Writing does not exist in a vacuum. It’s not enough to have a brilliant script on your computer, or in a folder with a bunch of other work. Scripts are documents that are the starting point of a collaborative process. And that process begins with sending your work to other people for their feedback.

First, there are the people you trust to offer something like objective feedback on your writing. Maybe friends, possibly family, in an ideal world other writers, but certainly people who can offer useful criticism. That’s the stage I’m at having circulated the first couple of chapters of the novel I’m writing to some female friends. I’ve been particular about choosing women, and women who are intelligent readers — and in one case a writer — because those chapters are narrated by two sisters, and I felt confident that female readers would pick up any failings in my ability to inhabit the skin of those characters.

Fortunately, the feedback is very positive. As one friend commented, “I hope to fuck it’s published because I NEED to read the lot!”. What it lacks in specificity it makes up for with attitude. And I’m hoping to get more detailed comments from my writer pal tomorrow.

So, there’s the feedback you can ask for that’s useful when engrossed in a project, especially at those points when you’re unsure whether it’s utterly brilliant or entirely fatuous. And that feedback can help guide your writing and revising process until you’ve got a draft you’re happy to send out into the world. Which is when the other kind of feedback comes in.

Sooner or later, as a scriptwriter, you need to engage with the industry. The exception is for street performers, but if so you’ll be exposed to the direct opinion of an audience, which either sticks round and puts money in your hat, or departs in favour of the half price fridges advertised in the window behind you. For most of us though, we’re faced with the business of sending scripts out to production companies, broadcasters, theatres, and so forth. And what counts at this point is anything other than a generic rebuff, which is why I was pleased to receive a letter in today’s post from a production company I rate highly:

“Thank you for sending us your script. I have now read and discussed it with the rest of the development department.

“We thought your idea had the potential to be an interesting and thought provoking series. Although I’m afraid that given our large development slate currently we don’t think it is the right project for us.”

Which, admittedly, isn’t as positive as “we enclose a six figure cheque and an invitation to our hotel at Cannes” but, you know, ain’t shabby either. Rather more encouraging was the response I got from an actor looking for a play suitable to stage this year, whose response to Breaking In — available as a sample script on this very site, folks — was “I love it, it’s on our short list and my personal fave…I was wondering, did you have any other one act plays?”.

You will note, as I did, that the enthusiasm of the response varies according to the financial rewards of the medium: I’ll be able to pay for a slap-up meal on the proceeds of the play, whereas I’d be looking to clear my mortgage with the tv project. So it goes.

Feedback, as the saying goes, is the breakfast of champions. The more perspectives on your work you can glean, the more you can learn from them, and the better that will shape your words so that a potential purchaser will squee when they see them. (‘Squee’ is a technical term, yes.) And one strategy I found useful in my earlier days — and still do — was to always be waiting to hear back about at least one project in addition to the one you’ve just heard about. Meaning, you’ve got an incentive to keep producing work and looking forward to good news rather than brooding on feedback that didn’t tell you what you wanted. Right now, I’m waiting to hear back from a radio producer, Big Finish (who put out a call for Dr Who ideas a while back), and a local audio drama project. Wish me luck — I know I do.

Why do we need narrative to help us engage with games? Isn’t the interaction of players controlling pieces enough to provide engagement? Apparently not. The key is in the business already mentioned of ‘players controlling pieces’. Whether those pieces are on a chess board or in a science fiction online game, the key to it all is the player’s interaction with a symbol system. In the moment, symbols are not viewed as pieces of wood or collections of pixels — they are emblematic of ourselves, and our identification with them is what leads people to have real emotional experiences while engaged in play.

It’s the same when people follow football clubs. They get caught up in the action on the pitch, and off — newspapers are full of tales of footballers and even their partners, boardroom coups and bids for foreign players. Again, the whole experience is of immersion in a narrative, and even though the supporters are spectators than participants the emotional engagement is all-encompassing.

Sometimes, a game’s narrative can spill over into other areas of the lives of players. There was a case the other year of a German man who travelled all the way to Britain to kill another participant in an online game. And real world fortunes change hands for virtual artefacts in World of Warcraft.

None of this should be surprising, really. Babies respond positively to a balloon with an upturned line drawn on it, interpreting it as a smile. Our relationship with story is hardwired. So, for those of us engaged with creating games, how do we take advantage of that tendency?

Fortunately, there are plenty of tools in the writer’s arsenal to provide assistance for this kind of thinking. One classic example is The Hero’s Journey — I know of a writer who gained a position with a computer games company based primarily on his knowledge of this story template, popularised by Chris Vogler in his book The Writer’s Journey and derived from the pioneering work of Joseph Campbell.

The Hero’s Journey is a valuable skeleton that can be built up in all sorts of ways according to your intentions. The basic idea of a protagonist who is called to act against an enemy, but can’t tackle that antagonist until they’ve found their inner hero, and then returns to their community changed, is a powerful archetype. And no wonder: it’s distilled from the study of hundreds, maybe thousands, of mythical tales from cultures worldwide.

It’s all about execution. The Hero’s Journey is too often applied clunkily, with stereotypically ‘wise’ mentors imparting wisdom to their youthful charges. But it doesn’t have to be like that. As with any tool, it can be used to create work of quality — or crassness. That said, how about exploring alternative ways of creating story for your game? Vladimir Propp studied Russian folklore and came up with a list of 31 elements that a story could contain. It doesn’t have to use all of them, but the typology is worth looking at, and imaginatively applied could bring fresh life to a concept that you’re tiring of.

Given that gaming is bigger than film these days, it makes sense for developers to pay more attention to story than has traditionally been the case. People complain that Hollywood films are more like games, and at the same time games increasingly resemble films. It’s already the case in terms of design — now narrative has to catch up. And that’s nothing to do with technology and investment, and all to do with attitude and willingness to think in new ways — while making the most of age-old paradigms too. Sure, there are issues to do with interactivity that make games and film fundamentally different, but there’s every reason to believe that games can work with our innate desire to be excited by and involved with story.

Marshall McLuhan was famous for fifteen minutes way back when for trumpeting ‘the medium is the message’, and he had a point, even if no two people can agree precisely what it was. Right now I’m thinking of business models to support an online project, the collaboration with Andy Tudor that I mentioned recently, and like McLuhan in that it involves thinking about the nature of media, and in particular how to create a commercially viable project in the online age.

Getting the model right is important, and what’s interesting with the online scene is there’s no definitive ‘how to’ that will produce the cashflow you’re looking for. Well, that’s true with offline work too — the mainstream comics model is one based on revenues raised from monthly publication. But in recent years that trend has been joined by another, for collecting serialised works under one cover. So you can buy an anthology of Daredevil issues for instance. And that in turn has led to a change in the way that writers conceive of their work: many now ‘write for the trade (paperback)’, which allows them more time to develop a story that works in 120 or so pages with rising and falling arcs and all that stuff you read about in McKee, rather than being five cliffhangers followed by a concluding issue.

The serialise-and-anthologise model works because the costs of producing the comic are covered by the audience that buys monthly comics, meaning the profits from the collection are gravy, and increasingly part of the money that creators make for their work. But that’s only one way to do it. As book publishers have entered the graphic novel field, it’s become common for writers and artists to be given advances for the work they’re going to do.

Warren Ellis is a canny thinker about the economics of the comics business. Interested in creating work that’s experimental by mainstream standards, he collaborated with publisher Avatar to create the Apparat line of comics. The first wave of Apparat were single-issue sized, and the downside of that is they tend to exist in a shop only so long before they’re removed from the shelves. So, next time round, the Apparat titles — one of which is reviewed here, and others of which I may well cover in time to come — were done as 48 page ‘graphic novellas’. Never mind the nomenclature: what it means is that these slim volumes are on the shelves long term, not restricted to the ‘this month’s titles’ selection but filed alongside Watchmen and Persepolis and the other anthologised collections and original graphic novels. Meaning you can buy Frankenstein’s Womb or other graphic novellas at your convenience rather than having to get it in a particular short calendar period, and that Avatar, Ellis, and his artists can benefit from the shelf life of their brainchild. Smart thinking.

Ellis scored again with another Avatar project, the online comic Freakangels. A serial produced in weekly installments of several pages like the 2000AD comics Ellis was familiar with in his youth, this collaboration with artist Paul Duffield is a big hit online, and has also spawned successful anthologies. And it may be that the concept of the story was geared to the audience that Ellis and Avatar have cultivated: Ellis’s online presence attracts a significant number of young people into alternative lifestyles, and the Freakangels themselves are the ultimate outsiders, misunderstood even by their peers. That comment, by the way, is by no means a criticism: what sense would it have made for Ellis to launch into a comic about the Lakeland poets in their twilight years? It’s easier to write with constraints than utterly free of them, and creating work for an identified audience is one constraint that makes a great deal of sense.

It’s not just Ellis that Andy and I have been learning from — the recent piece on Alex de Campi and Christine Larsen’s Valentine has prompted us to think of what’s possible as well. And those are just two examples of the way that the digital scene is changing the way that forward thinking creators conceive of developing profitable properties.

I’ve been wondering what would have happened had I moved to Manchester at the time that I instead chose to come to Nottingham. Given that Manchester has a strong media economy, with plenty of tv production companies and lots of multimedia happening, there’s every chance I’d be further on now than I actually am. But, being Nottingham based has introduced me to some wonderful people — playwright and writing tutor Jon Wood, without whose encouragement I might not have written the short play that became a treatment I entered in a Times competition which won me a meeting with Working Title’s Tim Bevan. And Andy Tudor, a highly talented illustrator and designer with whom I’m developing a project aimed at children.

It’s this project that I’ve just taken to Manchester, for a workshop organised and partly delivered by Mel Norman of Media-Sauce. The day was all about familiarising a varied group of aspiring media tycoons with the intricacies involved in realising profit from multi media intellectual property. Just what Andy and I need at this point, basically: we’re confident about the quality of what we’re doing creatively, and the feedback from people who’ve seen it is great…but we’re two creative dudes, not high-rolling negotiators.

Fortunately, help was at hand. As well as Mel’s invaluable contributions, there was a great group of fellow students whose input was gratefully received over the course of the day, and whose varied experience of animation, production, collaboration and the general business of Making Stuff Happen was a core part of what I brought home. Plus, there were two guest speakers — Amy Chandler, a multimedia IP expert from Pannone LLP, whose common-sense approach to the nuts and bolts of copyright and trademarks was very welcome. And Andrew Sparrow, acknowledged as one of the heavyweights of IP law and the internet, whose lively and engaging style derives from a wealth of experience in the trenches, and who incorporated questions from the group into his informal and instructive talk.

Mel is very much engaged in what she’s speaking about too, drawing on experience as a producer in tv and film. Her description of the bewildered reaction of former colleagues baffled by her choice to move to this odd little fad called online is a sadly familiar one. I’m sure dinosaurs had similar conversations about the fleet-footed hominids scurrying around them once upon a time. Reality check: every form of media is converging, and sooner or later all will emerge from a portal that transmits 3 minute songs and 90 minute films equally well (regardless of whether you or a recognised name created them), can send them to other people just like that, and the very technology of which mitigates against old-fashioned notions of ownership. That’s the reality of the 21st century, and the legal system is a horse and buggy compared to its sleek supersonic styling. Neither are there definitive business models about how to make a success from this new reality. Which is tremendously exciting.

Have a look online. There’s a world of freaks and geeks out there, and some of them are making a living from being on the internet purely through doing their thing, whatever that may be. Some of them are cartoonists who’ve realised that you can make more money from merchandising your own products than being syndicated in newspapers. Some are experts in one or another domain, and have established an authority that attracts advertisers. Others are selling their artwork to an international audience. Others still have realised that the ubiquity of free content means that, if anything, fans value limited edition versions of their fave creators’ work even more than what’s readily available: supporting a creator this way is the crowdsourced version of having a patron.

Understanding new media possibilities puts creators in a better position to reach old media goals, too. All of which has got me thinking, and looking forward to the next time Andy and I put our heads together, with renewed energy for a project that we want to be as rewarding financially as it is creatively, and to reach the biggest audience possible. Watch this space.

Back in the day, DC Thomson’s comics were free of the names of those who wrote and drew the stories they contained. Children would be confused by the information, so the editors said, and be drawn out of the tales they were reading. More to the point, it meant that the writers and artists were anonymous, making it harder for them to build up a fanbase and use that as leverage to ask for more money, or be talent spotted by rival publishers.

This resentment of the people who wrote and drew the comics that the publishers made money from is a typical attitude of the industry, even today. Marvel and DC like to hook their readers onto characters, and the fact that they and the people chronicling their adventures are largely interchangeable means that creative talents can be switched from one title to another without much impact on sales. And as a system, it works. Particularly if you’re the publisher.

In the sixties, all that started to change when fans started to organise, and wrote to and hung out with the people who created their favourite comics. In turn, some of those fans went on to become a new generation of talent in the seventies working for those same publishers — often with not much more ambition than to follow in the footsteps of those they’d admired. Pop will indeed eat itself.

Fast forward to the 1980s. A band called Pop Will Eat Itself celebrated a comics writer whose capabilities were well in advance of his predecessors. Alan Moore knows the score, said the Poppies. Like them, he was a working class product of pop culture, who referenced high and low art in his work. (One of the Poppies, Clint Mansell, has gone on to become a celebrated film composer, collaborating with the Kronos Quartet for the soundtrack of Requiem for a Dream. Alan Moore’s recent work includes The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, which imagines a world based on myriad fictional sources from Camus to Ian Fleming.)

Moore was, and arguably is, most known for Watchmen, his seminal collaboration with artist David Gibbons. It is a work of singular impressiveness, perhaps genius. There sure as hell wasn’t anything like it in comics before the 12 issue series appeared. And it’s appeared ever since, in a number of graphic novel editions, including the superduper paving slab sized one that I invested in the other year. Watchmen is also a truly lousy film, one which Moore had nothing to do with. And he’s taken that stand further, relinquishing his financial rights to the work he created for DC and passing it on to his artists, to give him more time to concentrate on projects that truly matter to him: Jerusalem, an epic novel charting the history of the world as seen from Northampton, and the internationally distributed fanzine Dodgem Logic.

And now DC are planning spin-offs of Watchmen. Prequels and sequels, but you can bet nothing else that equals the brilliance of the original. And DC know that. Which is why led by Paul Levitz they never made such a crass move. Now under Dan DiDio, that’s precisely what they’re doing. Making DiDio even more of a numpty than Simon Cowell, who believes the world wants and needs his banal music, and the preening wannabes who perform it.

Make no mistake: like the film Watchmen, anything that appears bearing that branding is going to be karaoke. Remember that phrase means ‘empty voice’. And sure as hell the comics shit out of DC’s sphincter will bear no more relationship to Alan Moore’s Watchmen than an Oasis tribute band does to The Beatles at their height. But people will buy them, and some of them will enjoy what they read, for the same reason that millions eat at McDonalds when actual burgers are available elsewhere. All of which is a reminder that, for the majority of publishers, the lowest common denominator is what it’s about — even if at least some of the creators signed up to them aspire to writing and drawing work of lasting worth.

So, writer-director Stephen Poliakoff has had a hissy fit with the BBC over their insistence that he needs to deliver a script before any new project is given the go-ahead. Seems the £3.7 million spent on his recent feature Glorious 39 was not a shrewd investment, having recouped less than £285,000. Rather than adopting a contrite approach, Poliakoff seems to have a serious case of entitlement, perhaps symptomatic of his gilded roots.

That said, I am not unsympathetic to Poliakoff’s situation, while — to put it mildly — not being a fan of the man’s work. Now, it’s wise to be wary of anyone suggesting that there was a golden age of any sort in any domain, but you don’t have to look too far back in the BBC’s history to discover that things were very different once. The era of Play for Today brought some startling drama to the screen, and writers such as Alan Bleasdale and Dennis Potter. The free rein they had (not the lack of g in rein: the term’s etymology is to do with slackening a rider’s hold on a horse, and is nothing to do with royalty) gave rise to the blossoming of some extraordinary talent.

But, at the same time, a lot of stuff the corporation produced was dreadful. For every Edge of Darkness there were several misfires like Triangle, a soap-on-a-boat travelling through sludgy waters under a slate sky. Doctor Who is rightly remembered for its classic episodes, but there were a lot of dismal ones in there too. And don’t get me started on It Ain’t ‘Alf Hot Mum. More control at the top doesn’t guarantee better drama — far from it — but it’s not a bad means of employing some kind of filtering. Which is what’s happening more and more. New writers are ushered in through the Writers Academy, and having been told the way the BBC likes things, are increasingly creating the scripts for long-established shows like Holby and Casualty.

You can like that or dislike it, but that’s the reality. And it has good and bad aspects. Also, comical ones. When I’d got through the door at Doctors and started submitting ideas, there was one I particularly liked that featured a ghost. My script editor liked the concept, but ran into a problem that she had to consult colleagues about: did ghosts exist within the world of Doctors? A small group of script editors and producers convened to discuss this issue, like a Church of England synod, wrestling with the issue of the afterlife in daytime medical drama. Never mind the fact that the ghost in the story was as bogus as those that featured in Scooby Doo, though was more sophisticated than a janitor with a rubber mask on to put those meddling kids off the trail. No, the spirit world of Letherbridge — the town where Doctors is set — had to be defined by committee.

That kind of stuff goes with the territory of working with institutions as big as the BBC. Poliakoff should consider himself exceptionally lucky that he’s been allowed to play with the toys there at all, and for as long as he has — but his ego and sense of entitlement are indicated by the fact that security personnel were called during his meeting with BBC drama commission controller Ben Stephenson.

If Poliakoff really is as all that as he supposes he is, then he should be able to discover his true worth on the free market. Find out who is willing to stump up the readies for him to bring one of his scripts to the screen, and how many people are then prepared to watch his new insights into the milieu of troubled toffs. How about doing a new project about a creative wunderkind who is cast out by those who nurtured him, and has to find his own way through a world of beastly financiers and cold commerce?

There’s an outfit — I won’t dignify or give them publicity by naming them — offering an online course in Advanced Dialogue, which will teach you 47 ways to make your dialogue sizzle and get Hollywood actors panting with excitment at the prospect of speaking your words. And I’m thinking ‘Advanced Dialogue? I don’t remember doing a class at any point on Advanced Talking’, which is presumably what such a hi-falutin’ concept calls for.

More to the point, which is more important: dialogue skills or listening skills? As far as I’m concerned, you have no business writing words to go into a fictional person’s mouth until you can demonstrate an ability to sift through actual conversations and remember what startled, saddened or otherwise affected you. The biggest tool you have for writing dialogue comes in a pair, one either side of your head.

Which isn’t to say that dialogue skills can’t be sharpened. But it starts off with that first hand experience, to which can then be added skills from the realm of linguistics. Nothing too technical, and some people have such an ear for speech that they don’t need that kind of knowledge. But I know that I’ve been assisted in my writing by knowing things like what a nominalisation is.

A what? OK, break it down. The first three letters — nom — will be familiar from the term nom de plume. They indicate name. The rest is a fancy way of saying something about the process of naming. In particular, the way that we capture a whole bunch of stuff that happened — a process, involving verbs — and put it into a noun. Like, for instance, the term ‘heist’. Which five simple letters mask what could have been weeks of reconnoissance work, planning, and the assembly of a team fit for the job at hand.

Knowing the word ‘heist’, we can use in in dialogue confident that the audience will fill in the blanks without us having to go into massive detail. Saves time, and allows the writer to paint with broad brushstrokes. We know that in Reservoir Dogs a heist has happened. Its details become apparent in the aftermath, which is what the story concentrates on.

Conversely, there are times when a nominalisation can be used to spring a surprise on the audience. Even now, when a character refers to being in a relationship, odds are most audience members will be thinking of a heterosexual one, especially since Hollywood is so homophobic about what roles actors play. The realisation that a character has a same sex partner counts as difference.

All of this, if you think about it, is to do with the pictures that audiences make in their heads based on the words that they hear. And you as writer are responsible for those words. As such, you have a certain degree of influence over the pictures too. Not total, because our internal imagery is personal, and your references and mine aren’t the same. But still, you do exercise a lot of control over how audiences think and feel.

All of which, by the way, doesn’t just apply to dialogue. Scene descriptions are just as important. Your job is to persuade the director that the way they want to film a scene is the way that you’ve implicitly described. And hopefully you’ve described it well. Either way, the director will get nearly all the credit for it, since they have more status. Get used to that, or start writing for radio or the theatre, where the writer is more respected — and less well paid.

Words have power. Bards way back when were feared because the power of sarcasm could ruin a man’s reputation. Politicians have speechwriters to work their contemporary magic — I still have no idea what George Bush the First was referring to when he talked about ‘a thousand points of light’, a phrase repeated in his speeches again and again when he was standing for office. But I do know that when people make mental images of lots of sparkly lights around them, it makes them feel good. And it’s by keeping curious about how language works when you come across it — in overheard conversations, in tv ads, in slam poetry and food labelling — that you begin to develop a feel for how this stuff works.

I have mixed feelings about Hustle. Thing being, I am fascinated by deception, the art of the con, and all that stuff lovingly documented by close-up conjuror Ricky Jay and celebrated in scripts by his buddy David Mamet. Which puts me firmly in the show’s catchment area, you’d think.

Only, in practice, Hustle is more often than not a disappointment. A half-baked piece of tame light entertainment, implicitly hampered by its protagonists being ‘nice’ con artists, who target nasty people and liberate their money to exact revenge on behalf of hapless third parties.

So, I am surprised and happy to report that the first episode of the sixth series was tremendous fun. The pace was zippy, the attitude jaunty, and the whole was a skilfully written and directed piece of pop entertainment of quality and distinction. In some ways, I was reminded of what people go on about, and on and on about, when they reminisce about shows like The Avengers (sixties incarnation): cheeky sexy fun that’s somehow essentially British.

The episode started gleefully with a fake Kylie Minogue tv shoot, set up to relieve a central casting Arab sheikh from £250,000. Only, this was a bogus Kylie who was really one of the gang that Michael Stone (aka ‘Mickey Bricks’, I kid you not) leads. Gleeful nonsense, in other words.

Their next victim is plucked from the headlines: a banker whose institution has been bailed out by the taxpayer and has pocketed a fat pension. A panto villain — his nickname was Piggy for godsake. Boo, hiss. And oh, what joy — however predictable — to see him stitched up by the crew…

What made things different this time round, and will continue to for this season, is that Mickey meets his near-match in a sexy Detective Chief Inspector determined to add his scalp to her impressive collection. Only, Mickey likes his scalp where it is, and has no intention of giving it up, even for a woman who — to use the show’s vernacular — is mostly posh with a bit of dirty thrown in.

Of course, the team turn up top. But it’s a close thing. And part of the skill is in the hands of writer and series originator Tony Jordan, who structures the episode so that you find out what happened for real in a flashback. Meaning maximum tension is extracted beforehand by showing Mickey together with the mark and the briefcase containing a cool half million the fat banker is going to hand over, and the police busting Mickey when he has the case in his red hand.

There were some suitably cool directorial flourishes, in the tradition of the show’s flash visual vocabulary. Split screen shenanigans used to good effect, play with time distortion, and general dynamism where colour and shadow were concerned. It all helped give the show a sheen that goes with its high-rolling subject matter, altogether appropriate since the benchmark for this kind of material is set by expensively styled films like the Ocean’s series.

Tony Jordan must have been cackling with some of the lines he came up with, referencing Anne Widdecombe’s arse and having the pseudo-Kylie’s Arabic patron tell her that her version of Locomotion was shit. I’ll leave you to check out the full picture over on iPlayer — thankfully it convinced, and amused as much as it convinced. Otherwise the whole would have fizzled out as surely as a Star Wars prequel, audience goodwill pissed up the wall by cynical opportunism.

So, kudos to Kudos — the production company responsible for the equally stylish and sophisticated Spooks for BBC1, and The Fixer, similarly distinctive over on ITV. Three audience-friendly returning series with intriguing high concepts. Nice one, guys.

Reports I’m getting from people better placed than myself to know are that development money for new tv projects is hard to come by. Which might explain why, despite the favourable response to my drug worker drama The Sharp End, I haven’t had a bite as a result.

Not that I was expecting things to be so straightforward. More realistically, people who liked my writing on that pilot script might want to talk to me about writing projects of their own. Which tentatively started to happen at one point, with a drama series set in a world that had parallels to the one I was writing about, but came to nothing.

Still, I’m moving forward with The Sharp End anyway. Started to do a rewrite yesterday, based partly on wise feedback from Philip Palmer, some of which I haven’t acted on until now, with a view to sending it out to a dozen or more production companies in the New Year. Again, the expectation is more that it’ll serve as a door opener than anything.

There’s also the multimedia project I’m developing. And I had a breakthrough with that when I caught up with a friend who is a director of a Soho post-production business. One missing piece of the jigsaw was what motivation I could offer to a games company to go with our untested concept and not one they’d developed in-house. I now have a very sensible answer to that question, albeit one that requires the investment of a chunk of money neither I nor my partner in this venture have at our disposal. But that’s what we were expecting, and is why we’ve set up as co-directors of a limited company, so that we offer a chunk of same to the investors we’ll be speaking to.

Somewhere, the tv future and multimedia one converge. In not many years time, households and individuals will utilise portals through which they access both that which is currently called television, along with games and the internet. Which is one reason why tv development money is scarce: noone is sure what the future holds, though some bigger players such as the BBC can shape it purely through the choices they make about access to their archives. But only to an extent: even though the Christmas Dr Who is available at the BBC website, a sizeable number of people prefer illegal downloads because they don’t like the BBC’s iPlayer interface.

At the moment, I know about this stuff at a distance, but not as a consumer. And that’s something that needs to change. With that in mind, I’m planning to get an iPhone, to engage with what’s happening in digital media as it progresses, and find out at first hand the highs and lows of test piloting the future. There’s just the small matter of my phone contract not being up for renewal until July, but having been a good Orange customer for some years, I’m hoping that a bit of persuasion will see me tricked out before then.

With the iPhone, this bizarre world of apps that I’m hearing about, and have seen thanks to a few friends who own one, and their chirruping presence at seemingly every coffee shop I visited in Melbourne two months back, will become a reality. And it’s a reality I need to embrace: the multimedia project I’m co-devising is designed for just such a world, and I’m going to feel a bit of a fake turning up to meetings without being able to demonstrate on my own handheld gizmo. That role falls to my partner at this point, and both of us need to get tooled-up.

Fingers crossed, at least one of those meetings with a potential investor in the multimedia project will happen in the next few weeks. It’s a distinct possibility anyway, and means more putting of noses to grindstones, and shoulders to the wall, but you know what? I don’t mind. I’m long enough in the tooth to have picked up that success in this business is not just about the quality of what you do creatively, but your ability to treat it as if it really can make some money for people. Otherwise, it’s a hobby, and for that I have swimming pools and CDs to keep me occupied.

How many stories are there? Well, one answer is there are thousands upon thousands, since there’s no shortage of films washing up at cinema screens the world over. But look a bit closer and you’ll start to notice disturbing similarities…

Virtually all American films are predicated on a model that works pretty much as follows: hero/ine achieves their outcome against improbable odds, experiencing a transformation of character in the process. Which is all well and good, as far as it goes. And, to be fair, it does have its utility: if you’re going to be spending ninety or more minutes in the company of an imaginary character you’re encouraged by various dramatic means to identify with, best that the experience is an enjoyable one.

Problem is, firstly that said model omits any number of fascinating and compelling stories in which people fail to get what they want, a life experience which may be frustrating but is an inherent part of the human condition. Second, that the model described is increasingly applied to television, another medium which you’d hope is a broader canvas for storytellers to spin their tales.

Especially in public service broadcasting, which has a wide remit, isn’t there room for a broader spectrum of stories than ones in which people achieve their goals through persevering against the odds? What’s happened in the last decade is that people involved in commissioning tv programmes have been sent on Robert McKee courses and the like, all of which trot out the same old message about three act redemptive structures.

Now, I have high regard for McKee as it happens, but there’s a difference between writers using the likes of his Story to guide their work and script editors and producers using it as a stick to keep errant writers in line. And according to someone who knows a lot more people in the industry than I do, that’s exactly what’s happening.

Similar abuses are made of the Hero’s Journey. It’s an interesting and valid template for story arcs, and one that’s well worth becoming familiar with. But it’s a very selective account of how mythical stories function. It neglects that considerable number of stories in which heroes fail to get what they’re after, and are killed or suffer divine punishment in the process. Now, if all this Hero’s Journey stuff is as significant and archetypal as all that, surely that would suggest that humans have an inherent need to hear stories of defeat as well as victory?

I approached someone I respect recently to ask for their thoughts on a script I’m writing. They turned me down because the story mixes genres, and didn’t believe this would be commercially viable. Which is a fair point, but a defeatist one. We’re living in a world where Charlie Kaufman writes uncharacterisable scripts to great acclaim. Where the likes of Warp X are explicitly interested in genre fusion for the potential it creates for new stories. And tv is breaking new ground with shows like Lost and Misfits.

All of those examples point to a future in which new forms of story will be welcomed. And we’re at a fascinating time for that to come about. The convergence of computer and television in one box, and the use of digital technology to stream films as well as games and tv shows and whatever the hell is playing on YouTube, could well present a tipping point not just in a technological sense, but in terms of the types of stories that audiences want to watch.

Let’s hope so. The alternative is that technology marches on and Avatar becomes the benchmark not just for sophisticated graphics, but for complacent storytelling. And that’s not the future I signed up for.