So, I spent yesterday over at De Montfort University at a pitching event arranged by regional screen agency EM Media. Quite why Britain’s most landlocked university features tv ads with dolphins I still don’t know, but it’s home to one of the UK’s various screenwriting MA courses, and I’ve been pretty impressed with the calibre of its graduates, some of whom have gone on to establish careers in television.

The event was run along the lines of a speed dating session, and if I were as successful in that arena as I was yesterday I’d have a lovelife so busy I’d be doing more snogging than blogging, that’s for sure. But in both fields it’s quality and not quantity that matters, so how did it work from that perspective?

I had seven minutes each with the representatives of various film, tv, animation and corporate sector outfits. We’d been briefed to prepare one pitch for the occasion, but with an opportunity like that, naturally I tailored what I was pitching to suit the person I was talking to. So, the guy who did animation for tv got to hear about my science fiction series for people who’d love Buffy. The guy wanting films in the under £2m bracket was told about Trouble Magnet, an emo rite of passage story that combines elements of Juno and Billy Elliot. Someone else was pitched a psychological thriller based around a cop in a mental hospital. And there was even someone there who did want to talk about the project that they’d read about beforehand, my tv drama serial set in the world of drugs work.

The ‘trick’ to all of this, if interacting with human beings can be called a trick, is to identify what the person I was pitching to was about. No point trying to flog dark post-watershed tv to someone interested in light comedy films, after all. Which seems easy enough, and requires two things. First, the ability to assess where someone’s coming from fairly quickly. Second, a varied portfolio of projects so you really can match a project to the person you’re pitching to.

Overall then, I was very happy with the day, and people I pitched to…which also included a fellow pitcher, since he’s looking to get into making digital animated features with his partner in crime, and it so happens that they’re looking for someone to develop stories with. And most of the people I was pitching to seemed to be credible people, with one exception: I was concerned that in one case I was dealing with someone I wouldn’t feel comfortable with walking into a room on my behalf to secure funding for a feature film, say, because I was a lot more confident than they were. But maybe they’re someone who gets all resourceful when placed in a room full of financiers, so I gave them the benefit of the doubt. Besides, if things don’t work out, I lose nothing anyway.

It surprises me when people get nervous around pitching. Some people expressed uncertainty about themselves, or were unduly suspicious of the people we were pitching to. All wasted energy, in my eyes. If you can’t be confident and enthusiastic when you’re talking about something that you’re passionate about, when on earth will you be? And if you can’t communicate your belief in your creative projects, how is anyone else supposed to share that belief and use it to fuel the long process of getting a concept funded and developed?

Steve Whitaker is dead, and none of you know who I’m talking about.  Which is a shame.  Steve was an immensely talented artist, and a genuinely lovely man.  I came across him at the London Cartoon Centre in the late 1980s, his lanky frame and mop of hair a good example of the theory that comic artists tend to look as if they’ve drawn themselves. 

Steve was clearly very intelligent, at least in the Stephen Fry sense of that word: someone who has drunk widely from every source that culture has to offer, from knowledge of Greek myth to obscure jazz musicians.  And in other senses his intelligence was limited: a harsh way to put things, but I don’t know how else to account for his inability to translate his undeniable gifts into a reliable way of supporting himself.  But I’m very much a pragmatist, or at any rate have something of an entrepreneurial streak, and Steve danced to the beat of more elfin drums, like those you can imagine his beautifully depicted characters playing.  Steve’s characters came complete with a sense of art history being paraded in front of you effortlessly, a touch of Art Deco here, of classical painters I don’t even know the names of there, and it’s that evident quality that made his work both distinctive and ill-suited to the demands of a market that primarily traffics in cheesecake illustration.

Just 52 when he died unexpectedly the other day, Steve’s death is the second from the world of the Cartoon Centre.  The other was cartoonist and musician Andy Roberts, who died maybe a couple of years ago.  Andy was someone else who looked like one of his own drawings, and opened my eyes to words, pictures and sounds that made my life that bit richer.  Andy was the punk to Steve’s beatnik, and it was a pleasure to spend time in the company of either – and even better when both were in full swing, swapping stories and dreaming out loud. 

I was less sure of myself at this point, and a bit embarrassed about my tastes in comparison to theirs, but they both had time for me.  And that led to me editing and publishing an anthology comic, Discordia, one review of which captured what I and the Cartoon Centre were about when it said words to the effect that the comic was proof of the Centre succeeding in a way that nobody could have anticipated.  Looking back, that remark makes a lot of sense to me: Discordia was a comic that favoured narrative over style, and had no special regard for genre, and that describes the evolution of my writing subsequent to the Cartoon Centre pretty well.

Discordia was named after the Roman Goddess of Chaos, known to the Greeks as Eris, and Steve and Andy’s deaths are further confirmation that death is part of her beat as much as anything else.  She continues to crop up for me in one form or another, and I’ll end this piece with something that started in one place – about NLP trainer Michael Breen and performance poet Murray Lachlan Young’s excellent Captivating Communication course, created using the methods we learned that weekend – and becomes something like a prayer.  At any rate, the kind of prayer that even Andy and Steve would be happy to be said in their names.

DIVINING WITH M&M

We flirted with muses and courted attention
Abandoned excuses and even intention
Found ways of speaking that aided retention
All in pursuit of verbal invention

Make an impact — learn to rupture
Liven up the surface structure
Alpha-bet your life it’s fun
Making meanings of the pun
That punctures, from above
Why punctu-hate when you can punctu-love?

Abandon the planned and
Glad-hand the random
Conscious, unconscious, steering in tandem

The day-to-deity here is Eris
Goddess of Chaos, succulent mistress
Benevolent minx, Hex in the City
Whoop-de-doo wyrdplay, pearls from the gritty

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.

Yesterday was an interesting day. Most of it involved writing material for a computer game. Not character dialogue or plots, which is what many games require writers for, but rich and idiosyncratic detail relevant to the genre of the game…until I’m sure of my position regarding confidentiality I can’t say any more. 

Anyway, the nature of the work is providing what amounts to capsule stories; descriptions of people and events that serve to flesh out the experience of gaming for those players interested in scratching the surface of the world to see what makes it tick. The style I chose for this – a job which I’ve been putting time into for a few days now – was information-rich nuggets, 8-10 lines for each piece, varying in tone from plausible to eccentric. Hopefully, just what players will be interested in discovering, so they can build on those easter eggs in online forums etc.

After that – or more accurately during it, since this was something that consumed several short chunks of the day as I liased with my client and the artist also working on the job – a marketing piece for a business involved in the digital sector. The issue here was problem solving: how do we get across a particular issue of relevance to the story, without upsetting anyone in the various cultures who’ll be reading it, while staying reasonably true to the concept that runs through the piece, which itself has an element that many will find inherently offensive? No wonder the main contact at the client is away.

But, over the course of several surreal phone calls and emails, a solution is brokered that seems to satisfy all parties involved. No small feat, given the way we were headed at one point, when part of the possible solution which the three of us were discussing in something almost like seriousness read “The stranger stretched his underpants out in front of him and gave them a mighty TWANG…creating a resonating frequency that knocked out XXX’s corrupt and antiquated circuitry, rendering him helpless.” But détente is achieved, and an international marketing campaign can be rolled out.

And then there’s another ongoing concern, a new one: how to develop a low-budget feature film with a director who, fingers crossed, wood touched, has the money for one and wants me to be involved. This took the form of a couple of phone calls while the director juggled babies and visitors, and the gradual development of a strategy for going about how to realise our ambition. At this point the story is scarcely an issue, though I run a concept past the director that he seems to like, and which I’ll now have to find time to write a treatment for.

The object of all the above is to give some insight into the life of the gigging writer. Yes, writing was done, and quite a useful chunk of it. But it was also a day characterised by the need for listening skills, tact, the ability to change what I’m doing in response to feedback, and a bullish attitude to self-promotion. In short form then, and I may yet run a course with this title:

Be Your Own Pimp –

someone’s going to be making money out of you,

and it might as well be you

I think it was on my third attempt that I actually managed to finish reading Lord of the Rings, a rite of passage among my teenage peers. Sure, I might have skipped over some of the songs, but I’d read however many pages of the thing in its three volumes, and it felt like an accomplishment. It helped give me an exaggerated respect for books, as a result of which I’d carry on with them regardless of whether I was enjoying them or not, as a point of principle.

It wasn’t until I was 22, and struggling through Giles Goat-Boy by John Barth that I realised I could, you know, just stop reading. A lightbulb moment. The book is enormous, and amusing from time to time, as in the section that reframes the Oedipus legend as a tale of the wild west, but there’s just too much of it, most of it hopelessly indulgent, as might be expected from an author who’s an academic professing to write an anti-novel (anyone who can tell me what that is, I’d advise not to).

Liberated by the realisation I could just stop, I’ve since continued to abandon books before they’ve finished. Why bother, when there are so many more promising things to be getting on with?

And why stop with novels? Does anyone really need to hear Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music once the first five minutes has given you the gist? Watch incomprehensible Romanian productions of The Tempest that even Shakespeare would have found obscure? Wade through all 12 volumes of Tsugumi Ohba’s Death Note manga series, when it’s clear after 5 that his irritating portrayal of female characters isn’t going to change?

Life is too precious to waste on art that makes no attempt to communicate with an audience. And yes, that applies to films too. Has anyone seen Liquid Sky? I hope for your sake that you haven’t. It’s a repellent tale of aliens feeding off the vital fluids – sexual and/or narcotic – of vacuous 1980s New York hipsters who find every utterance they make, like, totally meaningful. Horrid things happen to horrid people in a horrid film basically. But somehow I sat through the whole thing, maybe because I’d paid for my ticket and wanted to see if it became tolerable. Or because I didn’t want to emulate the people I’d seen walk out of Mishima not long before, a film I found utterly compelling in its highly stylised storytelling, but I know some people found pretentious beyond belief.

Now, if I find that my attention is not with a film, odds are it’s because it’s lost my interest. I might doze off, to come to when a door slams or a gun is fired, and see a few more minutes before deciding whether to watch it properly or to take the hint of my sleepiness and leave. Yes, I’ve become someone who walks out of films. Not many, admittedly, but frankly if I’m administered a soporific then I’m likely to doze, and when I wake up I’ll make my exit. It’s not a lot to ask, is it, that a film maintains your attention throughout. That’s got to be the minimum bid made by a screenwriter or director, surely, to keep the audience awake. And I feel no shame about slumbering if that contract is not abided by, or walking out altogether if things don’t get any better.

This blog will go on hiatus, returning on Sunday 20^th, for excellent reasons that will become apparent on my return. Have a good few days.

You’d think writers would have an ear for dialogue, but it amazes me how many don’t. Note that good dialogue need not be naturalistic, but its rhythms and twists inevitably have their roots in real speech, however far the writer has taken them in the service of character and story.

One of my favourite lines in the English language is from David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross. It’s so simple, and it makes me smile every time I hear it. “Get them to sign on the line which is dotted.” Not, “Get them to sign on the dotted line,” you’ll note, the line that so many writers would have opted for, and which serves the same purpose, and even has a rhyme. No. “Get them to sign on the line which is dotted.” Get it yet? The rhythm, the rhyme, the eccentricity of the phrasing: it’s a sheer delight. Every now and then, I might find something in my own writing that approaches the same level of joy for me. Not, please, that I am comparing myself to Mamet, who can construct whole scripts from well disciplined syllables. But take, for instance, a line from A Ghost in the Garage, which you’ll find in the writing samples here on the site. I didn’t appreciate it until it was read out in a group, and people laughed, and I realised how ridiculous it sounds. The line? “In a manner, mon amour.” Say it out loud and you’ll get it. Repeat it a few times and it starts to take on the goofball quality of the Muppets’ song Manha-Manha.

Note in these instances it’s the sound of the words that’s the issue. The content is pretty much irrelevant. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that if you don’t relish the glorious and absurd range of noises that the human mouth is capable of, then you’ve got no business being a writer.

I keep a notebook with me most of the time…more than one usually. But this particular one is to capture language as it emerges from peoples’ mouths and as it appears in the wild (ie, I don’t take anything from fictional sources, though I do have sections for technobabble, psychobabble, and adspeak). It’s something I’ve been doing for nearly three years, since doing a superb course called Captivating Communication with NLP trainer Michael Breen and performance poet Murray Lachlan Young (most known for the controversy around his piece Simply Everyone’s Taking Cocaine, which caused all kinds of fuss and led to Murray being given a record deal and dubbed the Million Pound Poet). We looked at how Murray came to create his pieces, which starts off with a process of collecting language in just that fashion. The phrases he comes across are then glued together, morphed, and generally played with until something resembling poetry comes out. Here’s the first piece I came up with using that method:

Monstering through meaning

A tyrannosaurus lex

Sparking up synapses

A self-perpetuating hex

A professional style blender

Here to queer the decks

A lyrical reminder

That language is sex

Want a go yourself? Here’s a starter pack with a few of the scraps of languages I’ve sampled, and may well use in some form one day, and which you can now play with too:

concrete evangelist

iconic fabric

label-conscious homage

ladder-climbing arselicker

I could see the temper in your knuckles

his heft was too much for the rattan chair, and it went kerplooey

disco trauma

truckstop wankfodder

a little bit anxious, a little bit wide-eyed, a little bit late for my train

coke-dealing wheel-clamper

chestnuts and acrobats

The American election race is gathering momentum.  Barack Obama won the first round in Iowa, but with the support of women voters Hillary Clinton clinched the second, the New Hampshire primary.  What was it she said or did to win support?  Well, a few tears and the declaration that “I listened to you and, in the process, I found my own voice.”  Is it just me, or did that come across like a soundbite precisely targeted at the female Oprah-watching demographic, schooled to relish narratives in which women endure suffering in one form or another but rise above it and come to ‘find their voices’?  Go to a bookshop if you don’t believe me: it’s a high-selling modern genre. 

Or maybe I’m just a bit sceptical at the moment, having watched ITV’s Thursday night double of Moving Wallpaper and Echo Beach.  The first is a sitcom about the team behind a soap opera set in Cornwall, the second is that very soap opera.  A cracking and clever concept, brought to you by Red Planet and Kudos, and I’ll be sticking round to find out how well it’s executed.  

The reason for my cynicism about Hillary’s speech was the uneasy feeling that I could sense the backroom machinations that had led to it.  That’s the appeal of Moving Wallpaper, which lifts the veil that’s kept the creation of a soap opera from its viewers up till now, or at least flirts with the idea.  And it does so with quite a degree of credibility, the show’s producer Jonathan Pope saying he wants Echo Beach to have “wit, class and a permanent erection”.  His nemesis, the network’s Head of Continuing Drama, instructs Jonathan to hit the ethnic quota, saying “We’ve got Dev from Coronation Street and not much else,” which is rather spikier than I was expecting to hear. 

The opening episode of Moving Wallpaper ended with the team gathering round in Jonathan’s office to watch Echo Beach, another playful touch that carried through into the soap opera itself.  I was surprised how much visual storytelling was involved in the opening scenes of Echo Beach, certainly more so than you’d get in the majority of Eastenders or Coronation Street episodes.  But does it have what it takes to drag viewers back and build up a relationship with them like those shows have?  Hmm. 

In tone, Echo Beach has a good dose of the breezy Australian approach to soap, and in Jason Donovan one of its stars too.  It’s fast paced, with a musical backdrop through much of what’s happening, much of which revolves around sexy young things cavorting on the beach.  And there are a few sexy older things, including ex-Eastender Martine McCutcheon, for retro appeal and what passes for gravitas in these parts. 

Part of the fun was seeing how threads of Moving Wallpaper were realised in Echo Beach, for instance the decrepit state of the surf shack that Jason Donovan was opening, because Jonathan Pope had blown the set design money on a wet-room for his office. These are fun shows, with some real wit amid the froth, and I’ll be checking them out to see how they develop.  Besides, with the way that the American election is developing, I need a reliable form of escapism.