So, I’ve been writing a novel. Did 5000 and some words on the first chapter a couple of weekends ago, and now I’m working on the second. Which comes as a surprise, me being a screenwriter and all. Only, it was not always thus. Many years ago, I started out by writing prose, and the first short story I came up with was a runner up for the 1991 Bridport Festival prize. I’ve written a few more short stories too, one of which was published in an anthology by Route Press. I’m particularly proud of that because my contribution straddles the photos of naked people in the centre of the book, which means I stand a greater chance of being encountered by the casual reader than many of the other stories.

So, the novel. It all started last year when I woke up from a dream about a successful book I’d written, and knowing the core situation of that story. Then, a few weeks ago, I was on a train and knew in a flash that I wanted to write novels. Not only that, but I realised who the protagonist of the book I’d dreamed of writing should be — a prose incarnation of a larger than life friend who influenced me in good ways, and who died a few months ago. I also realised that the book in question would be the second one I wrote. Reason being, there’s one that’s more pressing for me to write. Never mind why, save to say it’s the right time for me to be working on this book, and it’ll stand me in good stead for the next one.

This novel writing lark is very different from screenwriting. I’ve intentionally chosen a style that makes it easy for me to write fairly quickly, by dipping into the narrator’s head and indulging myself in all that kind of associative thought that’s pretty much verbotten in developing film scripts. Writing this blog is a big help: I’ve got used to producing a 600-700 word chunk in 40 minutes or less. That realisation goes a long way when you’re tackling something considerably bigger than a screenplay.

I’ve also given myself a break by not having a plot intensive story. Stuff happens, sure. But it doesn’t need wall charts and index cards to keep track of. And, I’m dipping into the same set of experiences that are at the heart of the screenplay I’m also writing — which is a much trickier beast to tame. I’m creating it piece by piece, facing and hopefully conquering challenges I’ve never taken on before, and though progress is slow it’s very rewarding. Where the screenplay is a psychological drama with thriller elements, the novel is a darkly comic satire. Same ingredients — very different dishes.

I’m figuring this is subject matter I never need go near again in my life when these two projects are done with. They relate to periods of mental instability I experienced some years ago, which though traumatic at the time were ultimately regenerative in their effects on me. And that’s part of what I want to get across: there’s enough bleak material out there about people suffering, and I have no intention of adding to the pile. Not without turning that torment into something useful, anyway.

All of which risks making my novel and screenplay sound terribly pompous endeavours, concerned with correcting misconceptions about mental health. Eek: I’d run a mile if I thought I was doing anything along those lines. No, I want to tell entertaining stories influenced by personal experience that I’m confident a mainstream audience will find fascinating: sorrowful pablum is not on the agenda. Promise.

And after that? Well, the second novel is a science fiction satire. No mental trauma at all, other than that which the protagonist inflicts on those who would oppress him. But that’s another story…

One of my favourite fictional characters is Ignatius J. Reilly, the pretentious and preening adolescent narrator of John Kennedy Toole’s tragi-comic novel A Confederacy of Dunces. He’s distinguished by his literary ambitions, and with it a hi-falutin’ vocabulary and lofty self-regard. I bring Ignatius up having seen Youth in Revolt, which treads in its footsteps somewhat, and too has its origins in a novel — one of the same name by C.D. Payne.

The protagonist is Nick Twisp, a teenager similarly affected by notions of being a writer, who has seemingly swallowed a thesaurus, and is burdened by his troublesome virginity. Played to perfection by Michael Cera, who has done the awkward adolescent thing to good effect before in Superbad, and directed by Miguel Agerta, who was responsible for the sublimely uncomfortable Chuck & Buck, it hits the beats you sort of expect an indie comedy to reach for, sometimes with panache.

The story’s twist, the aspect which raises it above the level it starts at, is the protagonist’s realisation that he needs to develop a bad boy persona to attract the delectable Sheeni Saunders. She is a bit of a teenage pseud, like Nick himself, and her idea of a suitable suitor is Belmondo, the archetype of French New Wave cool featured in Truffaut’s Breathless. (Belmondo in turn modeled himself on Humphrey Bogart, but being French adds an extra dimension of cool in Sheeni’s eyes.) Anyway, Nick’s back-up personality pops up to give him advice at opportune moments, all the while smoking a cigarette and sporting a moustache.

Seeing this alternate self, named Francois Dillinger, egg Nick Wisp on to acts of daring and trouble making is one of the chief pleasures of this very likeable film. A lot of the glee is down to Cera’s strong performances as Nick and Francois — the two are clearly delineated. Other roles are equally well cast: Nick’s dad is an interestingly cast Steve Buscemi, and Sheeni’s brother and parents are strong too.

So, if we’ve got good actors in a comedy with a novel element, how come I don’t like Youth in Revolt more than I do? I suspect the answers are in the source material — perhaps a firmer hand could have been taken with Gustin Nash’s screenplay. For instance, having shifted location from Berkeley to a backwoods town where his mum’s lowlife lover has access to a mobile home, we then shift again when Sheeni is despatched to a school where it’s all French all the time. That sort of thing works better on paper than on screen: location is part of a film’s lifeblood, and to suddenly shift seems irksome. The director tries to make light of the fact by doing the journey to the school in animated form, and it’s kind of cute, but to me emphasises structural failings.

There’s another issue too. It’s not just Nick Wisp and Sheeni that have an affected manner. Pretty much all the younger characters do, and it’s a routine that wears thin, all of them talking in a stilted fashion and having similar issues. Sure, adolescents have a lot in common — but one of those things is a desire to be perceived as individual, and these kids all come from the same mould. It’s a pretty old mould at that, revolving around dreams of travelling to Europe, arthouse cinema, and cult vinyl — likely the stuff of C.D. Payne’s youth, but not credibly that of teenagers in today’s world, with which they seem to have no reference points. No, I’m not asking for topicality, but some recognition of contemporary youth styles and issues would have been welcome.

Really though, these are small quibbles about a film that is largely very satisfying. I’m not sure that I’ll ever read the book that it’s based on, but if it’s reminded me of A Confederacy of Dunces then it’s performed a useful service regardless.

Smelly heck, adventure fans, have I got something for you. Whether you think of yourself as a comics fan or not, I’d strongly recommend you check out the online escapades contained in Valentine, a comic for the online age set in another one entirely. It’s the tale of Valentine Renaud and his friend Oscar, caught up in Napoleon’s doomed Russian escapade of 1812…or that’s how it starts anyway. Pretty soon, things kick off in a more fantastic direction, broadening the arena of the story and bringing even more fabulous pulp and mythical goodness into the equation.

Bringing this fun and excitement to readers are writer Alex de Campi and artist Christine Larsen. I’d come across de Campi through her excellent collaboration with artist Igor Kordey, Smoke, an espionage thriller featuring an albino protagonist. Hmm, shades of Elric maybe. And the doomed Melnibonean once again comes to mind as Valentine Renaud is entrusted with carting a magical sword about by a French general. Hey, Michael Moorcock has influenced many and worse writers than de Campi — like Oscar said, “Talent borrows, genius steals.”

Valentine is a steal in more than one way. It wears its influences on its floppy white sleeve, bringing to mind everything from Three Musketeers to The Flashing Blade, and it’s done with such joy and style that the familiarity is fine. Besides, coupled with Larsen’s art the whole has a fresh feel — this is fluid artwork that delivers the goods in terms of depicting character, place, and action, which is pretty much what’s required in a comic. Plus, some of the colour work is spooky: the bad guys’ red eyes really pop out on a screen against the prevailing tones.

Fast paced and urgent, the story moves along at a rate of knots, a new twist coming along every few panels. The use of digital technology is inspired: you’re never lost as you read the story, and there are some lovely subtle touches making maximum use of the new medium’s possibilities. In which regard, you might want to note that Valentine is available on Kindle, iPhone, and phones running Android. Not only that, but de Campi has made sure it’s available in 14 languages: not bad for a one-woman (plus pals) operation. It’ll also soon be available to read online thanks to Comixology, and a dead tree edition should be with us for the autumn.

There’s not much more to say about Valentine itself, except why on Earth aren’t comics publishers producing work of this calibre already? Superhero comics are moribund for the most part, and there are some decent crime comics being published, but when was the last time you read a good piece of pulp fantasy in comic form? I’m aware of Mouse Guard, but something inside me squeaks when presented with anthropomorphic characters unless they’re in Krazy Kat.

If anything — and it’d be interesting to know what de Campi makes of the comparison — Valentine has something of the early days of Sim and Gerhard’s Cerebus about it. Not the weirdass monotheistic stuff that brought the series to a much-needed end, but the liberating fun of the aardvark’s early days. (And yes, I know that I’m kind of confusing my own argument about animal protagonists here: contradictory opinions are all part of the service.)

Valentine has already and deservedly made a name for itself, and hopefully de Campi and Larsen will make oodles of money out of their project. Help them, and yourself — pop over here to find out how and where to purchase the story. Unlike printed comics, digital ones don’t go out of print — you can start whenever you like and read as much as you like, and I urge you to do exactly that if you’re at all enamored of the camaraderie of men on horseback, swordplay, and the interplay of history and legend.

What draws audiences into a film, book, or play is engagement with the story it communicates. Everything else is secondary to that. Unless I’m engaged by story in some form, I’m out of there. Inventiveness about how that story is delivered is welcome, as long as it enhances that immersion in the story and doesn’t detract from it. Which is why the formal inventiveness of the graphic novel Asterios Polyp gets in the way of me liking it, where the creativity John Pham brings to the pages of Sublife makes me warm to his comics work all the more. Asterios Polyp’s creator David Mazzuchelli deconstructs the story he’s telling before your very eyes, drawing attention to the methods he’s using to get it across. Pham, conversely, uses experimental art techniques in the service of story, embracing cubist and other methods to get across the effect of travelling through space beyond light speed on the crew.

It all comes back to character. And that works for pretty much any narrative I’ve enjoyed as a film, comic, book or play. Character and plot need to advance together, or the effect is lost. I read a Jeffrey Archer novel once just to see what got so many people to buy the things. It was very well plotted, but there was zero sense of the characters as living beings. Stuff happened to them, some of it pretty grim, but they carried on regardless, remorsely making their way from one plot point to another like robots. At the other extreme, there’s Tarantino’s Death Proof, where his well known penchant for dialogue heavy writing runs away with him and there’s a disconnect between the verbose exchanges of the characters and the action of the film. They’re talking for the sake of it, which can be enjoyable, but without it being bound to story beats comes across as self indulgent.

Perhaps no surprise then, that some of my favourite stories are those which move the plot forward, have three dimensional characters, and good dialogue — and where the writer’s intelligence is firmly in the service of story. That’s very much the case with one of my favourite screenwriters, David Mamet. And it’s true in a different way for novelist Lee Child, whose Jack Reacher thrillers are masterclasses in creating apparently effortless stories. See also Carla Speed McNeil’s ‘aboriginal sf’ comic Finder, where every line — written or drawn — counts for something in depicting character and situation.

Effectively, stories are a kind of trance, and I don’t like to see that trance interrupted. Not unless it’s done within the context of the artwork itself, rather than to remind you that it is indeed a confection. Yawn: that stuff has very low appeal to me. That said, I do find some metafictions appealing. It’s all about the spirit in which it’s done. Cartoon characters have been finding out that they’re animated since the birth of the medium, in playful ways. But somehow my hackles rise when presented with a Jasper fforde book — there’s an overwhelming smugness about the enterprise that seems to be about a clever chappie telling me what books he’s read. Compare with the delicious experience of Steven Hall’s novel The Raw Shark Texts, which is postmodern and all the rest of it, but keeps you engaged with the story and characters throughout — a sheer delight.

What is it about story that entices? Well, let’s go back to that notion of trance. We go in and out of trances throughout the day: you could argue that each mood is its own trance, shaping your consciousness and consequent behaviour. Sometimes those trances are accidental, a function of identifying with the situation we’re caught up in — stuck in traffic, waiting in a queue, fantasising about someone we find attractive. And the story trance is one in which we have the opportunity to empathise with someone who’s like us, in some ways, but isn’t us. Who is up against obstacles that are in all likelihood on a mightier scale than the ones in our own lives. And who surmounts those obstacles — in most stories — and in the process tells us something about our emotions, raises questions about morality, points to inner truths. Which, if we’re looking at 90 minutes or so of film, or 250 pages of a book, is a lot to ask. But explains why so many of us relish the experience of story, whatever form it’s presented in.

Once upon a time, I kept up with the news. It was a habit that started when I did a politics degree, which coincided with the Russian state coming down and the IRA trying to blow Thatcher up. I also read Hunter S Thompson, who made following the news into an artform, stories turning up on the mojowire and sending him into a frenzy before spitting back his own incensed and partisan take on matters of the day. But over the years I’ve lost that fascination with information for its own sake. So, in recent years I’m aware of controversy around, say, Bill Clinton without being sure of the details. Ditto any of the more recent Tory leaders. And then there are nouns which surface and have little real hold on my consciousness, though I’m aware they have significance in the wider scheme. Blackwater. Intifada. Enron.

So when a friend said she’d bought us tickets to see a celebrated production of a play about the American electricity-to-everything supplier Enron, I was pleased. My trips to the theatre are rare, and this one was a doozy. Scripted by Lucy Prebble, Enron is a scathing trip into the Looking Glass world that is corporate high finance. Clearly Lucy has done her research, and used it not to present mere reportage, but to conjure the characters and court they inhabit, in which real world cause and effect, action and consequences, are abandoned in favour of a topsy turvy world where profit counts above anything else. As such, it’s a story that has its precedents in the likes of 18th century tulip fever, when fortunes were won and lost on growing and importing Dutch tulip bulbs…when they weren’t eaten by sailors who mistook the bulbs for onions.

Enron is a tale about hubris then, of men and women devising systems to make themselves wealthy in the face of any logic. The company prided itself on thinking outside the box, and in the process abandoned any connection to the sort of economics where actual people create actual goods which are bought and sold. Instead, it jumped wholehearted into the wibbly wobbly world of trading intangibles, such as the predicted cost of electricity at some point in the future. Only, such fancies have unanticipated feedback loops back to the world of matter, in this case leading to black-outs in the state of California. But hey, the lawyers can magic any attending problems away, right?

Not even the laws of physics would stop Enron’s leaders in their tracks. Having decided that they were going to offer video-on-demand to consumers, the realisation that bandwidth at the time couldn’t cope with the concept was not well received. Instead, it led to Enron trading in bandwidth like it did in other ephemerals.

Such hubris cannot go unpunished, and it was fascinating to see how the play presented the company’s downfall. The key was in hiding debts within companies that it owned 97% of, and redefining the sums of money so they no longer appeared to be debts. Nonsense on stilts, basically, and the massive debts lurking in the backs of the company managers’ minds were presented on stage as suited raptors, darting about the stage with red eyes, which themselves connected to another of the play’s visual metaphors. The effect was powerful and visually striking, and entirely apt to the state of mind of the power-crazed leaders of the company that America took to its heart for a while.

Enron went way beyond reportage into creating a play that is a powerul commentary on the state of contemporary business. The script and performances are moving, funny, scarcely believable while at the same time clearly grounded in truth. There’s no surer way to present satire than to offer a mirror to the world, and that’s precisely what this incisive play does — see if you can book a ticket while it’s still on in London.

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.

It’s been a while since I ran a writing workshop. I’ve been doing plenty of script doctoring and working on my own projects, and that tends to be a great platform for running a class. As you develop your own skills, you come to new conclusions about how they relate to the bigger picture and details of writing, and one of the times I find out where my own understanding is when I’m asked to share it with others.

That opportunity comes next Saturday, February 13th, in a free workshop I’ll be running as part of the Nottingham Loves Learning event. The class kicks off at 2 in The Arts Organisation, 3-21 Station Street, Nottingham NG2 3AJ — just by the train station — and finishes at 5. That said, I can see us heading somewhere we can continue to chat over food and drink into the evening. To indicate your interest, email me: adrian at youdothatvoodoo dot com, or call 07815 158123.

The session will be suitable for people at all levels of experience. There’s always something you can learn, whether it’s by going back to basics or coming across a new understanding. Besides, my approach is to ensure people have a good set of creativity tools to work with that can be used across the board, and not just screenwriting, seeing as it all starts with your ability to play with ideas. There’ll be time for questions and answers as well, and it’s possible we could start some kind of regular group if enough people are interested.

So, get in touch and let me know if you want to participate. It promises to be a fun session, using a range of exercises designed to get you coming up with material quicker than you might have thought possible, and give you some different perspectives on writing — all that, and industry tips too.

The workshop is brought to you by the Department of Business Innovation and Skills, Nottinghamshire: City and County Employment and Skills Board, Transformation Fund and The Learning Revolution. Not forgetting the letter W.

I was in London a while back, and opposite me on the Underground was a poster for Nespresso, a coffee product advertised by George Clooney. A father was using it as a lesson to his children about the evils of advertising, saying that Clooney was pimping caffeine for money, which is a Bad Thing. I restrained myself from talking about how Clooney uses the money from adverts to fund ventures such as Syriana and Good Night and Good Luck, two films of a leftward persuasion that could be viewed as advertising of the decent kind.

Anyway, Clooney’s here again — this time to entertain — with Up In The Air, a superb comedy drama directed by Jason Reitman (known also for Juno), co-scripted by Reitman and Sheldon Turner. George plays a man who spends his life travelling from airport to airport, stopping off to make people redundant at whatever business is going down the tubes in the vicinity. For most people that would seem to be an empty existence, but George’s character loves his anonymous life. Or does, until he meets a woman who seems to share his vacuous value system. Naturally, and gradually, he falls for her.

It’s class from the word go, with people who really have lost their jobs playing people who do likewise, adding it the same kind of authenticity that School of Rock benefits from by having young musicians instead of actors playing the kids. George’s impossible good looks and smooth upbeat manner are an alien contrast to their mere mortal ways.

Not only that, but George really does believe he’s got it made. And he wants you to know it. When he’s not sacking people, he’s got a sideline in motivational speaking, and holds forth on the value of a life with minimal attachments – the only baggage he wants is a stylish rucksack, and even that’s replaceable.

George’s bubble bursts when the company he works for hires a smart young woman who realises that people can be fired online rather than in person. The savings on plane flights would be enormous, and people would get to spend more time at home with their loved ones. Exactly not what George wants: nothing horrifies him more than the idea of commitment.

Travelling with the digital evangelist gradually brings home to George that you can’t live without people, and he invites the vapid woman he copped off with to accompany him to his sister’s wedding. He wants more than that – and discovers that she’s married, with kids, and wants nothing to do with the man she views the same way he perceives his conquests on the road. Ouch.

Well judged in every respect, this is a film I’ll be picking up on DVD and sure to learn more from with every viewing. At one level it’s a thoroughly modern comedy attuned to today’s economy and technology. But it’s also timeless, in the tradition of classics like the Howard Hawks gem His Girl Friday. Put Clooney back in time and he’d stand in for Cary Grant’s role just fine, and vice versa.

Every now and then a film appears which catches the zeitgeist in a way that couldn’t be planned. It’s arguable that Clooney has already been in one such film with Michael Clayton, an exploration of corporate wrongdoing that at heart is about one man learning to do the right thing. And at its core, that’s what Up In The Air is too, regardless of its comedy aspect. The Full Monty is another example, focused on life for those made redundant, but like Up In The Air treating the subject with a light touch – a reminder that comedy is serious business.

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.