Imagine how tiresome it would have really been being part of the Algonquin Round Table, with Dorothy Parker and cronies swapping wisecracks over martinis. I’m betting most of those bon mots were carefully rehearsed, and they were drinking so much because they were nervous.

Which is one way in to a point about writing. Don’t overpolish it. We can tell when you’ve sweated over a supposedly offhand remark, spot it when you’re trying to hard to emulate Aaron Sorkin’s dialogue. This is a phenomenon that affected my prose more than my scripts, which is one of the reasons I rarely go near prose. I have only to read a few lines of my short story The Calico Kid to be reminded that I was taken with J.P. Donleavy at the time. And – give me points for lofty ambition at least – one of my stabs at a Doctor Who novel, of all things, stands self-consciously in Thomas Pynchon’s shadow.

The thing with influences is transcending them. And I don’t mean full-on Buddha style transcendence here; more, the way that a child effortlessly outgrows early fads and peers to develop its own personality. Sometimes that means rejecting early influences the way teenagers do when they start to abhor a previously cherished band under the influence of new friends. Only, the harder you try to reject something that meant a lot to you, the more its influence will show in ways that you can’t control.

Sometimes, you can spot the traces of other writers in things you see. A good few writers have tried to emulate Paul Abbott, not least the ones who script his series Shameless. Few have mastered that Xeroxing, and I’m not sure that’s the best way to approach the show anyway: the giveaway is typically the way they approach writing Frank, who for me is still only written convincingly by Abbott.

At other times, a dialogue tic makes its way round tv shows. I don’t know who first wrote ‘I love the bones of you’, which is a lovely heartfelt way of expressing that sentiment…but I am mightily sick of hearing it from the mouths of various characters on Coronation Street who have no business saying such a thing. At least play with the structure a little, you know? Anyone loving their partner’s bones could reasonably be assumed to be fond of their flesh, their eyes, their arse, and even their words. Think, people: it costs nothing and is worth everything.

The key, as ever, is to keep your attention on the outside world, and note the differences between it and the model of the world you contain in your head and reveal in your vocabulary and sentences. The more differences you note, the richer your internal world becomes, and the more you have to write about. Sounds like a good deal huh? Then stop reading this, and go and note down at least three phrases that capture your attention in the course of today. And tomorrow. And the day after. And…

Once upon a time, when I was wet behind the ears about scriptwriting and many other things, I had a friend. C was only my age, but seemed to have done pretty much everything, and could do it well. Her singing voice was amazing, she was a skilled pianist, could paint well, create decent electronic music, and she’d written a novel (albeit an unpublished one: I read and enjoyed it). To say she was an influence on me would be an understatement.

Anyway, she lived next door to a place where I was going for scriptwriting classes, and went to some herself. And I’d often end up at hers for a cuppa, where she would beguile me with tales of all the creative endeavours she’d been involved with. It would be fair to say that she was as much muse as friend.

I had been invited to work with some actors to write a short play, and threw myself into making that happen. It was a hectic and sometimes stressful time, everything new to me and the actors too, and the script unfinished as the rehearsals started, but we managed to pull together and do some performances of the piece.

The production happened and there were a few technical glitches that got me stressed, and I went over to C’s for guidance. She was kind and supportive, and in her role as mentor inspired me with the story of how she’d taken a play up to Edinburgh one year, even showing me a newspaper clipping about the show. I was impressed, and knowing that C could do it, carried on moving forward.

The play was called Probably A Robbery, and it was about a 24 hour garage that was home to a pirate radio station, where a robbery took place. Really, it was a homage to the culture of dole, dope, and DJs that I was part of at the time, and it was written for the people I knew who were part of that world, and not mainstream theatre goers, who I was much less concerned with.

Then I wrote a film treatment based on the play. Or at least something I thought would pass as a film treatment, my knowledge of such things being woeful at the time. And the treatment won a competition with 2000 entrants that, if you’ve read the ‘About Me’ bit here, you’ll know secured me a meeting with Working Title’s Tim Bevan.

I came back from London full of beans that night, and popped in to see C. Only, she wouldn’t let me in. Instead, I got a mouthful of abuse and was told to go away. That hurt, and it became clear when I met her again at a mutual friend’s place that she meant it, and also meant that she wanted nothing more to do with me again. I wondered what I’d done wrong, and tortured myself about the whole situation.

And then I saw another reference to the play that C had shown me the newspaper clipping about. And realised it hadn’t been written by her, but by someone with an almost identical name. And recalled some of the other things that C had alluded to which seemed perhaps unlikely. And realised, as other mutual friends started to, that C was a compulsive liar.

If you’ll go back to the first paragraph, you’ll see I say a number of things about C’s talents. All of them are true, because I had evidence of her doing them in one form or another. Other claims, about doing stand-up comedy or doing backing vocals for cultish bands, or studying at the electronic music centre IRCAM in Paris, remain in the realm of uncertainty.

At the time I didn’t join the dots between my success and C not wanting anything to do with me. In retrospect the connection is clear. She always had to be the brightest and bestest, and for an apprentice to surpass her in some way was intolerable. Though she may have been a messed-up bullshit artist, she was also prodigiously talented, and a real inspiration to me. And her lies helped me at a time when I needed guidance: even if she hadn’t actually taken a play up to Edinburgh, her story about doing so assisted me to find the strength to notch my own writing up a gear or two.

Some words give you more bang for your buck than others.  A character can ‘walk’ across a room.  But they can also ‘glide’, ‘creep’, or ’skulk’.  It’s like you get a free adjective with the verb.  Nouns can work in a similar way.  ‘Car’ gets across one broad concept, while ’sedan’, ‘dragster’ and ‘pick-up’ convey more precise nuances.

All of this is useful in the condensed world of the screenplay.  The opening paragraph of my script for the pilot episode of The Sharp End features a character who ‘prowls’ from his car to a house.  It says things about Leon, the character in question, captures something of his physicality and attitude that hopefully a director and actor would find useful in turning the script into something that can be filmed.

You can have a lot of fun with paired words too.  I’ve been conducting informal experiments on the reactions that people have to the nonsense phrase ‘monkey saloon’.  Typically, they tell me it conjures up images of a Wild West style honkytonk where monkeys hang from chandeliers, taking hats from cowboys and being fed bananas by the dancing girls. 

There’s a fine line between semantics, which is concerned with meaning, and semiotics, which is the study of signals.  And they overlap in contexts like this, when the richness and density of words and phrases is under consideration.  For instance, the use of the words ‘New Order’ captures both the band of that name, the orginal use of the term which the members of the band alluded to (either a reference to a Guardian headline about Kampuchea or a quote from Hitler’s ‘Mein Kampf’, depending who you listen to), and it implicitly refers to Joy Division, the band who New Order emerged from.  In turn, that further hooks the phrase to unsavoury WW2 episodes.  Oh, and it’s a term you can use in any situation where an old order of some kind has changed.

The same concept applies to images.  Picture a woman standing over a grille in the street, warm air from below blowing her skirts up, and you’ll inevitably bring to mind a picture of Marilyn Monroe in that precise pose.  Even if you came up with the image freshly, not having seen the classic photo, other people will assume that’s what you’re referencing.

All of which is to say, be aware of how much juice the words and images you use in your writing contain.  Use language that conveys as much information as possible in as few syllables as you can.  Feel free to plunder the image bank of popular culture that we’ve all grown up with, and pay homage to images that resonate for you.  Just do so with your own sense of style. 

Frank Zappa, who knew how to mutate the doo wop he loved into weird new forms, and who had a hell of a knack for musical satire using American themes, as well as a powerful imagination for new musical forms, had a wonderful term for the process of going from the basic notes you’d play to performing them in a distinctive way.  In his language, this was the business of ‘putting the eyebrows on’.  Maybe that brings Groucho Marx to mind, or the graffiti that people do in cartoons to paintings like the Mona Lisa, or even the Gallagher brothers’ shared forehead plumage.  But whichever it it, remember the key point here: without attitude, what impact will your writing ever have on anyone?

Pick a film, any film.  If the notion that there are only seven stories (or however many) in the world is correct, we should be able to reverse engineer its specifics and find its template. 

The film I’ve chosen is Guy X.  The story goes something like this:

An American soldier is transported to a military base in Greenland, where he is mistaken for the press office they’re expecting.  The fact that it’s the wrong guy entirely matters not a jot: military intelligence being what it is, our hero is declared press officer whether he likes it or not.

Problem being, there is pretty much zero news to report from the Greenland base.  There are swarms of midges, troops enacting rituals hundreds of miles away from any context where they might have meaning, and that’s pretty much it.  Except for this one cute woman who’s also on the base, and attracts our hero’s attention.  Only, she’s caught up in the world of the commander of this crazy outfit, and rank counts for a lot in set-ups like this.

Taking to his press officer role if only to give himself something to do, our hero starts to get suspicious about what’s going on at the base, and discovers a hidden hospital ward, full of seriously injured soldiers who were hurt at an earlier point of the commander’s inglorious career.  He has exploited the inane system he works in to do what he can to hide his mistake.

But hey, it all works out fine in the end.  Our hero blows the whistle on the commander’s sick exploits, and the story ends with the hero and his new chums flying away from Greenland under newly assumed identities, knowing that the clumsy system they’re part of will never discover what’s going on.

So, there are a few things going on here.  And if you want to reduce the film to its vital elements, you can use its blueprint to create a fairy story.  Like this:

A humble peasant is mistaken for a librarian by the king’s courtiers, and gets to live in the crazy world of the court.  Everything revolves around the assumption that the king is a good and wise man.  But the peasant, smitten by the king’s daughter, discovers the terrible truth about the monarch.  The king is overthrown (overthrone???)  and the peasant and princess head away on horseback using forged papers to start a new life of their own.

Simple, huh?  (And I hope it urges you to see Guy X, which I am very fond of, and was criminally ignored when it was briefly in the cinemas about three years back.)  Now let’s see if we can make things simpler still.  Hmm.  Do that, and the core story starts to look like The Emperor’s New Clothes, in contemporary American military drag, part of a film lineage including M*A*S*H, Dr Strangelove, and Three Kings. 

Maybe we haven’t gone back as far as deducing which of seven ur-stories is Guy X’s ancestor, but this reductionism thing can be taken too far.  What’s useful is looking at the structure and themes of a story, finding precedents for it in film and myth, and seeing how they can usefully shape the way you want to write your own screenplay.

We did the story of F last week.  Today, it’s the story of A. 

A is about half my age, and she started a conversation with me earlier this evening, when we were both making our ways home.  She’s a lapdancer by trade, and knowing a few other women who’ve worked in similar fields I was able to talk to her without going down tired and tested-to-destruction routes. 

I still haven’t much of a clue why A started talking to me, although over a coffee it turned out she’s having a lot of hassle at the moment, and wanted advice concerning her cousin, who is dating a guy she’s seen exchanging saliva with someone else.  Only, A and this guy already have a history of animosity, so is cousin going to believe her if she decides to spill the beans?  My advice, for what it’s worth, was not to get involved, on the basis that cousin has already found her man cheating on her once, and there’s no way A could easily communicate what’s going on without hassles of some sort or another.

Other stuff came up too, where I hope I was more valuable.  Particularly where helping A find some direction is concerned.  Right now, she knows things could be better, what with having a boyfriend in jail who is frankly a liability.  And she’s still grieving over the death of three friends in a car crash a couple of years ago.  More than anything, that seems to have left her at a loss about how to proceed.  And why not?  Learning that people can leave life so young, is it any surprise that this 20 year old has no particular sense of her own future?

Anyway, on the basis that it’s best to leave people better than when you found them, we chatted about this and that and, with the help of my trusty index cards (something I might go into in a future piece) came up with something that made some kind of sense to A.  It started kind of silly, with how she wanted her dog to lose weight, but we ended up in some genuinely useful places as a result, and - I believe - a sense that A can choose where she goes in life, rather than feeling she’s a pinball on a table that others control.  Maybe not: she’s got my email address now and may stop by here and give another take on the whole encounter.  Like, why is the big man telling stories about her?

So, what has this got to do with anything, and screenwriting in particular?  Well, if you’re tired of people asking you where you get your ideas from, you can point out that we’re surrounded by them 24/7 in the form of people, places, and incidents.  And that, with eyes and ears open and preconceptions to one side, as far as that’s possible, you might just come across situations that teach you more about the actual world than a chapter of Robert McKee ever could. 

Sure, McKee’s useful for what to do with turning those encounters into characters and scenes…but remember that the last gig i’m aware of McKee getting on an actual film was as an advisor on Disney’s series of Princess movies, which are as searing and authentic in their own ways as Pretty Woman was revealing about the realities of prostitution.  Oh, below the belt, I admit - but ask yourself this: would you rather hang out with lapdancers or men who imagine the adventures of princesses who inhabit realms that exist only to flog merchandise on behalf of The Mouse?

A few years ago I interviewed comics writer Brian Michael Bendis, one of the biggest names in the business these days with a whole string of Marvel titles to his name.  At the time he was an indie kid, known for his crime stories Jinx and Goldfish, and just launching Powers, a police procedural cum superhero title.  I asked him when things had started to turn around in his writing, and he was very clear about the difference that made the difference.  The turnabout started when he took to cycling.  Every day, he’d spend a few hours on his bike doing the shopping and a little socialising, and when he came back home he’d find that, somehow, all the writing problems he’d had before he left the house had disappeared.  Hmm.

Bendis isn’t the only creator to note the importance of exercise in their process.  Walking was central to Charle Darwin’s routine, and I can report that when I lived in the country for a few months and took a bracing constitutional every day, that I’d come back with all kinds of writing nuggets, albeit no contributions to evolutionary biology.  William Wordsworth was another rambling writer: the title is the giveaway in Composed Upon Westminster Bridge, and part of what Blake was getting up to in his walks in Lakelands (no, not the kitchenware shop) was seeking - and finding - inspiration.

All of which is to say that mind and body are indeed one, and that writing is something that happens neck down as well as shoulders up.  Start paying attention to these things and you might notice that you breathe differently when you’re coming up with ideas.  That people often look up and make big gestures when they’re verbally painting the grand scheme of things, and peer down as if at a stamp collection when it’s details that are under scrutiny.  That there are consistent patterns to where you look when you’re referring to particular ideas.  And so on.

All very well, but even if this is the case, how can it help?  This is something I’ve been discussing of late with award winning science fiction writer John Meaney - there’s a link to his website somewhere round here.  And in the course of our conversation, we’ve uncovered a lot of clues about how John comes up with his particular brand of ideas.  More to the point, there are ideas that we can teach to other people, that I’ve already introduced to others with success in fact, based on John’s strategy for coming up with concepts.  Ideas which draw in part from John’s experience of martial arts. 

Anyone who’s done aikido or learned other disciplines will tell you that the business of centering yourself on the body’s natural centre of gravity has applications not only in the dojo, but in boosting confidence for everyday life.  If you don’t believe me, ask Penry, the mild-mannered janitor in Hong Kong Phooey.  Only, he’s a  dog.  In a cartoon.  So maybe he’s not the best source.  But have I ever let you down?  Before you consider that question too deeply, let me continue the advertorial.  John Meaney and I have come up with some Cool Stuff we want to share with you about how you can come up with ideas the way he does.  They work.  And they’ll be featured here, soon.   

I was working with a filmmaker once, acting as a scriptdoctor on his new short. To make a point about his own project, I made a comparison with another short I knew he’d seen. Oops. He didn’t consider the one I brought up to be of relevance because it didn’t approach its subject matter, drug trafficking, with the socio-economic reality that this director felt it deserved. Hmm. Meanwhile, he never once stopped to consider the equivalent level of social reality in his psychological drama, which seemed to inhabit a dreamworld.

Interesting, the things we consider relevant when we compare films to reality. I’ve just looked at a short film script about burglars that’s quite playful. I pointed out in my notes to the filmmaker that he essentially has a choice to make. In one corner, the socially realistic burglary film, in which most burglaries are committed by drug addicts looking to sell your DVD player so they can get a fix. Alternatively, create a world of your own, where crime has its own context: Bugsy Malone and Ocean’s Eleven are two very different examples. Either route can produce a good film: make your choice and stick to it.

What I presume people mean by ‘realism’ is ‘presenting a similar worldview to my own (objectively correct) one’. Only, the term has been hijacked by people of a maudlin disposition, many of them academics and reviewers, who believe that some forms of reality are more real than others. Not for them the giddy delights of Amelie: no, life is best expressed in this worldview by the angsty Nordic cinema of Bergman, or in the socio-political paradigm of Ken Loach. Oh, the sacrifices such thinkers have made to whitter about film when their true calling was in social change or psychiatry.

The above is of course a generalisation. There are other commentators on film who care less about the tone of a movie than when it was made. I’m thinking here of those who still bemoan the collapse of seventies American cinema, which brought us Spielberg, Lucas, Scorsese, and Coppola among others. Only, the clue’s in the title: it’s not the seventies, so how about waking up to contemporary and even world cinema? Asia is producing some of the finest horror films you’ll see, and Korea in particular has become a hotbed for inventive thrillers.

For other people, how a film is made assumes significance above all other things. That’s clearly a concern for George Lucas, who didn’t even go near the second Star Wars trilogy until digital filmmaking had advanced to the point where it could tackle the effects he knew he’d need. And having done so, he went back and tinkered with the original trilogy to give the effects there an extra je ne sais quoi.

The Golden Age is whenever our favourite films were made. And that may well dovetail with other things going on in your life at that time anyway, outside the context of cinema. Which might explain Jonathan Ross’s enthusiasm for Stardust: hell, I’d be happy if my wife wrote an adaptation of a Neil Gaiman book with Robert de Niro in it, too.

There are people you meet who open your eyes to new possibilities with their way of looking at the world, and their experience of it. I met one such person last night, and these are just two of the stories she told me:

Andrew is a seven stone mathematician, who is not noted for his practical take on things. Which means he’s not ideally suited for a particular job that comes up, as a debt collector. Nevertheless, this is exactly what he ends up doing. And he turns up at the door of a well-known local conman, Ronnie.

Being a pretty capable conman, Ronnie persuades Andrew that he’d do well to move in with him: he needs someone with a brain to help him capitalise on an investment opportunity that’s come his way: $2 million of Uncle Sam’s money to put into pickling. And so, Andrew leaves behind the world of debt collection and becomes a pickler. Of garlic. He spends a considerable amount of his own money on equipment while waiting for the American money to turn up, before realising that it never will.

By this point, Ronnie is no longer on the scene. He’s apparently looking for production partners in the former Soviet Union. Only, when Andrew looks at what’s on the computers he’s paid for, it seems Ronnie is actually intent on finding himself a Russian bride. Leaving Andrew with nothing to show for their joint venture but a crate of jarred pickled garlic, and several thousand pounds of credit card debts.

Onto cheerier things. An aviary, in fact. Which is where our heroine is one summer day when she spots a couple of serious looking gents with balaclavas and what she only realises in retrospect are sawn-off shotguns. It’s when she sees the news that evening, which includes a description of her in the company of the two men, that things get really odd.

Calling the police to tell them what she knows, she’s brought in for questioning that lasts more than a week. It takes a while for it to dawn on her that this is because one of the cops fancies her, and is stringing things out to see if she’ll fall for him. She doesn’t. But she does hit it off with the young woman officer in charge of fingerprinting, who she gets hammered with one Friday afternoon when there’s not much happening.

And there’s more where this came from, believe me. Expect updates from the same source, a Schehezarade if ever I met one.

Some years ago, at a friend’s house, I watched a home video double bill of Se7en and Shawshank Redemption. Both fine films in their very different ways. And what’s inescapably noticeable when you see them back to back like that is the endings, both of which present Morgan Freeman carrying a box with mysterious contents.

Take a step back, and it’s like there’s a third Morgan Freeman, offering the protagonists of both films a choice of which box to open, like a particularly daemonic Noel Edmonds. ‘Now which will it be: your wife’s head, or a stack of cash? Choose carefully.’

That particular sequence could work well in what passes for much of contemporary horror, combining as it does the banal torture antics of Saw, Hostel, etc, and a game show twist that could pass for Lottery satire.

The best horror films often have a strong element of social comment. Torture porn doesn’t begin to qualify unless you buy the argument that it comments on what Americans are getting up to at Guantanamo Bay and with rendition flights etc, which frankly I don’t buy. The films reflect what’s happening there, perhaps, but there’s no sense of analysis or irony or distaste: it’s a mere two-dimensional presentation of people being eviscerated, no nuance at all.

Perhaps you need to monsters and mutants for metaphors to really come alive. There’s no shortage of motifs to play with if you’re looking at vampires, which connect Freud’s biggies of sex and death in one toothy package, and provide rich material about blood, sex, and AIDS. And I don’t know how many times Invasion of the Body Snatchers has been retold now, but it can be (I’m overlooking the lousy Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig version) a potent way of exploring themes of social conformity, emotional sterility, and more.

But the big daddies of the metaphorical horror film have to be zombies. Under George Romero’s sure guidance, zombie films have become some of the finest satires of our times. They’re a wonderful means of criticising capitalism, proof positive that death is no obstacle to continued consumption. They’re a shambling version of what the Buddhists call hungry ghosts: creatures with immense appetites and stomachs the size of blimps, but with mere pinprick-sized mouths. That’s what they’re attempting to do when they push shopping trolleys round supermarkets in their early appearance. Later, in Land of the Dead, they take on another aspect: migrant workers beating at the walls of the gated communities of the privileged. I haven’t yet seen Diaries of the Dead but I’m betting there’s plenty of room for comment on the modern media with people attempting to make a zombie film while actual zombies attack them. Media eats itself as surely as a zombie snacking on your kneecap.

Given the opportunity, I’d love to do a zombie film that taps into tabloid fears about East European migration. The story would start off with urban rumours and scare stories, but people would soon adjust to the walking dead in their midst. After all, cheap labour is cheap labour, and the food issue could be dealt with by giving the zombies ASBO teens to devour, proving once again that in a good horror film, humans are the monsters.