How many stories can you tell about yourself? It’s something we seemingly never tire of doing. What’s interesting are the patterns within the stories we choose to share with the world, and how they define us and shape the way we behave. Are we victims or heroes, tricksters or passive, the voice of reason or the spurned lover? Listen out for the stories you tell, and the stories you hear. Listen and learn, and then think about how they apply to the fictions you write.

Once you’ve worked out the kind of stories a character tells about themselves, you’re a long way to working out what kind of person they are in practice. I’ve never been a big fan of the whole detailed biography approach to character creation where you know what they had for breakfast and what colour socks they wear. Too much information. But if you get a feel for the way they talk about themselves, the stories they share and roles they play in them, other stuff starts to fall into place.

Someone who plays martyr in their tales, and likes to be different without having the smarts to figure out an original way of doing so…it’s kind of easy to see them wearing a big old leather trenchcoat. Contrarily, a character who never realises the joke is on him…well, there’s something about putting them in a ‘comedy’ tie, and having their clothes chosen by their mother into their twenties and beyond. These things have a logic of their own: you might not agree with my choices, and that’s fine as long as you’ve got your own radar for such nuances.

Nuances are what it’s all about. The distinctions a character makes inform their place in the world, and what they are capable of doing to change it. Norris Cole of Coronation Street meticulously places everyone on a social scale that’s of utmost importance to him, while Phil Mitchell of Eastenders pays heed to social convention only when it doesn’t interfere with his personal goals.

When different worldviews meet, sparks can fly. Drama often reaches its climax points when characters who have been close are polarised by their attitudes and actions in a new situation. The trick then, is to know your characters well enough to find situations that will force them apart. Will they accept the new reality, or will it cause them to redefine their relationship?

Alan Moore’s Watchmen is full of fine stuff emerging from a profound understanding of the distinctions between his characters, ably illustrated by Dave Gibbons. All are superheroes, each has their unique take on what can and should be done about humanity, the distinctions between them leading to a monstrous plot hatched by one of their number in the name of the greater good. Other, more grounded characters, have their more human response to the grand scheme, but are so ‘normal’ in their perspectives that they are easily outfoxed by the mastermind. It’s brilliantly realised, and for all the structural excellence on display that takes it several cuts above any other work in the comics form from a technical viewpoint, the character work is what makes Watchmen tick. And it all starts with the stories they tell themselves, about the world and their place in it…

Why is it that a man who plays a harmonica whilst playing guitar is classed as a musical genius, but put a set of cymbals between his knees and a drum on his back and he starts to look insane?

I found the above question on a forum yesterday, and it got me thinking. What is it about the alteration of one detail that can irrevocably change a whole picture?

The first line of the old song ‘Misty’ goes ‘Look at me, I’m as helpless as a kitten up a tree’. Aah, sweet: we empathise with the singer’s vulnerability straight away. Substitute ‘kitten’ for the similarly syllabled and sounding ‘chicken’ and all of a sudden things are different. A chicken is just as helpless as a kitten is up a tree, but the empathy disappears. It’d be easy to say it’s because a chicken is a ludicrous creature, but let’s look a little deeper than that. Is it because a chicken is feathered and kind of reptilian in its movements, whereas a kitten is indisputably mammalian?

All this is towards making a point about what fits, and what doesn’t, and what kind of non-fitting thing you want to put into your screenplay when the time comes to break whatever pattern the audience is currently experiencing and present them with something unusual. Huh? Well, let’s say you have a thriller. The protagonist fearfully opens the curtains in her living room to discover…a sheep looking in at her. Unexpected alright, but not the kind of unexpected that works with a thriller. Whereas, if the curtains are pulled back and a man with a knife is seen outside, then all is well with the world.

In any screenplay, you’re seeking to strike a delicate balance between the expected and the unexpected. Veer to far off track and you lose the audience with what comes across as irrelevance. (Unless you make it your trademark and you become known as a surrealist: stand up The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie.) But if your concerns are more narrative and linear, there’s only so far off the path you can stray without losing your audience.

So, how do you cement a surprise into your screenplay such that it will work on screen? Part of the answer is the inner logic of the story you’re telling. Donkey Punch features assault with a deadly weapon in the form of an outboard motor engine, but the story is set at sea, the absence of the engine has featured as a plot point, and it has been seen and thus foreshadowed.

Music and sound are your friend in situations like this too. If you create an auditory cue at one point, its reappearance will be associated with whatever was happening the first time it was heard. So, let’s say you have a string section stab just before a jack-in-the-box pops open. Later in the film, all you need to do is hear the same string stab to expect an equivalent surprise.

The degree of surprise you allow for in a film depends on the nature of the genre you’re working in. You probably won’t get far writing a romcom if the protagonists hate each other at the end as much as they did in the beginning, unless there was a love story in the middle. And so on. But finding ways to create surprise is one way to keep you as a writer on your toes. And face it, if you’re not engaged by what you’re writing, what hope has anyone else got?

It was getting stuck with a feature treatment the other day that made me realise I needed to be bringing more to it. I was happy with the general feel of the story, very happy with the ending, and happy that I’d devised an opening to it that set the whole story up nicely. Happy happy happy. Only, something was missing. And that something was a particular kind of depth that would enable me to piece together the elements of the story that I was having trouble figuring out. At which point one of the things I’ve learned to do is turn to mythology. Which is not something I have any special expertise in, so I sometimes ask friends who I believe may be able to help out. And that’s when someone came up with the realisation that the story I’m telling has its roots in the story of the Minotaur.

Now, what with myths being told and retold over the centuries, they tend to have several versions available, which can help you pick out what’s particularly relevant to your story, and what’s not so important. And one consistent element of the stories that resonated with me was the character of Ariadne, who gives the hero Theseus a ball of thread so that he can find his way through the labyrinth that the Minotaur lives in. Hmm. In my story, a psychological thriller, the Minotaur is a good way to think about the protagonist’s internal conflict rather than a real beast he has to confront. But the notion that a woman helps him deal with that conflict makes a lot of sense, and was already implicit in the story in the form of a character he meets when he’s at a low ebb. Expanding her role makes all kinds of sense, and for her to present him with a ball of thread works too. And I realised, that too was already present in the story I was working with. She doesn’t give him an actual ball of thread, but she leaves him with something seemingly whimsical that becomes a valuable clue at a later point in the story. Bingo.

Interesting that in looking into the legend, I realised that some of the key elements were already there in the story I was working on. Which if there are indeed only so many stories, is no great surprise. Personally, I don’t believe that there are just so many stories…but I do believe that there are particular patterns of interaction that are ripe for development as stories, and which the ancients got to first.

The other part of the Minotaur story that interests me is what happens later on, which is wonderfully tragic and human and messed up. On the way home, the ship Theseus travels in loses its white sails in a storm, and instead has its black ones raised when the ship comes in to dock. His dad, seeing the black sails, believes them to be a message that his son is dead, and leaps off a cliff, grief-stricken. Powerful stuff. And I’d like to find a way of weaving some of that, somehow, into the tale I’m telling, which has no ships, storms, or sails, but does feature people who, like all of us, misread messages with sometimes catastrophic consequences.

Asked by a follower what makes for good spiritual practice, one guru said ‘A hard job, and a lousy marriage’. The same thinking applies where writing is concerned: the only genre in which we enjoy someone else’s fun vicariously is pornography. In any other form of writing, readers are there to see the protagonist suffer in artful ways, and it’s the writer’s job to choreograph their miseries.

Now, that description may sound mean. But it also contains a lot of truth. People follow the adventures of characters that interest them, and want to experience them going through hell on their behalf. Somewhere behind this notion, perhaps, is the understanding that if someone else has a dreadful time and comes through it, then maybe you the audience can experience the payoff without having to go through hell personally.

And yes, there’s a strong religious streak to this, which explains why some very successful writers have religion in their lives. Jimmy McGovern is a classic, and look what he puts his characters through in the first episode of The Street. A man and woman living in the same road start having a casual affair behind the backs of their partners. The man knocks down the woman’s daughter in his car when he’s preoccupied by memories of their lovemaking. Now, that’s shitty enough, but where McGovern’s Catholicism takes this beyond the realms of The Jeremy Kyle Show is in what happens next. The man is let off in court for what happened as it was an accident, but the woman still wants to punish him. So she reveals first to her husband, then to her lover’s wife, that they were having an affair, so he can experience some form of suffering, one which brings in a notion of divine punishment for their adultery. Nice one Jimmy: I’d love to read The Catholic Herald’s review.

Not that guilt is confined to followers of Rome. Comics writer Brian Michael Bendis is Jewish, and describes his basic approach to plotting as putting the characters in the worst form of situation for them as individuals, and making it worse still. And with all the baddies in the Marvel Universe available to torment his heroes with, you can believe Bendis enjoys putting his protagonists through the wringer.

All very well, but what’s the point of all this suffering? Once again we’re back in the realm of spirituality: the function of torment is to help people learn. There’s a line in a Robert Fripp song that David Byrne sings: ‘Remain in Hell, without despair’, and that pretty much sums it up. However dismal this place is, we can learn to find something of value
outside us or within, that enables us to keep functioning.

So, suffering is about learning, and learning is about developing capacities that you lack. One particular take on it is to be found in the Tarot card The Tower. It looks pretty scary, showing two people being flung out the window of a tower that’s struck by lightning. Now to decode the image…

There’s a long tradition in dreams and art of buildings representing people, so a building being destroyed is to do with the destruction of a personality that’s been built up over the years. Pretty scary stuff to experience. But where that leaves those who’ve been flung out is with the opportunity to rebuild, this time choosing the building blocks of their life rather than just cementing in the ones that nature and nurture provide. It’s about beginning again, unshackled by the past, basically.

So, quality suffering enables its victims to make new choices in their life. Something we’d all want, to some degree or other. And which helps explain why we find the suffering of others so fascinating in our fiction. Not to mention, depending on the genre that the suffering is happening in, that it allows for the possibility of exciting car chases and giant gorillas. And who doesn’t love a big monkey?

I’m half way through watching Clocking Off, and it’s interesting seeing what Paul Abbott is doing here that not enough writers are doing elsewhere. For those of you unfamiliar with the series, it ran on BBC1 in 2000, and consists of six self-contained dramas, Abbott’s sneaky way of bringing back the single play to television. Each story is set in and around the world created by Mackintosh Textiles and its employees, and features a stellar cast of names you’ll recognise from Dr Who to Life on Mars, stopping by at Coronation Street and Queer as Folk.

What’s immediately clear is that Abbott has a knack for coming up with stories that get to the heart of his characters’ lives. The stories they’re caught up in are without a doubt the biggest things that are happening to them, then and maybe ever. A man who’s been missing for more than a year comes home to his family with amnesia to discover he spent the missing time with another wife and child. A woman sets her house on fire to ensure her partner sees none of the money from it, and finds unexpected love with her next door neighbour. A teenager with learning difficulties has an affair with his boss’s wife.

There’s an epic scale to the emotions underpinning the stories, which ensures the stories are much more than soap opera. You come to know and care about these characters pretty quickly, partly through what’s at stake for them, also because there’s a lightness of touch brought to the dialogue which stops the scripts being Heavy With Significance. It feels like actual people talking, and they’re just as tongue-tied as the rest of us when it comes to grappling with the huge stories they’re caught up in.

What with Paul Abbott being the man who brought us Shameless, you can expect recognisable social worlds and people who behave like human beings, not as pawns representative of their class or theories based on some or other psychological text. And, like Frank Gallagher, some of these characters have their say at length, which feels fine and natural when most of the script features short exchanges of dialogue. One lesson from that is don’t be afraid to let your characters talk about what matters to them sometimes: why let Alan Bennett have the monopoly on monologues?

Another lesson is harder to quantify. In the third story, teenage K.T. is besotted with his lover, the factory boss’s wife. And the factory boss knocks K.T. over with his car, hospitalising him. Only, the boss doesn’t at this point realise that it’s K.T. having the affair. So, Abbott has got him to do what’s expected in a situation like this - put his wife’s lover in hospital…but without realising that he is her lover. There’s karma there, which is dramatically satisfying, but ignorance of the truth makes the situation far more interesting than had the situation been done by the book, with the boss punching the lad’s lights out for messing with his missus. There are other neat twists and turns that have similar effect: the boss loses it with his foreman, who he suspects of being his wife’s lover…which he was on a previous occasion, but is no longer, meaning that he’s both innocent and guilty at the same time. Good stuff, dramatically.

Those kind of nuances are typical of the scenarios that Abbott contrives. A man falls for his neighbour and her kids, and wants them to be part of his life - only she doesn’t want to be responsible to any man, even one she does love. They reach a happy compromise by a circuitous path, which makes their credible ending that much more satisfying.

That quality of reaching a conclusion only though trials and misfortunes, some of them age-old, others relevant to the society we live in now, is characteristic of Paul Abbott’s work. And helps explain why he’s a key figure in modern British television drama, and I’m sure will remain so for years to come.

For anyone interested in exactly what happens when you ask me to get involved in developing one of your scripts, Robin Kelly’s recent report will be worth reading:

Adrian Reynolds emailed me offering to read my Sharps for me as a sample of the script and story development work he does. So once I had finished the next draft, off it went to him. Little did I know that he would end up nailing my biggest persistent writing problem.

For more details, including prices, check out the script doctoring section of this website.

For a talented singer, Amy Winehouse is a one-note character. At least as portrayed in the media, she’s caught in a loop of dodgy relationships, substance abuse, and abandoned concerts that keep her in the headlines. It’s sad, but above all it’s boring, to see someone go through the same stuff again and again without seemingly learning from it.

What Amy needs is a character arc, and today’s PR professionals are adept at spinning their clients’ stories in just that way. Only, what do you do with a problem like Amy? Some situations you can’t spin your way out of.

All this raises the question of whether character arcs are actually something we experience in life, or something we’d like to see, and that we lace into our fiction to give us hope that we too can change, and get the partner of our dreams, earn that promotion, lose that twenty pounds, or whatever it may be. And it’s not just fiction that we seek that kind of solace in. Trinny and Susannah are there to change our lives by dressing us differently, Paul McKenna will zap away your fear of flying, and any number of people will redecorate your home as long as you react with tears or horror to the result.

Film writing guru Robert McKee’s seminars are attended not just by writers, but people from advertising and marketing and journalism. For a few days, they’re pumped full of the lore on character arcs, and then go and roll it out into the pieces and campaigns that they’re involved in. Even products have lives of their own in today’s marketplace, the likes of KitKat developing brand extensions, limited edition spin-offs, and so on.

Interestingly, the changes that most people are interested in are prescribed for us. Boy to man, man to husband, husband to father, employed to self-employed. Those transitions are expected in the society we live in, and are the ones some people measure themselves by, the stuff of soap opera. Other transitions are frowned upon, especially when they encroach on social roles. Female to male. Straight to gay. Fascinating stories, that some writers handle with sensitivity and confidence, but still not tales that are likely to get a big audience, at least as long as we have the tabloid press trumpeting morality on our behalf and we continue, tacitly or explicitly, to support that stance.

But hey, isn’t this about writing? Yes. And writing is about people and the social worlds they inhabit and move between. Or, maybe, that they fail to move between. Not getting what you want is a story too, even if it’s one that Hollywood frowns upon. But with a little ingenuity, and juggling of the what a character wants vs what a character needs equation, even that can be turned into a tale of someone moving on, in the fashion that mainstream cinema approves and expects.

No one likes a loser, as Amy Winehouse has found out to her cost by association with the James Bond brand: she wrote a song for the next film that’s now apparently been turned down in favour of one by Leona Lewis, whose story arc of ordinary girl to pop siren is a lot less messy than Winehouse’s, featuring Simon Cowell and proposed duets with Whitney Houston rather than front page photos looking like a drowned rat on the way back from another court visit to see an addicted thug of a husband. Amy better had go to rehab - again - and I hope next time it sticks: she deserves a second act.

There are some things you’ve just got to be prepared to take on board as a fan of particular genres. Like, if you’re into science fiction, you’re going to run across a lot of world governments, either in the purported future of this planet or the governance of otherworldly societies. Or, also from science fiction, in any story set in the future that features a list of American presidents from the past, there’ll be a few familiar ones plus a couple of others thrown in to suggest greater ethnic and gender opportunity as time goes on. Some of those tropes are harmless enough, but there’s one that really does bug me: the notion within too many also-ran thrillers that serial killing is some kind of artform.

As seen in Se7en and Silence of the Lambs I have no particular problem with this meme. It works for those stories because they’re well crafted and original, and both of them brought something new to the party for the time they were made: Se7en was operatic in its styling, and grandiose murders fit into that world just perfectly. And Hannibal Lecter is such a wonderful character than his sheer improbability is irrelevant: he’s a delightful monster. If only the same could be said of the killers that have appeared in his wake in any number of films, books, and tv programmes.

How many times have you now been presented with a killer who has a theme to his murders? Maybe he sews up his victims’ mouths with yachting thread. Perhaps he arranges them into the form of classical sculptures. Or offs them according to a schema laid out in an obscure holy text. Whatever, the basic idea is to elevate death from something random that happens to us all to an act of twisted creativity performed by a sick genius somewhere. And guess what: I’m fed up of it.

There’s something pretentious about the way that murder is presented in stories like those, and I’m wondering what it says about our society that such tales are as popular as they are. Perhaps it’s related to serial killer chic - the kind of bullshit that results in sad nerds writing to notorious prisoners and buying their sketches online. And there is something genuinely concerning about that: apparently the Austrian father who imprisoned his kids underground and sexually abused them has received hundreds of letters from women claiming that they love and understand him. Shudder.

Truth is, murder is sad and stupid, and most likely to be committed either by a family member, or a random idiot with a knife or gun, according to what age you are. That’s it. No cryptic crossword style machinations, no elegant artistry, just brute thuggery and conventional mammalian power games taken to their ultimate extreme. Why the need to make murder something fascinating and ornate when the reality is, almost always, crass and idiotic?

There’s a kind of pornographic aspect to suffering for some readers and viewers, a relishing of the misfortunes of others. And the worse the suffering, I’m guessing, the greater the payoff for the person who enjoys that kind of thing. Hence Saw having three sequels by now, and the dismal range of memoirs based on formulaic angst so popular in publishing these days. Clearly the actual news isn’t enough for fans of torture: for the real detail, you need the heightened effect of fiction. I’m half wondering when people will start writing books about what it’s like in Darfur, and curious if there’s anything out there on that theme already…But why wouldn’t there be, in a world where people still relish reading about Nazis, and there are tv programmes devoted purely to showing people experiencing road rage?

Somewhere along the line, as creators, we’re responsible for what gets produced. And you’ve got to work out what’s acceptable for you to be involved in. Is what you’re doing contributing to the worst instincts of audiences, or does it have something to say that allows for a flicker of light in whatever darkness you believe surrounds you?

There’s a particular feature script I’ve wanted to write for about three years now. Only, I’ve never found the right way into it. And then, earlier this evening, I cracked it - at any rate, it certainly feels that way. About time too, especially since a small but perfectly formed production company are interested in paying me to write said script.

The solution came as several other writing solutions have come to me over the years: by utilising an element from another story. In this case, a scene that’s a piece of visual storytelling I’m proud of, part of a grim and unfinished thriller. In its original context, it was a flashback that served an important purpose in that story. But it works just as well in its own right, and now seen as an early scene in the other story, witnessed by the protagonist, it helps explain why that protagonist embarks on his particular journey. Perfect.

I’m also confident that I’ve got an ending for it, too, which was something I struggled with before. So now, I have a first and third act, should those be useful labels for this script. Meaning I ‘just’ have that pesky second act to tackle, with its ups and downs, red herrings and blind alleys. Oh, the fun. Fortunately, I have a setting that’s pretty…unusual, and which I can write about with authority. That alone will give the script something to interest the casual reader. Then, it’s just a matter of layering several plot strands, to do with the incident at the start, and something that comes later, and how they affect the protagonist and his plans, and it’ll all come out fine in the wash.

Well, that’s the plan. And one I’m pretty confident about, right now. All I have to do next…is everything. Which in this case means embarking on what I know will be a complex script, a psychological thriller that will appeal to people who like Memento or Insomnia. If only I could find a title as snappy as those…the best one I’ve come up with so far was used by a film a couple of years ago, and I want it to have a good title. Titles are important.

It’s an interesting challenge, living up to your own expectations of a screenplay you’ve been hyping in your own mind and to others for years. Now it’s time to get beyond that hype and write the thing, once some funding has been secured. Curiously, I’m much more matter of fact about another feature script I’m planning to write before I start on this one. That’s just, you know, this funny personal drama I’m doing. The other is, like, The Big One: my psychological thriller I’ve talked about without writing for far too long now.

In practice, the wait has been good for me. I’ve written other scripts in the interim which have taught me a whole bunch of tricks. I’ve learned more about some of the technical stuff I need to know. And moved on from the personal issues that underpin the story for me. So, by the time some money does appear to crack on with the script, I’ll be raring to go. It’s just nice to know that, after all this time not writing it, and thinking about it, I’m now confident that I can do it justice.

There’s a kind of writing which I find grates, and that I can best describe as too neat. And the kind of neatness I’m thinking about sits at odds with my experience of life itself, which doesn’t conform to regular patterns and easy conclusions. As an example, ‘Brotherhood’, episode 7 of the first series of Six Feet Under, a generally excellent series that I’ve been catching on DVD after, as ever, failing to see it when it was broadcast on tv.

The brotherhood referred to captures the relationship of brothers Nate and David, and in particular Nate’s declaration that he loves David, an instance of ‘hugs ‘n’ learning’ that sits at odds with the generally distanced emotions of the Fisher family. And in this specific episode it also refers to the brotherhood experienced by a young soldier whose funeral the Fishers are arranging. For good measure, it serves triple duty when it comes to exploring the politics of the church that Dave is a deacon of.

The dead soldier’s funeral is arranged by his brusque older brother, who wants it to be a military-free zone. Only, Nate believes that the deceased really would have wanted his army buddies present, and arranges for that to happen. He does so, and the service is conducted against the brother’s wishes - only for him to turn up and concede that it really is what he’d have wanted after all. I found it unconvincing that he changed his mind in the short time devoted to the storyline: in other words, the dramatic reversal was unearned, and felt false because of it. In tandem with the story being about Gulf war veterans, it felt tokenistic to me, and what could have been a powerful story was diluted by an unearned payoff: confronted by uniforms, the brother just changed his mind.

The other overly neat aspect to this story was Dave’s rejection of a new senior figure in the church, whose crusading style would likely have brought up uncomfortable issues to do with his closeted homosexuality. It may be that the storyline develops new wrinkles in future episodes, but for now at least it felt like the dead serviceman story: just too neat to really convince.

So, if those are examples of neat writing, what’s the contrary to that? Messiness, I guess. The kind of messiness that feels more like life than it does the geometrically precise laying down of story beats that rise and fall and are mirrored over time. It’s also something I have an issue about when I see tv shows that have clearly delineated A, B, C storylines where the people involved in one never get involved in the others, and to all intents and purposes are involved in their own 12 minute hermetically sealed story rather than one that’s a living breathing part of an organic script.

That kind of messiness is harder to write, I know from my own experience. And it’s also much more rewarding, and effective when it’s achieved. The Shield features writing along the lines I’m talking about, and is achieved by a table of writers hammering out stories as a team. I believe I’ve achieved it in a pilot episode for a series I’ve devised, and one of the technical elements I learned from that which leads to quality messiness on the page works like this:

Get characters involved in each other’s storylines, for instance by having scenes in which a character’s actions create beats for two or more stories. In doing so, see if you can also get those actions to highlight different, even contrary, aspects of character to those established earlier.

Sound tricky? Well, it can be. But it’s a lot of fun getting it right, and feels a lot more like life than the A, B, C way of doing things…