How I write...

A couple of days ago, I posted a query in Substack comments, to try to get a sense of what people like and don't like about what I'm doing here, and to see if there were any topics that anyone particularly wanted me to cover.

There’s a huge number of "How To Grow Your Substack" posts on the site in general at the moment. And I guess that's only to be expected, as some people seem to gather a lot of readers from telling other people how to gather a lot of readers. The same thing happens over on Medium, and I've never really understood the attraction, not just of the posts themselves, but of the idea of growth for the sake of growth. Either I'm doing something worthwhile here or I'm not, and I'd rather be doing something worthwhile for a dozen people than have a thousand subscribers who don't bother reading. So that why I was asking the question, to make sure it was all worthwhile.

Anyway, to the point. "Andrew" (I don't know why I'm putting his name in quotation marks, I suspect his name really is Andrew) asked me to go a little deeper into how I write. He actually said "we know you use software, but". And that made me realise that every time I've talked about process, I’ve talked about software, the physical nuts and bolts of it all.

But “how I write”. I don’t know that I’ve given that very much thought for a long time, but maybe it’s worth getting into…

And I suspect the best way in might be the corollary - why I don’t write. On any given day, in any given moment, what I am not writing far outweighs what I am writing. I don’t just mean that it’s a question of choice, it is; when I choose to write something it necessarily means that I am choosing not to write lots of other things, but it’s more than that. An idea has to grab me in such a way that NOT writing it would be more painful than writing it.

I should throw in a caveat here that sometimes I’m writing to pay rent and put food on the table. That script might not be THE THING, it might just be something I need to get done. But on a level playing field, where money/career etc. don’t tip the balance one way or the other, then something about a story or a character or an idea has to grab me.

There are plenty of times, and I mean PLENTY, where an idea seems great and I get really enthusiastic about it, and then I come to start writing and… Nothing. I don’t always know why this is.

Right now, I’m wrestling with something, an idea that I dreamed up on a park bench at a point in time when I didn’t have the bandwidth to write it. Nonetheless, I scribbled what I had in a notebook so the idea could gestate. A few weeks later, I was on a call with a US producer (this was just before the WGA strike started) and I told her the idea. She really liked it and went away to talk to an A-list star she works with, and he really liked it too. They came back and said they were interested, but there was something already that was blocking the thing in my mind. I told them I didn’t want to do this as a paid gig, because I didn’t want to go through a development process on it. I would just spec the thing in my own time and they were welcome to read it when it was done.

Then the strike happened, and all my US work ceased, so I thought to myself “This is a perfect time to write that spec”. Well, the strike has been running for a hundred and something days now and how much have I written of that movie? Not one word. Why? I couldn’t really tell you. If I pitched you the idea, you’d like it. I like it. It’s obviously a movie, and a good one if executed right, and it’s a great vehicle for a movie star. If it was on at a cinema, I’d buy a ticket. I would buy the blu-ray, I would watch it on streaming. But I can’t start writing it, and I don’t know why.

And so maybe the answer lies in addressing Andrew’s question. How do I write? Well, as detailed before, the mechanical answer is that I plant myself in a chair and I write five pages of any given project a day until it’s done. Not helpful? I thought not.

I have said elsewhere that I don’t like to outline, because I think that knowing too much in advance ruins the experience for me. I like to feel like I’m reporting what’s happening, not “making it up” or forcing it to fit a pre-ordained plan. That sounds straightforward, and it’s true to an extent, but it doesn’t really explain what’s happening.

When screenwriting is working, for me at least, it’s when the characters have taken over. I’m aware that sounds pretentious, but when it’s going well, that’s what it feels like. Have you ever ridden on an e-scooter? You have to give the thing two or three big pushes with your free foot before the motor will kick in and the thing takes off. That’s what this feels like. The “work” is getting the characters into a situation or a conversation at the beginning, and that’s like being dragged up to the top of the roller-coaster. And then there’s a moment, at the apex, where their voices emerge and they start to define themselves through what they say or do, and that’s the moment where they can wildly divert away from any outline you could have written, and that’s when you’re picking up speed, and the momentum/gravity takes over.

If that doesn’t happen though, and quickly, I’m dead in the water. If I have to force it, I become uncomfortable and turn to something more inspiring. And I think that might be the problem with my unwritten spec (and a possible solution) - I don’t know the main guy yet. I know what he does for a living, what his family set-up is, what his predicament is, what happens to him and, broadly, what he does about it. But that’s all plot. I don’t know WHO he is. I can’t hear his voice.

This is one of the reasons my scripts tend to be dialogue-heavy. I like characters talking, and once they start talking, my lot rarely, if ever, shut up.

But it’s not always dialogue. I wrote a movie a year or so ago that starts with the lead character checking into a hotel in Madrid. She’s a secret agent, and she’s checking in under a false name because she’s there on a mission. That is literally all I knew about the whole story. I was writing a spec, making it up as I went along, waiting to see where it would take me.

So this secret agent goes up to her hotel room, locks herself in, and then she opens up the secret compartment of her suitcase and we see all kinds of exotic weaponry in there. Because that’s what I was expecting to happen, because I’d probably seen it a dozen times before. It was a perfectly fine opening. But there was no character in it. I could already feel the thing stalling before I had got anywhere.

So I rewound, had her enter the room again. Now she could do whatever she wanted. It’s just me and a keyboard, and the words don’t cost anything but a little bit of time. I just needed to move her around in the space and let her show me who she was.

This time around, no weapons were revealed. Instead, she hit the mini-bar and poured two straight vodkas into a tumbler of ice and downed them. And then I realised she had probably been drinking on the plane and so she must be pretty smashed already. Interesting. Why is she drunk? Does this job play havoc with her nerves? Is she not really cut out for this? Maybe no one really is…

And then it occurred to me how rare it is that you arrive at a hotel in a foreign country with just minutes to spare before you have to go do something. This character had flown into Madrid from London and she had a mission. But she probably had time to kill. So what would she do with that time? She looked out the window for a bit, she checked her phone. Then she took a shower, came back out into the room, emptied out the ice-bucket and then filled it with all the chocolate from the mini-bar. All of it. That was a surprise, but I guess she’s on expenses, so she might as well get whatever perks she can. Then she sat on her bed and put the TV on and found an episode of “Ru Paul’s Drag Race”, and proceeded to watch it while eating all the chocolate. James Bond doesn’t do that. I had found the character.

So finding the characters is where I have to start. And that might not necessarily be at the beginning. Oftentimes, I will jump into the first scene where the main characters are actually interacting. If I can get to the apex of the hill with that, if I can get them to the point where they seem be talking without my help, then I can start to figure out who they are. Then I can jump back to the beginning and write whatever opening or set-up I may have had in mind, and infuse it with some of the feeling of what I now know comes later.

Openings are plot, in the main. In TV we call it the Cold Open; the scene that poses a question, or provides some kind of hook, before you meet the main character. Movies have them too - the submarine sequence in the new Mission Impossible, for example. Those sequences have a job to do, but I can almost never write them first because they’re not my way into the story, the characters are.

Nick Harkaway said in a recent Substack that, if you have a great idea for a scene or sequence, go write it now. However far down the story it might come, it will inform everything else and give you something to aim for. I’m a big fan of this approach, even though I usually try to write stuff in order as much as possible, so that I can feel like the story is evolving organically. But my version of jumping to the good scene is to start with whatever gives me the characters.

Almost everything starts with handwritten notes. That’s always important. Often it’s just a few lines, but those lines, if they’re good, become the “purity test”; the page I refer back to throughout the process. “Am I still writing the thing I set out to write?” Sometimes the answer is no, and that’s fine if the thing is better than its conception. But if the answer is no and the thing is going off the rails, that first note can be the north star. It’s the idea in its purest form, written the moment it occurred to me.

I have one such note that marks the genesis of the Aldrich Kemp radio series, written at the dining room table of a rented cottage in Suffolk. It reads “In a manor house attached to a long-forgotten village lives Aldrich Kemp.” I’d struggle to tell you what it was about that sentence led to two radio seasons, but it did. I guess it was this character, why he was there, what his past was. Crucially, though, I found I knew very quickly who he was and what he sounded like. And “manor house” and “long-forgotten village” gave me my tonal key; old money, the proper way of doing things, afternoon tea and bone-shaker bicycles - something peculiarly English. Anything I subsequently wrote that didn’t fit the tone invoked by those phrases didn’t belong.

Eleanor Peck, from the Lovecraft Investigations, is an interesting one. On the one hand, she is almost impossible to write because all of her scenes are the linear distillation of months of research. But on the other, her voice comes so easily and clearly that, as soon as I know what she’s saying, I know exactly how she’s saying it. I literally just wind her up and let her go, and I feel like I’m scrambling to transpose the voice in my head.

There’s more to all this, obviously, there’s structure and editing (constant editing - I edit as I go, reading back and correcting yesterday’s pages as a way into the frame of mind for today’s) and various self-imposed “rules”, but I think those are for another time.

Have I answered Andrew’s question? “How do I write?” I mean, it really depends. This article started as a note for a piece I was intending to write tomorrow. But then the first few sentences came to mind and here we are. Sometimes it just takes you with it. And now, at long last, I think I’m starting to hear the main character from that spec script. He’s walking around the zoo with his daughter. I should go catch them up so I can hear what they’re saying…