What is a story, anyway? Is it defined by incident, or meaning?

We hear and tell tens of stories throughout the day, in full or in part. Some of them amuse, others provoke thought, others give insight into the teller. We define ourselves to others, and ourselves, by the stories we tell.

There’s an outfit called the Landmark Forum which grew out of a seventies therapy movement, est. I know a couple of people who’ve had run-ins with Landmark, and though they practice some pretty dubious habits such as locking people into seminar rooms and refusing to let them go to the toilet (which takes me back to junior school if anything) they also have some more interesting things going on. Such as, getting group members to tell the defining stories of their lives and, gently or otherwise, pulling those stories apart.

Why would behaving so impolitely to someone’s stories be useful? Well, when it comes to the stories that define us, we often choose to play archetypal roles. Whether we’re hero, victim, fool or survivor, we’ve identified with a particular stance on life that, arguably, we play out in other aspects of our life, whether or not they’re the most appropriate ways to deal with the situations we’re confronted with. Challenge that role, by bringing other perspectives to the stories people tell, drawing attention to the necessary omissions or weighted descriptions, and that can help people rethink not just the content of their story, but the meaning they made of it and have carried forward since.

So, allowing a bunch of killjoys can be good for you, huh? Actually, done well — and I’m talking about the kind of interaction you can have with a caring friend rather than some of the clodhopping accounts I’ve heard from Landmark — and it can be a very useful experience. Realising that the cherished story in which you broke your mother’s favourite vase didn’t mean she no longer loved you, but was the start of a journey in which by paying for a new one you became a provider for the first time in your life, can be a therapeutic experience.

I’d suggest that one of the things writers do in creating their professional stories is, sometimes, reexamine some of their own fundamental stories. Which would explain the recurrence of particular themes in a given writer’s work. And, knowing that it’s possible to do so, would it be worth asking yourself what your own fundamental stories are and seeing how they relate to the scripts and prose you’ve already written, and the projects you aspire to tackling in the future?

Eek, we’ve finally got onto ‘writing as therapy’ some 90 posts in to this experience. Apologies if I’m coming across a bit Dr Phil — greater apologies still if I’m all Oprah. And mum…sorry about that vase.

What metaphors do you have for writing? Is it something that’s as natural as having a daydream, or as tough as cracking a particularly elusive walnut? And what about ideas? Are they like butterflies you have to catch with an imaginary net, or that you tune into on your mind’s private radio station?

The metaphors we use are a reflection of what we believe, and shape how we behave. I worked at an ad agency once where one of the directors would pair up with a writer to have what he called a ‘braindump’, an unsettling image that conjures up furrowed brows and straining - and is frankly an activity that should be engaged in on your own unless there’s a medical need for assistance. Then there’s the famous ‘brainstorm’, a term some people refuse to use now as they believe it offensive to the mentally ill, so hence we have new terms like ‘thought shower’, one that’s never really convinced me.

If you’re unclear of what your metaphor for creativity, or writing is, ask yourself what your mental picture is of that process. Some people’s mental picture will contain that metaphor very obviously: a zoo full of wild and exotic animals; a solar system where every planet has different physical and maybe even social rules; a garden that needs to be cultivated. If you don’t seem to have a mental image, then ask yourself ‘what is creativity or writing like…?’ and listen for what comes up.

At which point, some of you will be nodding your heads, and others will still be wondering why any of this matters. Well, if you’re in the latter camp and you’re confident in your ability to generate workable concepts and develop them to fruition (…another metaphor, as it goes) then all very well. If, however, you’re someone who feels that their writing is sometimes difficult, that they’re stuck, and that words flow like the last inch of treacle out of a crusted-up tin (..another metaphor) then perhaps it’s time you had some fun with this notion and explored what your metaphors around writing are, and what they could more productively be.

Metaphors for creativity give you some idea of the pre-conditions that need to exist before someone will allow themselves to be creative. If your creativity is such that you require Classic FM, a chilled Chianti, and certain flowers in your study before you can put words to paper, then I wish you all the best and hope you continue to enjoy a steady stream of classical music, wine, and blossoms. But what if creativity could be as natural as breathing, say? It’s not a coincidence that the words ‘inspiration’ and ‘respiration’ have a lot in common…so what if you could literally come up with ideas as easily as breathing in and out, wherever you happen to be?

Start to keep your eyes and ears open for evidence of metaphors that you and others have for creativity, for writing, for ideas, for whatever else you’re interested in. And notice the difference between those who have an abundance of those things, and people who struggle to come up with anything inventive or novel. What metaphors do the generative people use, compared to those who find creativity difficult? And how might you be able to assist them in finding more constructive metaphors, if that’s something they want to play with..?

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…

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.   

Lately, I’ve been listening to a lot of Charles Mingus. I started with the album Ah Um, recognised as a classic and without a doubt featuring a composer with a strong and distinct voice setting him apart from some of the other big names in jazz. And then I took a step backwards and picked up a set of 10 CDs for £8, one of those dubious bootleg collections that I typically avoid. Only, on this occasion, I was curious, and my curiosity has been rewarded.

The CDs chart Mingus’s time as a bassist sideman with a variety of other peoples’ bands in the forties and fifties, and seem (information is sketchy) to be taken from contemporary radio broadcasts. It’s a fascinating glimpse into an era of jazz that I’d not explored much before now, featuring bands playing tunes many of which are now regarded as standards, but at the time were just the pop hits of the day. And there are glimpses of what’s to come for Mingus, in some of the more eccentric arrangements, playful chorus vocals by band members, idiosyncratic takes on the blues.

You can chart much the same progress with some writers. The recently dead Anthony Minghella started out writing for tv on Jim Henson’s The Storyteller, and I’m betting the stories he developed there weren’t as moving and memorable as what he went on to achieve in Truly Madly Deeply or The English Patient. And why would they be? There’s a world of difference between being a journeyman writer on someone else’s tv show and creating your own feature film from scratch. Not, I’m sure, that he’d have put less than 100% into writing for Henson, or Inspector Morse, or whatever else – but there’s a substantial difference between applying yourself to someone else’s intellectual property and coming up with your own. I know this myself from the difference between writing for Doctors and coming up with my own series and pilot episode for it: much as I learned from the first, the second has been even more valuable for me though no one has yet given me any money for it.

It’s traditional to assume that some people are fully fledged genii from birth, but I’m dubious about that. Orson Welles is often raised at this point as an example of someone who wowed people with his first film, Citizen Kane. But a bit of investigation and you’ll discover that Welles wouldn’t have been allowed anywhere near a film set if he hadn’t already impressed with a strong track record in theatre and radio drama. Welles had been writing, performing and directing for a decade or more at the point that he made Kane at the age of 25.

So, judging by the examples of Mingus, Minghella, and Welles, the issue about when genius strikes is primarily to do with how you learn from your experiences, and what beliefs form about your capabilities and limitations. And some people have healthier beliefs about themselves than others. Why would Steven Spielberg be troubled by self-doubt about his ability to make films when he’s been making them since he was less than ten? They’re just something he does: all that’s changed is the scale.

Conversely, other people have experiences that they choose to let limit them in the future: having had a bad experience working on his biggest film, Once Upon A Time In The Midlands, Shane Meadows has retreated to making films on a smaller scale. Which isn’t to disparage the films he’s made since, Dead Man’s Shoes and This Is England: both have been very successful for him. Not that I’m in any position to tell Mr Meadows what to do, mind, but having heard him talk at screenings about the trauma he experienced working on his biggest film (in financial/logistical terms), it’d be good for Shane to get some therapy and rethink the notion of working on a large scale…I’d love to see his Seven Samurai, or Godfather based on a Uttoxeter crime dynasty.

There comes a point in a writing project when you know it’s come together and is waiting to be written.  Which tells you one difference between me and many writers; I don’t write every day.  More than that, I don’t believe it’s necessary to do so. 

Oh, sure, it’s useful to build up your writing muscles by learning how to write consistently for a few hours at a time.  But having got to that point, which I learned to do a long time ago by working in ad agencies, I’ve found that the most important part of the writing process is the gestation period.

This is where self-sabotage and other such bullshit can come in.  I know myself well enough to know when I’m ready to get a sizeable chunk of writing done.  But it can take a while to get there, and there’s no point kidding yourself about it.  There absolutely are times you need to be disciplined and apply bum to seat and fingers to keyboard, make no mistake.  And having been there and found out what that’s about, it’s possible to move on and learn through experience what happens as you’re gestating a story.

Note that the metaphor is a very organic one, and that’s because it feels very much like that.  Put crudely, in the same way that you know when you need to dump, you discover what feeling is attached to needing to write.  And it is a need when you’ve got in tune with that process. 

Somewhere unconsciously, processes have been coming up with a bunch of cool stuff on your behalf: your part of the deal is to get that cool stuff down on paper when the time is right.  Ignore it, and there’s a chance you’ll scupper your relationship with whatever it is that produces cool stuff for you: simply, if you do nothing with it, how can you be trusted to make use of it in the future?

Analogies about elves making shoes, as per folklore, can be made at this point.  Treat your elves well, and they will reward you with everything from steel capped Dr Martens boots to stilettos, snazzy trainers to flip flops.  So, what goes into the proper care and feeding of elves?  Principally, a varied diet of sensory stimuli and the opportunity for regular rest and recreation.  The greater the input, the greater the output.

However busy I am, I find time for catching up with friends, going to see films, listening to music and pottering online.  All of those experiences help build up a sensory and conceptual database that the elves can utilise for…inspiration for next season’s shoes, to stretch an already weary analogy. 

Put your trust in that process, and you can achieve wonders when you need to.  I once participated in a charity event, where over the course of 4 hours in a drafty railway station, I fulfilled nearly 20 commissions at the request of commuters, working at a typewriter on a table.  Some of them wanted short stories, some wanted poems, others wanted a piece to keep their children entertained.  And each gave me some kind of framework for the writing that they wanted, choosing items, characters and themes from a menu. 

Madam wants a story of revenge featuring a crimson dress and a work colleague?  Very well.  Just after I’ve finished Sir’s science fiction drama involving an intelligent octopus.  And then I can get round to a rhyming yarn about Thomas the Tank Engine for the young man in the pushchair.

I’m just ready to reach the writing point for a tv treatment that’s been cooking in my head for a while now.  I’ve already got some of it down, and in the process realised how much more I needed to do, in a style that’s new to me.  Now it’s ready, I can spend time getting it down in written form, and then send it off for feedback before taking it to script stage.

I’m staying in Anglesey at the moment, and that presents entirely different scenery to what I’m used to in Nottingham.  Mountains straddle the landscape, visible pretty much wherever you are.  Forests reach down to the sea.  And there’s a fraction of the amount of traffic I’m used to seeing.  All of this makes me think in terms of location.  It’s a key aspect of screenwriting with the potential to have a big effect on the audience.

Look at the cosy Sunday night shows that bring big television audiences in.  Monarch of the Glen, Last of the Summer Wine, Heartbeat: all shows with a strong sense of time and place…even the ones that are set in the here and now feel like they belong to a bygone age.  Set your characters against a horizon, and they and their horizons can’t help seem bigger.  Look at No Country For Old Men: the raw story could have been the basis of a middling thriller.  But in the hands of the Coen Brothers, and as adapted from a book by Cormac McCarthy, it becomes a story about life and death itself when experienced through characters living in the space Texas presents.

Contrast that with the world presented in Se7en.  A corrupt city where the protagonist is trying to  get out and build himself a place in the sticks.  A monolith of a place where rain lashes inhabitants like a scourge for their sins.

These things are worth thinking about.  let’s take the subject of yesterday’s blog, a mutated episode of The Fixer, and move it to Anglesey.  Immediately, the story has a different feel.  And a key decision has to be made: what world did Jude the killer come from before being settled in a safe house in North Wales?  Odds are, his crimes happened in a city, at which point we’ve got a world of visual contrasts and metaphors available to play with.  And the fact that Jude kills again even in this safe haven points to the fact that he can’t even be redeemed by being put in somewhere that could be portrayed as a rural idyll compared to the urban chaos he’s used to.

With your eyes open, details just fall into your lap…yesterday, one of our tasks was to pick up a couple of dead thrushes that met their ends hitting a window, and pass them on to a local artist to paint.  That detail, which could only come from a world where people are conscious of nature, and part of a community where they know how to help one another out, and what someone else could make use of, could form an interesting part of the story we’re developing.  Particularly since it points to Anglesey being a place where people view death as part of the natural cycle…so how will they respond to a cold-blooded killer like Jude?

Note, I’m not pointing to any answers here.  Just playing with the possibilities that location presents, and what happens when you shift from some of your presets and explore alternatives instead.  Already, by reversing some of the aspects of a story triggered by The Fixer’s second episode, and shifting its location to rural Wales, a whole new story is starting to emerge.

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.

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.