have with pitching, which they see as being beneath them. By contrast, actors are used to having to pitch themselves, every time they do an audition. A writer’s rejection comes in the form of a standard letter, more often than not: easy to read and digest alone, without anyone to share its impact. An actor is typically turned down there and then, after they’ve done their piece, and deals with it in the full glare of the activity around the audition.

My own conclusion about all this is that a good professional attitude requires the ability to embrace either end of the spectrum. Writers need to be able to present themselves and their wares in the best light to the people they interact with. Actors could benefit from time to reflect on rejection and learn from it, rather than that process itself becoming a performance.

There’s something to be said here too about the necessary mix of association into and dissociation from different aspects of our lives, and how learning to do both in ways that work for us can make any part of who we are and what we’ve done into a resource for the stories we tell, the performances we give. But that’s something for another more ruminative piece, perhaps when I get back from a couple of days during which I may well not have access to a computer. Back at the weekend, for sure.

So, let’s make that two recent shows with sociopaths as protagonists. First, we had Dexter, with a serial killer trying to pass as regular human. And now we have John Mercer, who’s killed his aunt and uncle. But don’t worry, he did it with good intent because they were abusing his sister. Welcome to the morally confused world of The Fixer.

That moral confusion goes all the way round in ITV’s new Monday night thriller series. John is sprung from jail early to do a hit on behalf of a shady ex senior cop who needs someone to do wetwork as part of his anti-crime initiative. He’s partnered in this endeavour by Calum, his cheery chavvy former cellmate, who can get you anything from dodgy computer games to East European firearms. Oh, and Rose, who was there mainly to provide someone for John to sleep with when he thought he was going to escape his new employers, mostly to show how amoral this little crew is. Their leader is an older guy called Lenny who reminded me a bit of Gordon Jackson, and that’s when all this fell into place for me: The Fixer is a noughties version of The Professionals.

Way back when, The Professionals ran with the police, and did manly things together to fight crime. Only, we’re living in a different world now. At any rate, the Daily Mail would have us believe that’s the case. And The Fixer is proof positive of my theory that one way to develop primetime ITV drama is to pretend that the Mail is true, and write programmes that respond to its agenda. Hence, last night, we had a checklist of Mail reader fascinations. Crime getting out of hand so the police can’t control it. Check. East European migrants. Check. The need for capital punishment, in the form of gun squads controlled by rogue senior cops. Hmm, not sure that’s Mail editorial yet, but check anyway. Young men in need of ASBOs to control them. Check. A soupcon of child abuse. Check. Women behaving like ladettes. Check.

Thankfully, the element of formula is only there on second investigation. When you’re actually watching it, The Fixer feels fresh because it’s very well written, and astutely cast. The dialogue in particular is a delight, particularly the banter from wideboy Calum, who can’t understand why John isn’t pleased to be out of choky and behaving like a member of a South American death squad. There was a lovely exchange to establish that John is a bright guy, which actually managed to touch on Schrodinger’s Cat without making me cringe, since it’s usually a case of the writer showing off and not understanding it. Here, it actually worked, and sounded in character, and that deserves a prize of some kind.

The story hit all the beats you’d expect it to in the circumstances. After doing his hit, on a nasty piece of work who thinks he’s above the law but didn’t bank on being assassinated in a toilet, John tries to get out of the situation he’s in. He makes a bolt for it, via sleeping with Rose and nicking her money and bank card, and thinks he’s got away with it, until it transpires that Rose is working for Lenny too, who was three moves ahead the whole time. Back to square one, and episode two. I’ll be watching again, because if the scripts are as refreshing as this first one was, The Fixer is shaping up to be a contender for ITV’s best new thriller for a while, with enough lethal vigilante action to keep Mail readers happy, and sufficient moral ambiguity and smart dialogue for those of us who like to think we’re above summary justice.

Characterisation, in a nutshell, is all about the revelation of character through action. Just what we’re interested in as screenwriters in others words; visual storytelling. The question is, how to go about it. And for answers, I’d suggest that consulting your own experience of how people make themselves known to you is a good starting point.

For instance, a few years ago I had the misfortune to be involved with a dodgy businessman. If he’d been an outright conman I’d have spotted it a lot earlier, but he was more of a Walter Mitty than anything; a fantasist with dreams of being a successful entrepreneur. Even at the time, there was one visual clue as to his true nature: the background image on the screen of his laptop was an expensive motor of some kind. Not being conversant in carspeak, I couldn’t tell you what, but it was a nakedly aspirational image that said a lot about how shallow he was.

Another Mittyish character from my commercial dealings was more touching, and wasn’t any kind of ripoff merchant. His visually fascinating flourish was that he actually lived in the business unit he rented on an industrial estate, one of the rooms being reserved as his bedroom. That was quite sweet really, as was the fact that he named the unit after his son, whose death had triggered him to leave the stable banking world he’d been part of and seek a new life as a business guru. Mittyish – but endearing. If I was writing something drawn from him, I’d have Mel Smith in mind.

Then there are moments we witness from people we may never see again, but point to interesting personality facets. Steve Whitaker, the comic artist whose death I recorded recently on this blog, shared one with me that if he never got round to using it, I’d like to one day. He’d been in a supermarket, and the person in front of him had just two or three items to pay for. But they put them a foot away from the food of the person in front, and left another foot before placing the bar marking out the next customer’s shopping. A lovely visual shorthand for ‘I need my space’.

Years ago, on my way to an anti-racist rally in London, one participant stood out on the coach we were on. He was dotted all over with badges, each allying him with another cause, whether environmental, international, trade union, or artistic. The sheer range, combined with the way he’d got his packed lunch ready, and his awkward way of dressing, painted a picture of a man whose whole life was about causes, but for whom the causes were in all likelihood a means of connecting with other people. Each of the badges was his way of saying hello to a potential friend.

All of those examples are easily conveyed visually. One of my favourites would be trickier on that front, but would I believe work over the course of a story. This was drawn from a woman I knew who was a tremendously talented artist, writer, and musician, but who never seemed to get anywhere with all that potential. As I got to know her well, it seemed every time an opportunity came up she’d experience a real or imagined illness that stopped her from having to deal with it. And what seemed to sum her up was a short film she wanted to make…and of course never did. Its title? ‘Waiting For A Miracle (And Nothing Ever Happens)’. A precise declaration of her stance on life at that time…I hope she’s moved on and managed to make things happen since, as her talent is unquestionable. Interesting, and inevitable, that our choices say so much about us.

So, I spent yesterday over at De Montfort University at a pitching event arranged by regional screen agency EM Media. Quite why Britain’s most landlocked university features tv ads with dolphins I still don’t know, but it’s home to one of the UK’s various screenwriting MA courses, and I’ve been pretty impressed with the calibre of its graduates, some of whom have gone on to establish careers in television.

The event was run along the lines of a speed dating session, and if I were as successful in that arena as I was yesterday I’d have a lovelife so busy I’d be doing more snogging than blogging, that’s for sure. But in both fields it’s quality and not quantity that matters, so how did it work from that perspective?

I had seven minutes each with the representatives of various film, tv, animation and corporate sector outfits. We’d been briefed to prepare one pitch for the occasion, but with an opportunity like that, naturally I tailored what I was pitching to suit the person I was talking to. So, the guy who did animation for tv got to hear about my science fiction series for people who’d love Buffy. The guy wanting films in the under £2m bracket was told about Trouble Magnet, an emo rite of passage story that combines elements of Juno and Billy Elliot. Someone else was pitched a psychological thriller based around a cop in a mental hospital. And there was even someone there who did want to talk about the project that they’d read about beforehand, my tv drama serial set in the world of drugs work.

The ‘trick’ to all of this, if interacting with human beings can be called a trick, is to identify what the person I was pitching to was about. No point trying to flog dark post-watershed tv to someone interested in light comedy films, after all. Which seems easy enough, and requires two things. First, the ability to assess where someone’s coming from fairly quickly. Second, a varied portfolio of projects so you really can match a project to the person you’re pitching to.

Overall then, I was very happy with the day, and people I pitched to…which also included a fellow pitcher, since he’s looking to get into making digital animated features with his partner in crime, and it so happens that they’re looking for someone to develop stories with. And most of the people I was pitching to seemed to be credible people, with one exception: I was concerned that in one case I was dealing with someone I wouldn’t feel comfortable with walking into a room on my behalf to secure funding for a feature film, say, because I was a lot more confident than they were. But maybe they’re someone who gets all resourceful when placed in a room full of financiers, so I gave them the benefit of the doubt. Besides, if things don’t work out, I lose nothing anyway.

It surprises me when people get nervous around pitching. Some people expressed uncertainty about themselves, or were unduly suspicious of the people we were pitching to. All wasted energy, in my eyes. If you can’t be confident and enthusiastic when you’re talking about something that you’re passionate about, when on earth will you be? And if you can’t communicate your belief in your creative projects, how is anyone else supposed to share that belief and use it to fuel the long process of getting a concept funded and developed?

How do you begin to describe Dave Sim, and Cerebus, the comic that he put out 300 monthly issues of? A middling sword and sorcery parody when it started, within a year or so Cerebus started to find its feet and became a hugely accomplished and ambitious tale taking in politics, religion, relationships and gender.

Cerebus is an amazing, frustrating, complex piece of work, sometimes magnificent, other times wildly self-absorbed. For the first 200 issues at least though, it was following a clear course, and its sometimes obscure subsequent waywardness can be forgiven: no one else has tackled something as ambitious as Cerebus in the world of comics, at least in terms of scope, and perhaps they never will.

Sim’s lettering portrays personality beautifully, and after a while he was joined by collaborator Gerhard, whose input ensured that the comic’s backgrounds were as striking as Sim’s rapidly improving character work. And if that weren’t enough, Cerebus became the focal point of the small press revolution, inspiring countless people to self-publish their own comics. Many failed, but those that survived helped redefine what comics were capable of. Bone, Strangers in Paradise, Kane, A Distant Soil, Bacchus: all undeniably influenced by the success of Cerebus and its creator.

I interviewed Sim and Gerhard in 1993, and found them hospitable, intelligent, and fascinating company. This was before Sim’s infamous anti-woman outburst in issue 186 of his comic, and it may be that the interview would have taken a different tack had it been published before we met. That said, it’s arguable that his views have been stereotyped by people eager to shout misogyny but silent when it comes to putting them in the context of Sim’s historic mental health problems (I say this based on experience of working with people with mental health issues). It’s also the case that his beliefs didn’t get in the way of Sim creating some of the most compelling and three-dimensional female characters to be found on the comics page.

One issue of particular concern was the balance of left and right brain, of the linear and non-linear, in creating a project as vast as Cerebus. I asked what the blend of planning and spontaneity was in the comic:

Sim It’s a nice mix. As Neil Gaiman put it, it’s as if you’re building a bridge, but you’re not building a bridge sequentially, the way you have to do it in the physical world. The moment you start building it on this side, it starts growing from the other side. And you just start trying to predict where all the curlicues and whatnot are going to be, and all of a sudden one of them shows up, and you’ve got a chunk of the bridge about 30 feet out in mid-air that’s about 15 feet higher than you thought it was supposed to be.

AR And you don’t know how the hell it’s going to work.

Sim You don’t let that trouble you. You just start building the rest of it, and eventually some dramatic curve comes in and you go ‘Oh, alright, it’s going to rise up in some way and hook up with this side. And I can see now looking at all this stuff that’s getting built on the other side in my unconscious mind that yeah, this could be quite attractive when it’s done. You know, it could be quite symmetrical.’

Which is as good an answer as you’re likely to get, and accords with my own experience of planning and writing scripts. However much you plan them – and you need to if you’re going to feasibly bring in a workable story within however many pages you’re working to – there are and always will be elements that find a place in the script without you having intended them to be there. And quite often they’re the ones that make the whole thing shine. But that magic doesn’t happen without planning: you have to prepare the ground carefully before something unexpected will grow from it, fly over it, or tapdance in the centre of it all.

If you’d like a copy of the interview I did with Sim and Gerhard, please get in touch: it runs to 20 pages and hasn’t been published. And keep an eye out for Judenhass, Sim’s forthcoming solo story about the Jewish Holocaust, which advance reports are saying is very good indeed: see www.judenhass.com. There’s also Glamourpuss, just starting, an ongoing series that’s a curious hybrid of homage to womens’ fashion and photorealistic cartooning: www.glamourpusscomic.com.

We’ve been talking about screenwriting long enough.  Let’s see how it’s done, and who better to show us than Diablo Cody, who won the Best Original Screenplay Oscar for Juno.  Here’s the opening paragraph of that script:

JUNO MacGUFF stands on a placid street in a nondescript subdivision, facing the curb.  It’s FALL.  Juno is sixteen years old, an artfully bedraggled burnout kid.  She winces and shields her eyes from the glare of the sun.  The object of her rapt attention is a battered living room set, abandoned curbside, by its former owners.  There is a fetid-looking leather recliner, a chrome-edged coffee table, and a tasteless latchhooked rug featuring a roaring tiger. 

JUNO V.O.

It started with a chair.

So, what do we know?  A key aspect of screenwriting is epistemology, which is a fancy way of saying ‘how do you know what you know?’.  And in screenwriting terms, that’s about presenting multi-sensory clues and cues in the written text that will be used by the director and others to construct the world of the film as seen by the audience.  The more thought goes into it upfront on the writer’s part, the richer experience the viewer has.

Well, for one thing, this opening sets out a world – that of the suburbs – and in one simple low-budget image presents something that stands out from that world.  Furniture is ‘meant’ to be inside, so seeing this acutely depicted range of interior items at the roadside is slightly unsettling.  All the furniture is from another time, perhaps within the memory of many of the people seeing the film, but notably from a world before that of Juno and her peers.  The roaring tiger is particularly intriguing: a wild animal captured in a cheesy rug, the owner probably thinking it expressed something of themselves. 

As for our heroine, Juno MacGuff is a wonderful name that trips off the tongue with ease, and suggests to me that the writer enjoys the sound of words – always a good thing.  She lives in the anonymous suburbs, but is far from anonymous herself.  No, she’s an ‘artfully bedraggled burnout kid’.  One of the things I like here is that there are no specific wardrobe suggestions: we’re looking deeper than that, into Juno’s character. 

‘Artfully bedraggled’ says Juno is conscious about the way she looks, as almost any teenager is.  But she’s making a choice not to run with the herd, and does so with her own sense of style.  That tells us a lot.  As for ‘burnout’, there are two routes to go down I suspect.  Juno is either burnt out by experience of school – a kid who’s smart and doesn’t fit in.  Or she’s emotionally burnt out by whatever family experiences she’s had so far, maybe including divorce and death by her age.  More than likely, the burnout comes from a combination of school and home.

Not bad for a first paragraph, huh?  Especially when it’s rounded off by a voiceover from the protagonist that serves as a hook to lead our attention into the substance of the film.  ‘It started with a chair’ is a fairly gnomic utterance, but it captures the attention, and that’s all we could possibly hope for so early on.