How many ways are there to tell a story? And in choosing different means, do we arrive at the same place, or are we in fact creating other stories altogether? I ask because I come across and can utilise different approaches according to my intentions, and sometimes encounter stories where the combination of narrative and means to express it makes for an unusual effect.

Case in point: the first volume of Son of the Gun, written by Jodorowsky with art by Bess, a handsome Humanoids hardback I picked up for just £5 in a Forbidden Planet sale. I’ve got some limited experience of Jodorowsky through seeing his film Santa Sangre, a kaleidoscopic yarn involving circus folk, psychedelia, incest, and — somewhere in there I swear — a dead elephant.

No surprise then that lurking between the covers of what seems to be a crime yarn, is something rather more twisted. The writer’s mystic and mythic preoccupations have been fused with an otherwise conventional story, and the effect is fascinating. The tailed protagonist Orlando is raised by a midget whore and whelped by a dog, growing up to be the fiercest and brightest of a gang of street thugs, before ultimately being crucified in the desert. Even Scorsese at his most florid hasn’t taken his fascination with Catholicism so far — here we’ve got the fusion of Last Temptation and Goodfellas that he shied away from.

The thing is, it works. The mixture of mythic and street material is highly effective this way round. What doesn’t work for me is when inherently mythic material is presented in the manner of street level storytelling. No surprise that I’m thinking Brian Michael Bendis at this point.

I loved his work on Daredevil, where the mix of guilt, obsession and street crime works just fine, and suits his dialogue tics. A word about those actually: much is made of Bendis’s love of David Mamet, and there’s some overlap. But where Mamet’s dialogue is always moving the story forward, Bendis all too often circles round and round without momentum. Which is exactly what you don’t want when you’re writing characters like Captain America and Thor. Those guys are heroes, icons, living myths, and work best when treated as such. Having them stumble over their words and circumlocute to no good end is bad writing, plain and simple.

That’s not just my take on matters, it stems from research. A seminal bodyworker called Moshe Feldenkrais spent his life examining the way we use our bodies and neurology, and created exercises to minimise what he called ‘parasitic’ thoughts and movements. Leg twitches, hums and hahs, all the stuff that characterise ‘normal’ interaction — but which we can learn to reduce. And if that’s possible for you and me, you can bet true heroes operate at that level and beyond.

This is something that Grant Morrison gets — and Kevin Smith doesn’t. Morrison’s Batman is the ultimate a human being can aspire to, a billionaire who has reached the pinnacle of physical and mental perfection. Smith’s contribution to the Batman mythos? He had him piss himself. Which works fine at the level of teenage sniggering…but that’s pretty much the level Smith’s work is stuck at, for all his attempts to include some moral fibre in Dogma.

Someone else who gets it is Walt Simonson. His run on Thor embraced the epic in every sense, from the larger-than-life dynamism of the artwork to the galactic scale of the adventures his hero engaged in. And even when he worked on a smaller scale, with Thor turned into a frog, there was still a sense of true fantasy about it. No stumbling over words and Woody Allen style self-consciousness: Thor represents the divine.

I’m all for mixing things up, learning from different styles and genres. But that includes recognising when a particular approach is going nowhere, and hasn’t been pursued before for good reason. But what do I know? Bendis comics sell by the truckload. All very well. But that’s the point when we can look at the distinction between popular appeal and mass appeal. The Beatles were the first, creating art that elevated themselves and touched peoples’ lives. Oasis are examples of the latter, aping the surface aspects of what the Fab Four did without ever expanding that template or creating work with real resonance.

A little while back, Jimmy McGovern did an interview in which he opened up about his feelings regarding the state of tv drama. It caused a bit of a stir, as it was intended to do, and now — lo and behold — here’s some of your man’s very own drama in the form of a new series called Accused, a collection of one-offs linked by their protagonists being on trial.

The trial idea is a reasonable one, guaranteeing that viewers will be presented with a story of considerable importance to its central character. And in this case, he was played by Christopher Ecclestone, which is a good if predictable thing…a description which applies to the whole enterprise. Oh, I don’t mean that I was one step ahead of the plot at any given moment. But there was a deeply familiar feel to what was going on for anyone who’s seen any of McGovern’s work. Which, seeing as he worked on Brookside before coming up with Cracker, is an awful lot of the viewing public.

Says Jimmy, “The only way to tell stories on TV is to convince people that what they are seeing is actually happening now and is real.” He goes on to castigate the use of irony and pastiche, and pretty much anything that doesn’t involve working class northeners doing things that allegedly working class northener McGovern has experienced, or knows someone who has.

All of which is bad news for fans of The Simpsons, for a start. Never mind that the show has a strong satirical and subversive aspect that you’d think Jimmy would approve of for showing authority up. No, it’s clearly fantasy, and therefore suspect, with its characters not only drawn, but lacking the right number of fingers. As for Dr Who, that involves time travel and monsters, and — worse yet — is written by middle class writers. A non-starter in Jimmy’s world.

Actually, Jimmy himself is a big fan of irony. He complains that television results in “this regurgitation of the same sort of thing”, and goes on to demonstrate that by wheeling out the same tropes that have featured in his work for decades now. An alienated working class northern protagonist, by any chance? Not like any of the ones seen in Jimmy’s previous show The Street then, to name just one contender. How about his addictive personality, as expressed in a fondness for gambling and drink? That’ll be Fitz, the star of Cracker, surely. Ah, no, it was Houlihan, as portrayed by Ecclestone. Oh, and a priest turned up. As they do in dramas by lapsed Catholics who’ve even written films about men of the cloth.

None of this makes McGovern a bad writer. Not at all. I can still watch his work and wonder at the passion and craft involved. What I don’t need is him pouring scorn on the work of others whose motivations and interests are different than his own. And I especially don’t need this elder statesman of British drama bleating, as he did when he nearly gave up on a BBC project because of his childish resentment of an unidentified “posh” writer: “I downed tools for a while because some other writer was being treated better than me.” Diddums.

Wouldn’t it be great if McGovern realised that there’s the potential for drama in any human interaction, regardless of the class of those involved? That he could forget his fixation with his humble roots and consider writing truths drawn from the life he lives now? If he accepted that irony and fantasy aren’t some kind of bourgeois trick to dupe honest working class lads, but ways to bring new life to stories that might take forms he’d be blown away by if he let himself go..?

Odds are though, none of the above will happen. Which probably won’t stop me watching more episodes of Accused. But I’ll do so thinking what might have been, and — you never know — have a go at creating something in that vein myself.

There’s no such thing as things staying the same. They’re either getting better or getting worse. The illusion of consistency is possibly a sign that you’re missing signs of stagnation. In which case, best get off your arse and start making stuff happen. When all’s said and done, making stuff happen is one of the key skills needed to ensure writing becomes a paying vocation rather than a pleasant hobby.

Yesterday, I made stuff happen. I had three meetings in the afternoon, and returned home buzzing with the energy they gave me. First meeting was regarding a project that I haven’t mentioned in these parts before, but that you’ll hopefully be hearing about in the months ahead. It’s to do with an aid to creativity I’ve come up with, and would like to see sold in the popular psychology or business sections of bookshops. And the meeting was with an outfit who should be able to sort me out with some modest but very welcome funding to help create a prototype. All of which sounds rather mysterious, for which I apologise — but watch this space.

Lesson: being a writer gives you insights into creative processes which people will pay for in the right circumstances. I received a four figure sum for delivering one day of creativity training for one outfit. Money like that can buy a lot of writing time.

Next up, I went to check out an organisation doing brilliant work with drug users about ways we might be able to work together. The meeting went like a dream, getting to know a couple of new people as well as reacquainting myself with the guy who’d invited me. By the end of the session we’d cooked up a plan for a substantial drama project to involve and empower the project’s service users. It’d involve putting in a bid for arts funding, since we’d be doing something above and beyond their usual remit, something we’re all keen to make happen.

Lesson: the more irons you have in the fire, the greater chance there is of some of them working out. I always have more projects than I could possibly deal with if they all came to fruition, knowing the chances of that are so small. Plus, a project that doesn’t spark at one time can be reignited at a later date.

To round off the afternoon, I met up with Andy, my artistic collaborator on a multi-platform concept that’s excited everyone who’s seen it. This has been a slow burn, since we both have many other demands on our lives, but it’s been worth it. Everyone who’s seen the work has been blown away by it, and we’ve already attracted one investor impressed by our vision and the quality of what we’ve done. This time round, Andy brought along another brilliant batch of character designs that totally captured two key characters in such a way that I’ll be able to write them more easily. And we nailed the package concept for the project bible, which has moved on in significant and positive ways since our initial thoughts.

Lesson: an old one, sometimes expressed as ‘the journey of a hundred miles begins with a single step’. Some projects demand a lot of input over time with no reward before they’re ready to share with the world. Also: choose your collaborators with care. Andy and I have worked together for years and we’re a good double act. Other joint endeavours have not always worked as successfully.

Other thoughts? All of these achievements helped me move forward a few spaces yesterday. But I barely wrote a word. Just sorted out some cover text for the project bible Andy and I are developing and send it to him late last night. The thing being, writing is only one of the skills a writer needs to make stuff happen. If you’re ambitious about where you’re headed, you’ll acquire the others needed along the way.

Who’s making the decisions about your future? And if it isn’t you, what are you going to do about that? Big stuff to think about, but it needs to be addressed. Especially if writing is going to be anything more than a pleasant hobby.

Way back when, I had a full time job at a London ad agency. And it didn’t satisfy me. I was paid not nearly enough to tolerate people who said they wanted creative ideas but wouldn’t recognise such if they trooped in wearing clown shoes and set fire to their trousers. Ultimately, I realised that even the thing about being paid more money wouldn’t help: I flat out did not want to be around some of those people any longer. Only, what to do about it?

The decision was made for me when a third of the agency’s staff were made redundant on the same day. Most people were understandably devastated — there were some decent human beings among them whose lives were ruined. Me? I was happy. I was free. And I realised that what I wanted to do with my freedom was write. Not the stuff I’d been underpaid to peddle on behalf of my employers, but whatever I wanted to create.

Only, what was that? Newly jobless, one of the first things I did was write a short story that got me a prize from the Bridport Festival. That seemed like a good omen. And when I moved out of London to Nottingham, I kept writing. Prose at first, but was then lucky enough to come across a community arts project where I attended some good classes on scriptwriting. Bing: I realised that this was the kind of writing I really enjoyed. Not only did it make the most of whatever knack I had for dialogue, it got me interacting with actors who wanted to work with me. Which led to me writing a short play that itself became the basis of a competition entry when The Times ran a search for film treatments. My success there — my submission was the first treatment I’d written — got me a meeting with Tim Bevan, the man behind Four Weddings And A Funeral. Another good omen.

And then it all kind of fell apart. I hooked up with a filmmaker and made a short with him that was a great learning experience, but made the mistake of hanging around with the same guy for a long time after that, during which I came up with no end of ideas, and got nowhere with them. Well, a good learning experience, but not one to be repeated.

Somewhere in there, I wrote a couple of episodes for Doctors. Again, a great experience, but in many ways it took me back to my ad agency days: I was coming up with ideas for someone else, and not developing my own vision. And yes, I do mean vision. It’s a word that might strike some as pretentious, but think about it: do you have a clear sense of what you want to write and where you want it to take you?

For me to find my vision I had to go through mental illness. This is not a path I would recommend. But since experiencing two psychotic episodes that got me sectioned, and recovering from them, I have been remarkably clear and consistent about what I want in life. And increasingly successful in achieving it.

The key for me is about creating work that I’m passionate about. So that’s what I do. If you can be happy writing episodes of medical drama or soap opera then good luck: I wish you well. But that doesn’t work for me, other than as part of a learning process. I want to create projects for film and other media that I can have true pride in. It’s something I’ve felt with my theatre work, but have yet to experience in any of my screen adventures. And I’d rather pursue that goal than accept the compromise of being just another hired hand on an ongoing series that I don’t really believe in.

I fear I am going to say some horribly old-fashioned things about The Trip, a vehicle for Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon. Which if it were an actual vehicle would be…what? It’s tempting to say a junk, but that’s to dismiss the show too easily, when actually it is worth some contemplation. Maybe a catamaran then: a curious twin hulled structure that holds your attention for a moment before you realise it’s just two canoes held together by a scaffold with a sail on it.

Steve Coogan is someone I hold in high regard. Rob Brydon considerably less so. And I like much of the work of Michael Winterbottom, the director who cast Coogan as Tony Wilson to brilliant effect in 24 Hour Party People. And who also made A Cock and Bull Story, an intermittently amusing realisation of the unfilmable nature of the novel Tristram Shandy. Or maybe it’s an anti-novel. That’s one of the terms people bandy about who like that kind of thing rather too intensely. Me? I love Flann O’Brien, whose writing treads similar paradoxical ground. But O’Brien tends to recognise when a horse has been flogged beyond the scope of mortality, and would look at you askance if you suggested filming poor Dobbin’s torment.

Which brings us back to The Trip. See, there was a strand in A Cock and Bull Story in which Coogan and Brydon did some semi-improvised stuff that riffed on their respective media profiles. Coogan, to give him credit, was and is admirable in his refusal to play the matey celeb game that so many of his peers collude in. Brydon is…well, he’s Rob Brydon. And their sparring carried over from the actual performances they gave in character into these other sequences of them out of costume. There’s an allusion to all this in The Trip, when one of them (I couldn’t tell) made reference to being like an 18th century dandy. Which — guess what? — was pretty much the remit for their roles in A Cock and Bull Story. Laugh? I almost did.

The Trip picks up on all this sorry stuff with the notion that Coogan has been asked by The Observer to do a tour of some restaurants in the north. Having split up with his partner, he asks Brydon to accompany him, and the two make their way out of London to do the gig. Which, to be fair, isn’t too bad a concept for a series. Tragically, Winterbottom’s interest is in the ho-hum postmodern business of teasing out the distinctions between the real Coogan and Brydon, their portrayal in the media, and their participation in the very show that you’re watching.

Does it work? Depends what you’re looking for. I guess there’s a case for this being an example of the kind of post-Seinfeld/Larry Sanders/30 Rock show that celebrates reflexive humour about not a great deal, while purporting to offer a peek into the lives of those we are fascinated by. But I’m not sure how fascinated I am by that kind of thing. To me, it comes across as Heat (the magazine, not the Michael Mann film) for the apathetic and jaundiced. And, fair enough, that’s not my demographic. More to the point, I find those who are in that catchment fairly smackable.

Thing is, I care about stuff. At the weekend in America, thousands gathered to participate in a rally two tv comedians had arranged to shake people out of complacency, and speak against the crazed rhetoric that oozes out of Fox News and from the mouths of Tea Party kooks who claim to be speaking on behalf of their nation. Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert’s Rally to Restore Sanity mattered. And, ultimately, I believe life matters. When art doesn’t…and this is the crux of my problem with The Trip…maybe I’m missing something, but what’s the point exactly? For once, the Bible expresses my sentiments with perfection: “Like a dog that returns to his vomit is a fool who repeats his folly.” Thank you, Proverbs 26:11. No thanks to the dogs who puked up The Trip.

A little while back, a friend of mine recommended a book that had itself been recommended by two people I respect a great deal. Only, the book isn’t actually in print right now, so I had to find a second hand copy through Amazon. Which turned up on Friday. And which, once I started it that night, I couldn’t help devouring until I finished it in the small hours of Saturday morning.

The book? The War of Art. It’s written by a screenwriter, Steven Pressfield, best known for The Legend of Bagger Vance. And it’s the single most insightful take on how life changes when you make the commitment to creativity as a vocation, rather than a hobby, that I’ve come across. Which might sound alarmingly pompous. The book is anything but.

What’s so special about The War of Art then? Well, let’s look at how it’s affected me since I read it. Yesterday, I called an artist friend, who with a writer had suggested a comics project to an editor. The editor liked half of their concept, and I instantly came up with what could be the missing element: a plot which takes full advantage of the unique aspect of the idea. It would work great for a thriller of my own, but I was more than happy to share it. If the editor likes it, great. If not, I get to play with it anyway. Result.

Later, at home, I set about picking up the pieces of a novel that I’d started in January, written two chapters of in three days, and not touched since I’d faffed around with the third in April. I spent eight hours working out what the issues were, creating a core to the story it previously lacked, and wrote a solid few pages of the abandoned chapter before settling down to sleep at midnight.

And today, an hour or so back, I was struck with what seems to be a unique take on that most tired of concepts, the vampire story. One that makes me smile when I think about it, and contains its unique angle within a three word title that’s a twist on an iconic phrase. And which I will very definitely be doing things to make happen as soon as I’ve advanced on a couple or five other fronts.

All this as a result of reading a book? As far as I can work out, yes. Reading The War of Art has been the only thing of note that’s happened since it turned up, and there seems to me to be a direct connection between the concepts I’ve been buzzing with and the general level of heightened energy I’ve felt since finishing it. Ker-ching.

As for the content of the book, I’m not sure I need to say much. Hopefully the testimonial above is powerful enough for you want to check out what Steven Pressfield has to say. With all this hyperbole, it seems only fair to include some from the book itself. For which you need to understand that Pressfield sees the biggest issue of creativity being overcoming resistance to actually get round to it. That in mind, what follows is still an extraordinary claim:

“You know, Hitler wanted to be an artist. At eighteen he took his inheritance, seven hundred kronen, and moved to Vienna to live and study. He applied to the Academy of Fine Arts and later to the School of Architecture. Ever see one of his paintings? Neither have I. Resistance beat him. Call it overstatement but I’ll say it anyway: it was easier for Hitler to start World War II than it was for him to face a blank square of canvas.”

Extraordinary claims need extraordinary evidence. On the evidence of my own experience since reading The War of Art, I’d say that Steven Pressfield is onto something.

Did the use of symbolism in writing get better or worse when psychologists started exploring the meaning of symbols? This is an issue for stories more generally in fact: does knowing how writing works make you a better writer, or handicap you with knowledge that you could arguably function better without?

I’m curious about this having seen The Hole yesterday. Twenty odd years ago, its director Joe Dante brought the world the film Gremlins, an anarchic comedy about a bunch of cute ciritturs that turn badass when exposed to water, using them to create a satire on consumerism and who knows what else. It was riotous fun stuff, and I somehow can’t imagine in any of the script development meetings that people were asking what the gremlins symbolised. They were having too much of a wild time going crazy with them.

The Hole starts out promisingly if conventionally enough, with a fatherless family moving into a small town. Two brothers, an adolescent moody one and a tousle haired youngster, are faced with forging new friendships and getting by — and not for the first time, their whole lives characterised by house moves. So when they discover a multiply padlocked hatch in the floor of the garage which leads to a seemingly bottomless pit, they’ve all of a sudden got a project to keep them motivated — and send down a Cartman doll on a rope to investigate just how deep the hole is. They get the rope back, but not the doll…

They’ve also got a cute teenage girl living next door, and in short order they’re exploring the hole with her. All well and good so far. And to be fair, the creepiness and suspense is kept up well for the first two thirds of the film. Then the kids tell the audience how the hole works, and what follows is cheap Oprah style psychology played out in what had been a promising scary film for a younger audience.

Problem being, the hole contains whatever you fear most.Which might work, as long as you don’t think too much about it. And in this case, too much thought has gone into it, by a writer (Mark L. Smith) who was maybe exploring his problems in therapy while putting them into the script.

It boils down to the older boy having daddy issues, his father having been locked up in a secure facility for some unspecified unpleasantness. Which is all very well, only the writer has thought entirely too much about how to represent the son’s fear of the father in a literal form, and even more irksomely how he can overcome that in approved pop psych fashion. And that derails all the promising stuff which has gone before and turns it into a cheesy Dr Phil routine.

Hey, if you’re looking for something to be scared of, that would be it: trite American versions of how the mind works. Frank Zappa said it best years ago: ‘What’s the ugliest part of your body? Some say your nose, some say your toes, but I think it’s your mind.’

Thing is, when symbols have a 1:1 correlation with something that exists in the world, they become banal and one dimensional. Daddy issues can be real enough, but how much more powerful if they come up in the form of a minotaur, a Candyman, a Freddie Krueger..?

The power of an effective symbol is precisely that it cannot be reduced to one shallow meaning. How much more powerful to have a symbol that seems to connect to every fear, or — more to the point — your own fears. Yes, that’s you the viewer, you the reader of this piece, bwah ha ha. If every fearful symbol can be contextualised and neutralised, we live in a world akin to Scooby Doo’s, where all of the baddies turn out to be a janitor wearing a mask. And there are people who’d like us to live in that kind of world, which is what scares me more than anything…

Right? So where were we? Developing ideas — and a story – for the Wellcome Trust’s biomedicine tv/movie pitch competition. Only, something has happened in the last few days that has changed my ambitions where the realisation of this story is concerned.

I’m easily influenced, and right now I’m dealing with the consequences of my new love for the band Everything Everything. Like them or not — and I love them — they’ve undeniably created something special in their debut album. There’s wit and craft at work in their meticulously constructed songs, but you don’t need to understand the degree of skill involved to appreciate what they’re doing. Unlike the majority of Manchester bands that have an exaggerated respect for that city’s musical heritage, Everything Everythng’s influences exist beyond the normal Oasis/Happy Mondays/New Order trifecta.

Personally, I hear slivers of everything from XTC to Gentle Giant in their sound, but what matters most of all is they leave me grinning like an ape at the sheer ludicrousness of what they pull off: herky jerky post-punk rhythms mixed with delicious harmony vocals and unquestionably prog-inflected guitar. And all in the service of hyperactive chart-bothering pop.

OK, but how is this going to help me be a better writer? Well, I want to avoid the exposition-heavy clunkiness of a lot of such stories, and I suspect Everything Everything provide a way in. Imagine a drama constructed like their music. A sense of overheard lyrics, overlapping for that matter. The effect of heightened reality by adopting that style. Short choppy scenes adding up to an ever shifting storyline. Hey, I’m sold.

Interestingly, the competition doesn’t necessitate such an approach, and the organisers only wants a 750 word treatment initially. But I’m thinking ahead, beynd the competition to the writing of the script and the evolution of its visual vocabulary, and this kind of thinking will inform everything I do in my submission. I won’t have room to go into my stylistic ambition, but its influence will be everywhere. And if that helps sort out the sheep from the goats, it’ll have been useful in the competition — as well as helped shape a project I’d love to come back to regardless of how it does competitively.

That approch is a more general working method for me: given the plethora of writing competitions out there, I only commit to entering ones that really do interest me, especially if new work is required. No point putting hours into developing something I have no true feeling for: it’ll show, as it does when I read scripts by writers who’ve scripted a particular project because they feel they ought to rather than because of any true passion.

The road to developing a tv or film project is a long and winding one with lots of detours: make sure you really are dedicated to your destination, and that it will take you in an interesting direction if not to the goal you once had in mind. That journey requires passion and commitment, and from time to time a new way to think about what you’re doing. Maybe a Manchester band with tricky constructions and falsetto singing isn’t going to inspire you — but keep your eyes and ears open for something that will. If you can’t be moved by the creativity of others, what hope do audiences have when they’re presented with your own work?

However difficult it seems or even is some days, remember that you’ve always got the one thing that people respond to in art of any kind: a unique perspective. No one responds to life like you do, and somewhere out there are enough people who’ll resonate to your particular description of it that you might even be able to turn your passion into a means of supporting yourself.

High-rolling attendees at London Fashion Week are being issued iPads. Which seems an odd decision, since these are people who probably already have one. These iPads are special though. They come pre-loaded with an app that allows you to know what the models you’re watching are wearing as they parade in front of you, and put your order in for the store you’re buying for there and then.

It’s William Gibson come to life. A confirmation that Gibson writes science fiction about the world we live in now rather than a future one. And it has vast implications for the future of entertainment media. As a writer, you should be aware of some of how all this is unfolding, since it applies to you. No use burying your head in the sand, saying you want the BBC to sort out all that stuff for you and leave you to write: this is a hugely exciting time for forward thinking writers, and one that you can either engage with or be steamrollered by as the juggernaut builds up momentum.

The future is happening all around us. You can download a free EP of the Trent Reznor soundtrack to David Fincher’s film The Social Network — a film about Facebook, if you can imagine such a thing — ahead of the release of the film itself. I signed up for a similar taster of David Byrne and Brian Eno’s second collaboration a couple of years back, and as well as being convinced to sign up for a deluxe version of the CD in an artsy package with bonus tracks, have been contacted by Byrne since about his collaboration with Fatboy Slim, a musical based on the life of Imelda Marcos.

All of this is evidence that we are approaching the End Times to a certain stick-in-the-mud way of thinking. Yes, we all know a Jeremy Clarkson analog who listens to Shed Seven while burning rubber on the way to buy an even bigger flatscreen tv that will primarily be used for watching key sports events. But over in Moscow, wild dogs roaming the underground stations have changed their behaviour to switch with the current of the times: pack leaders are now selected for intelligence rather than aggressiveness, all the better to coax food from Russian commuters as they go about their days.

It’s those dogs we should emulate if we want to thrive in the emerging digital media free-for-all. These are amazing times that present unprecedented opportunities for the canny and connected — and if you really are canny, you’ll get connected sooner rather than later. Not everything will work out as planned. I recently priced up how I’d go about getting a new edition of a niche book by a Scandinavian writer created at a smaller cost for buyers while still offering attractive profits to its author. Nothing came of that, but along the way I learned something about the economics of digital printing, and what’s involved in reformatting a book. Somewhere along the line, that knowledge may well be valuable.

If fashionistas can make onscreen orders at a live event, what’s possible for people viewing at home as they engage with their viewing technology? Like to download your favourite drama’s theme tune to your iPhone? Why not? How about the recipe for that centrepiece dish in the foodie film you drooled over the other night? Some of these things are already possible, I’m sure. Recent experiences are opening up the world in a new way for me, thanks to talks with an entrepreneur whose income comes largely from hi-tech attractions in a Singapore theme park that attracts a million visitors a year. It looks likely that we’ll be working together, which is hugely exciting — this is someone who knows how to turn IP into money, and I’ve got no shortage of intellectual property and the ability to create more…

Even in the 21st century, the British countryside is a very white place. So much so, that the appearance of sausages branded as being made by someone called The Black Farmer comes as a bit of a surprise in the local supermarket chilled food section.

The Black Farmer doesn’t appear in Tamara Drewe. But don’t worry, this isn’t a rant about the lack of representation of minorities in rural stories. Good grief, go down that road very long and you’ll end up with something as tokenistic as The Archers can be. Interesting to think about that issue though, and I’m fine with Tamara Drewe’s pale cast since to a large extent the film is a satire on class in an agrarian setting, and in satire part of the gig is to exaggerate what’s there. Which is lots of red-faced white-skinned country dwellers, bound together and separated by the class system.

Arguably there could have been an element to do with swan-eating East European migrants, but that wasn’t a feature of the landscape when Posy Simmonds was drawing the Tamara Drewe cartoon for The Guardian, so there’s no particular reason for such to appear in the Stephen Frears film adaptation of her work. All of which is to say that there’s often something conservative about satire, dedicated as it is to sending up what’s happening, and not presenting any kind of alternative vision of how things could be. The Thick Of It might get people riled at the snakiness of government, but is that really any kind of revelation? And does its apparent insider knowledge give it kudos, or just point to the impotence of writers to change the world?

Except there are writers who do change the world. The homeless charity Shelter was formed in response to the sixties tv play Cathy Come Home. Books including gay sex helped set the scene for changes to the law about homosexuality. Fiction, which includes drama, can hold a mirror to the world that helps people realise that change is necessary.

Holding that mirror in such a way that it brings to light things which many people haven’t seen can be a good thing. Captain Britain started life as an also-ran superhero, albeit one with some interesting creators involved in its development. But bottom line is the good Captain was a knock-off of the more famous Captain America. And then, in his latest incarnation, writer Paul Cornell gave a new take on what Captain Britain is about. He did this simply enough, by populating the comic with a cast more representative of modern Britain than it had been before.

Cornell’s breath of fresh air was a statement of intent, and never more so than his introduction of Faiza Hussain, a young Muslim woman who works as a doctor and acquires powers in the course of the story. Faiza is often the viewpoint character — which considering the readership of Marvel comics is older white men is an interesting and overdue choice. But hey, if Marvel fans can relate to alien overlords and lizard men, they can surely relate to a fresh-voiced Islamic woman — a very contemporary wielder of the sword Excalibur, straight from Arthurian myth.

It’s approaches like Paul Cornell’s that keep genre fiction topical, and stop it getting caught in tropes that are no longer appropriate for the times we live in. We don’t live in a world where Fu Manchu style sinister orientals are credible, or where Jewish characters can be depicted as money-hungry and hook-nosed, because we know those things aren’t true now and only ever caught on because of prejudice and bigotry in the first place. There’ll always be a justified place for comedies like Tamara Drewe. But as a reader, and as a writer, stay open to ways in which you can depict the world we live in with honesty and in the rich complexity that diversity creates.