Generally speaking, I agree with the adage that the best person to compare yourself with is yourself at another time. That way you can see progress, how you’ve developed as a writer or in other ways. Sometimes though, it’s useful to have a peek at who else is out there, and see who they’re doing. At the very least, it’s useful to have some idea of what professional benchmarks exist for the field you’re in; how many script pages per day will support you, how long it takes to put a decent treatment together, and so on.

All I can say is, I’m very glad I’m a writer and not a comic artist. I’m reading Kirby: King of Comics at the moment, an impressively large book for a man who still casts a shadow over the industry he helped to define. Comics had existed as newspaper strips since the turn of twentieth century, but it was Jack Kirby who defined the distinctions between what could be done in a four-panel strip and what was possible in a full-length comic. His pace, energy, and vision drove an incredible capacity for creation; in the 1940s he was routinely drawing 8 pages a day, and his peers agreed they were the best in the business. These days, many comic artists struggle to do 22 pages a month. Yes, the requirements are more sophisticated today, and correspondingly greater skills are required…but that doesn’t make the work being produced now any superior to what Jack Kirby was doing way back when.

Kirby co-wrote and drew westerns, crime stories, war tales, romance and science fiction, all long before the superhero titles that secured his reputation for posterity. It was with Marvel’s Stan Lee that he enjoyed his most fruitful partnership, the pair of them hacking out title after title, coming up with characters and stories that are still being reprinted to this day, and which today’s comics creators continue to mine for inspiration. Captain America, Iron Man, Thor, and The Hulk are just a few of the iconic creations that poured from Kirby’s mind onto the page, and few of the superheroes created since have captured the public imagination in anything like the same way.

Kirby: King of Comics is written by the artist’s longstanding assistant and friend Mark Evanier, and I find it an easy and entertaining read. Kirby was hampered by his inability to capitalise on his creativity in an economic sense: others would always make more money from him than Kirby ever saw. And that’s why he had to draw so much; driven by a fear of being unable to support his family, he would continue to get the pencils out and create, because it was the only thing he knew.

It’s a physically impressive book, substantially illustrated with a cross section of Kirby’s work, reproduced from the originals in many cases. I find it thoroughly enjoyable, but some net critics have noted that it doesn’t show or tell anything new. True enough if you’re one of the geeks who subscribes to specialist magazines about Kirby, but if you’re a fan without that exhaustive knowledge, I’m sure you’ll find this a rewarding book.

Kirby is one of my two favourite original Marvel artists, and he died some years ago. The other, Gene Colan, is in hospital at the moment. Their styles couldn’t be more different: Kirby is brash, energetic, his characters physically impossible but commanding all the same. Colan’s work is more sophisticated, all about the dance between light and shade, with characters conjured to perfection from the simplest of lines.

Where Kirby is primal rock and roll power, Colan is a sinuous Miles Davis composition. Sure, he could kick out the jams when called for, and did so in The Avengers and Daredevil among other titles, but his real skill was in the depiction of nuance and atmosphere. Howard the Duck wouldn’t have been the same without him, and his art on Tomb of Dracula made that series work in a way that no other comic artist could have. If Gene Colan and his work have meant anything to you at all, tell him so: send a Get Well card to him at this address:

Gene Colan
2 Sea Cliff Avenue
Sea Cliff
NY11579
USA

So, Peep Show is back, which means there’s a watchable British sitcom on the air again for the first time in a while. It’s glorious stuff, and just when you think it can’t go any further in exploring the intersection of personal selfishness and public life, it takes one more clodhopping step into the awkward, the repellent, the unsayable.

Writers Jesse Armstrong and Sam Bain are immersed in the characters and world they’ve created, and combine flawless plotting with deep insight into motivation, and – where Jez is concerned – lack of motivation. But for all the failings of Jez and Mark, they’re still recognisably human characters: this isn’t fullblown misanthropy, more an accurate dissection of yer actual human condition.

The show makes full use of its post-watershed status, the latest episode featuring episodes of oral sex, frottage, homosexuality and drug abuse. It’s all in the tradition of Joe Orton, who if he was alive now might lose some of his reputation for scandalousness, but would at least hopefully be employed by Channel 4 or BBC3 to write scabrous sitcoms, a fate he could never have imagined in his lifetime.

The fact that Jez and Mark are played by the inherently likeable Mitchell and Webb (who I’m not much fussed about in their own shows) helps defuse the danger of the scripts: there’s something about their cleancut common room look that mellows out the sheer obscenity of what goes on in Peep Show.

Earlier in the evening, a leading character in British tv had a daughter, and so concerned are the custodians of his reputation that no hint of sexuality sullied this turn of events. The character was Dr Who, and daughter Jenny’s conception, gestation, and birth took all of 2 minutes, after which she sprang into life as a fully-formed adult, with all the vitality and eagerness of a childrens’ tv presenter. And don’t be surprised if that’s where Jenny ends up: this whole episode seemed to be geared up to providing a franchise-spinning opportunity out of an otherwise lacklustre story.

The problem was that what happened was all too familiar to longer term fans of the show: the Doctor arrives on a planet to encounter warring factions and unites them through discovering something they have in common. Perfectly good format as it goes, but there was no sign that the team responsible for this episode had done their groundwork in terms of checking out old episodes or reading good science fiction novels. So instead of an exciting new take on an old theme that would give younger viewers a thrill, we got a fairly tired tale that wouldn’t satisfy any of the children I know or the adults either. A pity: Dr Who can be a remarkable show when everything’s working, as I’m sure it’ll be again later in the series.

One thing I really don’t like is Sunday newspapers at New Year. They’re always filled with rehashed stuff about the previous 12 months, with pompous commentaries on top about the meaning of those events blah blah. So now, this being the 100th post at youdothatvoodoo, rather than cast a teary eye over the previous 99 entries, I’m instead going to look to the future, because something special’s coming up…

A few years back, I was chosen by my regional screen agency, EM Media, to go on a course that the UK Film Council were running, called Train the Trainers. It was led by screenwriting guru Phil Parker, and we were taught how to deliver the 40 hour Introduction to Screenwriting class that he’d developed. Lots of fun, and it led to me delivering that training in Nottingham on three occasions, hosted by Confetti Institute of Creative Technologies.

While many aspects of Phil’s course are very good indeed, I couldn’t help think something was missing, and that was some time at the front end of the course to explore creativity in general, to ensure that students had tools to develop and enhance their creativity all-round before applying it to the specific task of screenwriting. The material I came up with for that aspect worked really well, and equipped students with skills that they could tap into for the remainder of the course, and which are useful in many other contexts too.

Anyway, I’ve continued to explore the psychology of creativity for some years, studying a variety of models of what creativity is, and how it can be developed further. More importantly, I’ve found practical ways of teaching that material to people in ways that bring it to life: creativity isn’t an academic subject, it’s as much to do with attitude as anything.

Some of the material I’ve come across I’ve mentioned here before, such as Osborn’s typology of creative processes, and its spin-off the SCAMPER grid. Equally, I’ve looked at other sources, such as Koestler’s The Act of Creation – a big influence on 60s creatives from the Beyond the Fringe crew to writers and designers in ad agency studios – and continued to follow up-to-the-minute research on creativity. I’ve also done some research of my own into the impact of physiology on creativity, influenced by my experience of tai chi, and found ways to make that part of the process.

Anyway, all of this and more, you’ll get a chance to experience for yourself at a one day workshop I’ll be running on Saturday July 12. The event is called Connecting with Creativity, and the venue is in Nottingham’s city centre, and if you’re at all interested in learning effective means of developing and enhancing your creative potential, I want to see you there.

Full price seats are £75, but readers of youdothatvoodoo get a discount available until June 12: tickets purchased up until then cost £60. To get in touch, email adrian at youdothatvoodoo dot com and I’ll happily answer at least some of your questions about the event…the only way for sure to know what it’ll be like is to attend. I’m more than confident this will be an exciting and rewarding day, and here’s some feedback offered by my screenwriting students about courses I’ve run:

‘Thank you so much for opening up a new avenue for me.’
‘Thanks for making it brilliant.’
‘Thanks for so much useful and stimulating stuff.’
‘Thanks for a great course and for all your encouragement, focus and guidance.’
‘Cannes do!’

I finished a script earlier this evening, and I’m really pleased with it. And particularly as I entered the home stretch, I realised more of what the story is actually about, and realised there was a much more interesting transformative arc there for one of the principle characters than I’d first imagined.

Comics writer Alan Moore sometimes uses the metaphor of high altitude mapping to describe what it’s like assembling a story, and that made sense in this particular case. I put together the characters, themes, and structure in a way that seemed to fit, and then launched into writing the damn thing. And, what do you know – it worked! What’s interesting is the difference between knowing what the story is like from that high altitude perspective, and then the ground level experience of actually writing it.

In the process, I discovered a lot more about some of the characters than I thought I knew. And I hope that the show who those characters belong to agree with my conclusions, since that would increase my chances of selling this sample script to them. In this case, it’s a sample script that’s been requested, rather than being offered out of the blue, so I’m hoping that too will make them see me in a good light.

This is the stage of things where other people get involved, and that’s always an odd one. Right now, I’m very happy with this particular script, and feel it fits the bill for the show it’s aimed at. In reality, the feedback I’ll get will almost certainly point out ways that I’ve strayed from the path, in their eyes, and more than likely when I receive that news I’ll be inclined to agree with it. Time gives distance.

But, this very second, I am more than happy with the work I’ve done. And that’s something important to hold onto: something I aim for in everything I write is for it to be as good an example of what it is as it can possibly be. You’re on a hiding to nothing if every time you set about writing you aim for Nobel status, but if instead you aim for an attainable personal goal, then you can reach it, maybe even surpass it.

For instance, the play Breaking In that you’ll find on this site is my crack at writing a decent two-hander play, and I reckon I did the job…as did the audiences who saw it. My Hellblazer comic script is my stab both at writing for that title, and at using colour in narrative ways within a comic. And so on: set yourself an achievable goal, and you can look forward to reaching it – decide that nothing less than, say, being the next James Joyce will satisfy you and you’re much more likely to end up dissatisfied.

Naturally, having finished some writing, I figure I deserve a treat. So I splashed out on Amazon, seeing good deals on seasons of The Wire and The Shield I don’t have. Not that all my wants are American. Far from it: I’m waiting for the price to come down on Party Animals, last year’s sharply written drama about MPs’ research assistants, and recently picked up Boys From The Blackstuff for £10.

All this self-congratulatory stuff is bringing to mind The Shamen’s old positivist anthem, Pro Gen, from where this post gets its title. Whoever would have thought I’d be quoting Mr C in a blog on screenwriting?

Once upon a long time ago, I was a member of a local writing group. Only for a short time, it turned out, since like nearly all writing groups I’ve had any acquaintance with it was more for people who liked the idea of being writers than those who actually did any.

Anyway, there was an old guy there, his face all pinched and frowny, so that I told myself I was making a judgment based on his appearance and he was probably a really nice old man if only I listened to him. So I listened, and he proceeded to tell me and those few people at the group who still let his words into their heads, that it was hard being old since you’d heard everything so many times before, and that there wasn’t anything new to hear anyway.

He continued in this vein for a while, and I realised that sometimes appearances aren’t deceptive: he looked like a crotchety old coot and, by god, he was one. And I thought, I’m pretty sure if I believed I’d heard everything before and that there was nothing new under the sun, my face would probably wrinkle up like his, in disgust at the things it was affronted by on a daily basis.

Please note that this man’s condition was not age-related. He just happened to have practiced it for a long time. I suspect that it was ingrained as far back as his twenties, when he’d have been sneering at teenagers for making the same mistakes he had, or more likely making ones he’d been too scared to actually make in his own life.

Anyway, it struck me that this was an odd attitude for someone calling himself a writer to approach life with. And I wondered what kind of writing he did. Turns out, he was writing a research-heavy historical novel about a dentist who extracted teeth from a minor American president, which he reckoned had some impact on late nineteenth century politics. No surprise that 1) it was set in the past, and 2) pain featured heavily.

And I asked myself, when confronted by this elderly wannabe and his grim worldview ‘Is this the best way to approach writing, or life in general?’. I decided it was not.

It seemed to me that a more helpful attitude for the aspiring writer would be one of curiosity about the world, since you never know where or when you might come across a story, either yourself or through listening to the ones that others share with you. And such an attitude of curiosity would go hand in hand with a non-judgmental outlook, for otherwise you might find yourself dismissing perfectly good stories merely because they happen to come from the experience of people you deem
unfit for reasons that matter deeply to you but probably don’t make much sense if you think about them. But rather than make that non-judgmental outlook something po-faced, why not make it engaging and friendly, to increase the chance of coming across people wanting you to be part of their lives and tell you the amazing things that happen to them?

The above is as close to a credo as you’re likely to hear from me. All I can say is, it’s served me well. And going through the world with that attitude has introduced me to drug dealers and schizophrenics, astronomy groupies and glamour models, hypnotists and witches, all of them with stories that have enriched my life, and led me to write stories that will hopefully enrich the lives of others, or at any rate give them something diverting to help pass the time before whatever happens next in their own story.

I’d never heard of sitcom Teenage Kicks before last night, but its theme music was not promising. It featured a watered-down version of the Undertones classic from which the show gets its title, only without the passion, and with a ‘nice’ acoustic bit added so as not to shock anyone who might be unduly energised by the rawness of the original. I should have taken that as an omen and not proceeded any further.

The show’s premise is that, following a divorce, dad Vernon (Adrian Edmonson) moves in with his son and daughter, now students. He’s an ex punk, and is looking to relive his youth in the company of his teenage children and their flatmate David, whose main purpose, beyond representing Chinese youth on ITV, is to bankroll Vernon’s madcap schemes.

So, in other words, what we’ve got is a potential twist on The Young Ones, even more so because Edmonson is scripting as well as being the lead character in Teenage Kicks. And that’s not such a bad idea, as they go. What’s on offer is the conservatism of contemporary students versus the radicalism of Vernon’s earlier days, which he’s now trying to relive from the broom cupboard under the stairs where he now lives in his kids’ flat.

What happens in practice is that the kids are woefully undeveloped, with very little to distinguish Daughter A from Son B, other perhaps than Son B is a little more worldly wise than his sister. In other respects – and stop me if you’ve guessed where I’m headed here – Vernon’s children are now acting as his parents, urging caution and wanting to put the brakes on his madcap schemes.

Did I mention madcap schemes? If only the plot lived up to that billing. Instead, what we get is a limp tale that has Vernon rehearsing a backing band to tour Eastern Europe with the leader of his old punk rivals, who had a ‘punk’ name so embarrassing I’ve erased it from my memory. Anyway, the nearer the actual tour gets, the less likely it turns out to be likely to happen. And the band leader turns out to be a conman. Who was tricking Vernon into getting David (the Chinese guy, remember?) into paying for a van for the tour, which he then steals. Or something along those lines. At any rate, hilarity failed to ensue.

Yes, I know sitcoms are hard to write, and ITV seems to have a problem getting them right. But they had a decent stab at it with Moving Wallpaper, a thoroughly enjoyable show. Is it so difficult to bring some of the edge of a programme like that into the family comedy, or is there something about the family sitcom that propels British writers into cosiness instead of humour? Please God, there has to be room at the table for something other than pisspoor riffs on My Family, which is what Teenage Kicks aspires to be.

Iron Man is the latest superhero film from the Marvel Comics stable. The thing with Iron Man is that he’s a self-made hero, whose powers derive from his genius engineering skill, which itself has also given him access to power in the form of immense wealth.

Tony Stark, the man who wears the Iron Man suit, is a billionaire industrialist who enjoys Bill Gates style riches from his arms business, and a reputation for booze and women that…well, it helps explain why he’s played by Robert Downey Jr. Frankly he’s a jerk, albeit an amusing one, and Downey plays him wonderfully, giving him a hint of badda-bing as well as a streak of geek.

It’s a clever balance, but there’s a fundamental problem here because Tony Stark is already a grown and successful man at the start of the story. Compare with Peter Parker, Spiderman, a teenager who acquires powers in the context of an emotionally richer life than Stark’s. Stark’s life is light on genuine intimacy, while Parker’s superhero origins are meshed with his failure to save his uncle from being killed.

Tony Stark is a grown-up hero with a grown-up problem: how to turn his arms business into one that can help the world rather than contribute to its conflicts. All very well, except bringing this grown-up theme to life requires some pretty simplistic storytelling. Which is fine: you don’t expect multi-dimensional stories in a summer tentpole movie, even if it is about the consequences of a change of heart by a tycoon in the midst of the military-industrial complex.

But hey, bring on the bad guys. Every hero is defined by the quality of his nemesis, and in Iron Man Robert Downey Jr is set against his right-hand man, Obadiah Stane, played more than capably by Jeff Bridges, who is up to no good in Stark Industries. Stane is in cahoots with the Al Qaeda-likes who are the film’s initial villains, and creates an even bigger and more fearsome set of armour for them, which he first uses against his employer.

It’s all well put together in terms of plot and pace, and different strands are threaded together adeptly. Gwyneth Paltrow as PA Pepper Potts is the woman who very literally touches Tony Stark’s damaged heart, in a scene that’s all about the tenderness between them – and also sets the seeds for a crucial bit of action that leads to the bad guy’s comeuppance later. For all that craft and skill, there’s something cold at times about the way it feels, particularly notable in what has to be the most egregious example of product placement I’ve yet seen, when Stark comes home from captivity in Afghanistan and, before anything else, demands a cheeseburger.

It’s a whole lot of fun in a whizzbang way, but there’s something about Iron Man that’s not as compelling as Batman or Spiderman: they’re defined by primal emotional situations that we can all empathise with (the death of parents or a guardian leading the heroes to find their purpose in life). Tony Stark, by contrast, is a successful businessman whose biggest problem is that he can’t make an emotional connection with women. But so what? As a playboy, he gets to have flings with stunning models and actresses he picks up at casinos and film premieres. A lot of men – and this is a film aimed more at a male audience – would kill for a problem like that. Anyway, there’s still plenty of room to make a sequel or two, and hints that it could offer glimpses into other facets of the Marvel universe as yet unrealised on screen.