There’s a kind of writing which I find grates, and that I can best describe as too neat. And the kind of neatness I’m thinking about sits at odds with my experience of life itself, which doesn’t conform to regular patterns and easy conclusions. As an example, ‘Brotherhood’, episode 7 of the first series of Six Feet Under, a generally excellent series that I’ve been catching on DVD after, as ever, failing to see it when it was broadcast on tv.

The brotherhood referred to captures the relationship of brothers Nate and David, and in particular Nate’s declaration that he loves David, an instance of ‘hugs ‘n’ learning’ that sits at odds with the generally distanced emotions of the Fisher family. And in this specific episode it also refers to the brotherhood experienced by a young soldier whose funeral the Fishers are arranging. For good measure, it serves triple duty when it comes to exploring the politics of the church that Dave is a deacon of.

The dead soldier’s funeral is arranged by his brusque older brother, who wants it to be a military-free zone. Only, Nate believes that the deceased really would have wanted his army buddies present, and arranges for that to happen. He does so, and the service is conducted against the brother’s wishes – only for him to turn up and concede that it really is what he’d have wanted after all. I found it unconvincing that he changed his mind in the short time devoted to the storyline: in other words, the dramatic reversal was unearned, and felt false because of it. In tandem with the story being about Gulf war veterans, it felt tokenistic to me, and what could have been a powerful story was diluted by an unearned payoff: confronted by uniforms, the brother just changed his mind.

The other overly neat aspect to this story was Dave’s rejection of a new senior figure in the church, whose crusading style would likely have brought up uncomfortable issues to do with his closeted homosexuality. It may be that the storyline develops new wrinkles in future episodes, but for now at least it felt like the dead serviceman story: just too neat to really convince.

So, if those are examples of neat writing, what’s the contrary to that? Messiness, I guess. The kind of messiness that feels more like life than it does the geometrically precise laying down of story beats that rise and fall and are mirrored over time. It’s also something I have an issue about when I see tv shows that have clearly delineated A, B, C storylines where the people involved in one never get involved in the others, and to all intents and purposes are involved in their own 12 minute hermetically sealed story rather than one that’s a living breathing part of an organic script.

That kind of messiness is harder to write, I know from my own experience. And it’s also much more rewarding, and effective when it’s achieved. The Shield features writing along the lines I’m talking about, and is achieved by a table of writers hammering out stories as a team. I believe I’ve achieved it in a pilot episode for a series I’ve devised, and one of the technical elements I learned from that which leads to quality messiness on the page works like this:

Get characters involved in each other’s storylines, for instance by having scenes in which a character’s actions create beats for two or more stories. In doing so, see if you can also get those actions to highlight different, even contrary, aspects of character to those established earlier.

Sound tricky? Well, it can be. But it’s a lot of fun getting it right, and feels a lot more like life than the A, B, C way of doing things…