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.

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.

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.

Looking out into my garden, past the wild patch where a fox spends some of its time, and beyond the back of my own property, I can see into a neighbour’s garden. For the past month, it’s been home to a variable number of tall white domestic appliances, standing cryptic together like Fridgehenge.

A few hours ago, in the night, there was a small earthquake, clocking in at 5.2 on the Richter scale. It went on for a minute or more, woke me up, and several of the neighbours gathered in the street to talk about what happened. I didn’t bother; listening told me everything I wanted to know at that point.

So now I’m wondering, and unable to see because it’s dark at the moment (4.54 am). Is Fridgehenge still standing? Or did the earthquake topple the white goods onto the ground? And will I get to see their owner put them back upright, or will they be left there?

People often ask where writers get their ideas, and conversely my experience is that ideas are everywhere: what are they doing to block them out? At the moment, the raw ingredients I’ve outlined would work well in an episode of Clocking Off, the Paul Abbott-initiated series that sneakily brought back the single play to primetime television. Or as a storyline in Coronation Street, Norris bemused and anxious about the presence of a monolith made of consumer goods, Janice coordinating with some of the other women working at Underworld to see if they can steal themselves some fridges, and so on.

And if I let my thinking drift to the actual Stonehenge, which I’m researching for a television project, one of the things I recall from my own experience is the sheer wonder and nonsense of two groups of wannabe mystics. One group was planting crystals around the Stonehenge site to waken the ancient site’s earth energies, part of a long term project that would lead to the establishment of a new Avalon, a reawakened Arthur in charge. The other group went around digging for these crystals, since they interfered with delicate ley energies, and plucked them from the ground. I’m not sure what they did with them, but wouldn’t be surprised if they ended up getting recycled to the sort of hippy/goth tat shops that sell such magical stones in the first place.

That example is only notable for its relative eccentricity, but really the clash of beliefs it presents is not much different to the kind of conflict you’ll find driving stories set in a more mainstream world. Put people together, and the one thing that’ll emerge before long is politics in some form. Who gets to make the tea, use the car, get better rates of pay, or the right to vote. All eminently suitable material for writing, depending on your proclivities. Some people spend their careers detailing the ins and outs and ups and downs of the micro social worlds they’re familiar with.

Me, I like the fact that I deal with a whole bunch of people in a wide variety of contexts, and experience patterns that transcend content. The participants can be aspiring politicians, drugs workers, homeless people, single mothers, artists, business coaches, pagans, astronauts, whoever: our similarities are always bigger than our differences, and presenting social worlds new to the reader or viewer only emphasises that the human game doesn’t much change just because the individuals wear different masks.

Actor and director Ken Campbell tells a story in one of his one-man shows about a German artist he knew. The artist moved from the city he’d been living in to a small town. And in getting to know the place, he found himself going on walks in the small hours. He’d collect things of interest along the way: leaves, stones, bottle tops and whatever, instinctively knowing that they’d provide some kind of inspiration for him, maybe even become part of his new art.

In the small hours on one occasion, around 3 am, the artist’s pockets were half filled with items he’d collected on that night’s walk. He spotted an intriguingly shaped branch in someone’s garden, stepped towards it, and then stopped when car headlights played around him. In the car were two police officers.

The police asked the artist what he was doing out so late, and the artist realised how what he was doing must have looked to them. He explained that he was collecting items to inspire new art, showed them the oddments in his pockets, and the two police offices looked at one another back and forth. They radioed the police station to see what to do next, and were told to bring the artist in. He was feeling pretty nervy by now.

In the police station, the artist was interviewed by the sergeant there, who ummed and aahed for a while before deciding that expert opinion was needed. She called a psychiatrist the police often dealt with, and asked him to decide what to do with the artist.

The psychiatrist wore pebble glasses and had a salt and pepper beard, and was clearly a very bright man. He spoke to the artist for a while, asking about the things in his pockets and the exhibitions his work had been shown at. Then he paused before asking what the artist realised was a Very Significant Question: ‘You say you’re an artist; but do you have a commission to be doing this?’

The artist looked from the psychiatrist to the sergeant and back, realising that the answer to this question was going to be important. He thought for a minute before replying ‘Yes, I do have a commission’. The psychiatrist shook the artist’s hand, apologised for having him brought to the station, and told the sergeant to release the artist.

When I heard Ken Campbell relate the artist’s story in his show, I decided there and then that I would commission myself to interview Ken. And I did so, spending a fascinating afternoon in Walthamstow Marshes with Ken at his picnic bench office with one of his dogs, learning about a man who claimed to teach people the art of invisibility (the key is knowing how to hide in front of things).

And when I conduct trainings on screenwriting, or creativity in general, I tell that story to the people there, and how it influenced me. When the story comes to its conclusion, I ask them what they’re going to commission themselves to do, since it’s such a powerful way of making something new happen for yourself. And I wonder, having read this story about Ken Campbell and how I came to interview him, and how I use that story in a training context, what you might commission yourself to do?

So, in about three weeks I get to pitch a feature or tv project to an audience of real live people.  It’s a fun opportunity, and one I intend to make the most of.  And that alone gives me an edge over people who find pitching a sordid and unseemly affair, or don’t believe it’s something writers should be doing.  More fool them.  I figure, if I’ve put passion and commitment into getting a script or treatment just right, who better to persuade people that it’s worth finding more about?

Fortunately, I’m pretty resourceful when it comes to making the most of live situations.  For one thing, it’s a chance to get away from the kind of cabin fever that can result from too many days spent at the keyboard away from human company.  For another, I work in plenty of contexts where I’m used to selling myself to get work in copywriting, marketing, training or whatever.  And as far as I can work out, the key isn’t to do with relentlessly plugging whatever your thing is, but building a relationship with the person you’re meeting in which you demonstrate by your behaviour that you will make their life better, simpler, more fun, or whatever.  In other words, be yourself, having made sure you’ve got out of the right side of bed that morning.

The pitching process can be summarised as follows: generate good feelings in your audience, and attach your product or services to those good feelings.  Simple, huh?  And it’s made easier when you clarify your thinking about this whole networking thing.  Like many people, I was sceptical about networking at one point, seeing it as a means of getting people to give you work regardless of whether you like them.  And viewed that way, no wonder I didn’t want anything to do with it.  So it’s a good thing I got my head straight, and started to approach it in a different way: start by filtering for people you like, and work from there to how you can help each other.  No fixed ideas of what you’re going to be doing, more an intent to spend time with people whose company you enjoy doing stuff you like. 

Hmm.  Sounds better that way, doesn’t it?  And since I’ve approached it that way, I’ve become a dab hand at successful networking.  Before Christmas I went to an event intended for producers (another tip: go where your intended audience are, even if you’re not the target audience of the event).  There were a whole bunch of producers there, and most of them were a very sad lot, bemoaning their inability to get projects off the ground, predicting the impossibility of benefiting from the organisation hosting the session, and so on.  And then there were some fresh faced and smiling people who I gravitated to because they seemed like they actually wanted to be there, so we talked.  We discovered, among other things, a mutual love of comics and games.  The latter was no great surprise, since they worked for a computer games company.  But their enthusiasm was palpable, and my response to them was equally keen. 

Business cards were exchanged, leading to a meeting, the result of which is I’ll find out in the next week if I’ve got a significant contract to do a whole bunch of background writing for one of their forthcoming launches.  And all because we got on, and didn’t share the negative outlook of so many of the people at the same event, most of whom went home secure in the knowledge that things were as bad as they suspected.  Their problem.

So, where the pitching event is concerned, bring it on.  I’ve already sent the script in question out to some trusted and cool friends and colleagues in the business for quotes that can be used as part of the presentation or package. And I’ve got the bones of a strapline that gets to the heart of what my show is about, and why it’s different from anything else on television.  After that, it’s just a question of standing up and doing what comes naturally.

‘Write what you know’ has to be the most ball-achingly banal suggestion that anyone ever made to a writer. And it explains so much. The abundance of books and films commencing with the hero getting out of bed. Stories in which it’s painfully clear that someone is using writing as a substitute for therapy they can’t afford about a relationship break-up. An entire genre in the form of soap opera.

If ‘write what you know’ means turning the content of your own life into fiction, then whole swathes of my book and DVD collections would be invalid. No science fiction. No fantasy. Not much to talk of in the thriller section. Instead, reams of worthy biopics and movies of the week ripped from the previous week’s headlines.

But there is a place for ‘write what you know’ if it’s taken to mean emotional experiences rather than mere facts. I don’t know what it’s like to swing a sword in battle, but I remember the chaos and mud and brutality of rugby from school days. I’ve never been to another planet, but I have vivid memories of touching down at JFK airport. And though I’ve never taken on a corrupt establishment single-handed, I’ve seen what corruption can do and acted in my own small ways against it.

Every moment of your life is a resource for a story. And not just your life. Think of the stories you’ve heard from people over the years. The things people will do that seem natural to them, and leave me gaping in admiration, perplexity, or awe. S, raising funds for a hospice in South Africa having been there herself to see an entire generation devastated by AIDS. R, giving a handjob to an overfriendly Belgian to raise funds to get back to Britain after his friends were too stoned to meet up with him in Amsterdam. C, seeing his mother for the first time in five years after being excluded from the family circle for an offence with consequences that will possibly ripple through the remainder of his young life.

Show me somewhere there isn’t a story; someone whose life isn’t rich in incident, character, conflict. Writing is largely a question of choosing which stories you want to focus on, and shaping them in such a way that their particular details become vessels for universally recognised qualities. Story: the means by which we measure and share our experiences.

The question then, is how to keep things fresh. Which means continuing to mix familiar patterns with unexpected detail, or vice versa. That, or face the judgement of the woman who did my hair two cuts back, and commented of Casualty as she tidied my fringe, ‘It’s always the same: someone gets married, someone dies, and someone has a baby’. She had a point. Now, if it was the SAME someone, maybe there’s still a story to be told with those familiar ingredients…