When it's going badly...

This is not where I wanted to start with the paid newsletters, but you have to go where the mood takes you. And today has me thinking about catastrophes. More specifically, the catastrophe that happened yesterday, that I can now just about see clearly enough to write about it...

From the outside, writing probably looks like one of the best jobs in the world; you set your own hours, you don't have to commute, you're basically just making stuff up for a living. Who doesn't fancy that?

But then there are the times when it's not working; times, hopefully few and far between, when you will realise that the script you have been working on every day for the past month or more is, in fact, terrible. You haven't just made a wrong turn, or a few poor choices, you can't simply unpick a few rows and then knit the thing back together again. The whole thing was a crappy idea from inception and you have only made it crappier with your palpable lack of talent.

The whole endeavour is a disaster. And this means that YOU are a disaster. For this is the lot of the writer. A plumber faced with a stubbornly blocked toilet or a mystery leak is unlikely to question every life choice that led them into the plumbing trade, they are probably not actively querying either their abilities as a plumber or their value as a member of the human race. The plumber understands that the problem is external.

Not so the writer. For how can this be an external problem? If you are making something up and it's bad, how can that be anything other than a symptom of your own inability and unsuitability for this task with which you have mistakenly been entrusted?

"Don't be so hard on yourself," someone might say, who has never met a writer before and doesn't understand that being hard on ourselves is all we actually do most days. For the most part it's performative; we imagine we are pushing ourselves to be better, not to settle for mediocrity, and yet we secretly think we're doing OK. But then, sometimes, a catastrophe does occur. We hit some bad turbulence and the overhead locker where we keep our self-doubt bursts open, the contents tumbling onto our heads. A reality concussion: we really are shit at this.

The sensible course of action would seem to be to take it on the chin; bin the whole idea and move on to something else. Except... You're being paid. You have a contract and a delivery date. Walking away is not an option.

(There's a story about a studio tech accidentally erasing a Steely Dan master, moments before the record company were due to listen to it. In the story, the tech realises his mistake, announces that he is popping out for coffee, and is never seen again. I get this, I really do.)

I think anyone who writes for a living will recognise this feeling of staring into the abyss, realising that you've cocked the whole thing up. It doesn't happen often, thankfully, but it has happened before. And that's the first thing to remember... It happened before and you're still alive.

So now, what to do? Well, the first thing is to take a deep breath. Almost nothing that is broken cannot be fixed. I have come up with what might turn out to be a handy checklist. It works a little like the stages of grief:

1. READ BACK OVER THE WORK, double check that it is actually as bad as you think it is.

2. ASSESS YOUR MOOD. Are you just being negative, or is it actually objectively bad? If the former, take a break, get your head in the game, come back to it tomorrow, you're done here. If it is OBJECTIVELY bad, then proceed to step 3...

3. GOOD NEWS! If it's objectively bad, then that suggests there is such a thing as objectively good. Now you just have to figure out what needs to change to move it from the former to the latter.

4. PUT THE SCRIPT AWAY. You've read it now. You know you hate it, so looking at it any more at the moment is just going to depress you. At this stage, I usually open a notebook or take a blank sheet of paper and start writing whatever comes to mind, often starting with "This script is bad because...". This is no time for woo-woo positive thinking. This thing is a turd, you are an idiot, you have fucked it all up, what are you going to do about it? This is quite a liberating way to think. Keep writing in the notebook. After a while, you should find yourself outside of the tramlines you have imposed on the script and you might start to have new ideas about the plot and the characters. Worst case, you will at least begin to identify the problems in a more concrete and workable way.

5. BLAME EVERYONE ELSE. I feel like this is an important stage in the process. This script is terrible and that is almost certainly because it was a terrible idea in the first place, or because some exec insisted on having their cretinous story notes incorporated and that has completely ballsed the whole thing up. It's not your fault that they want you to fit a square peg into a round hole. These people are idiots and they have ruined everything and made it look like your fault and you are going to get the blame and everyone is going to think you're an idiot and ask for their money back and you will never work again.

6. ACCEPT THAT IT IS, IN FACT, YOUR FAULT. Stage 5 is important and cathartic and it's a useful, if brief, reminder that you once had some self-respect and this is what it felt like. But, even if there is some kernel of truth to the blame-game, it's irrelevant to moving forward. Your name is going on the cover of this thing. You took the job. You broke it. You fix it.

7. FIGURE OUT THE FIX. This is the really difficult part, for obvious reasons. And the solution is going to be specific to the problems (I'm going to do a piece on identifying script issues at some point soon). But I don't think Stage 7 can come any earlier. I firmly believe that beating yourself up, then beating everyone else up, then beating yourself up again is the only way to achieve the semi-exhausted Zen-state in which solutions will start to appear. You need to focus on the problem, rage about the problem, and then let the problem start to suggest its own solutions.

8. ACCEPT THAT THIS IS GOING TO BE A LOT OF WORK. You don't usually find yourself staring into the abyss because a couple of scenes need some finessing. This is happening because you did a BAD JOB and now you need to fix it. That's going to take some time, but doing the work is going to make you feel better than you do right now. Your self-esteem is hiding out at the end of this trail.

9. MAKE A PLAN. Planning is always good. You can't fix it all right away now - if you could, the problems really wouldn't be that big. So you are going to chip away at it and that involves making a plan. Having a plan is a great way to reassert control over the process.

And now there's the next step, and it's outside of the list, because it comes between 8 and 9 but it needs it's own space to be explored. So Step 8.5 is this: Before you do anything else, you need to talk to the people who commissioned you.

This is not always necessary but, in the event that the fixes you need to make are going to substantially alter the story or characters that were agreed upon at the start, I think you should talk to whoever is writing the cheques. If you don't do this, you are going to start writing something that is different from what they commissioned. If they don't know why you did that, they are just going to be upset reading a script that's not what they were expecting. Explaining after the fact that you changed everything because it wasn't working will not cut it because they won't ever really believe you. They will always be wondering what it would have been like if you had done it their way.

So you need to bring them into the process. You need to share the problem. This is not easy and it can be scary. Because it FEELS like you're calling them up to tell them what a failure you are. You are not doing that. You are calling them up to say that unfortunately you have done all the work that was agreed upon and it didn't work and so now we need to discuss next steps. Summon a residue of self-respect from somewhere and allow that you have brought your talent to bear on this issue and it didn't work out. Your abilities as a plumber are not the issue, it's the pipes that are the problem. You have some ideas of how to fix things and you'd like to explain the problems and talk through the solutions.

Any sane exec is going to welcome this conversation. They would far rather know that there are problems and have a chance to be part of the solution than wait another few weeks, oblivious, only to receive either something they're not anticipating or a something they don't like. We're all making the same movie, is the idea, so you have to make everyone aware when that movie changes course.

They won't think you're crap at your job because you're calling them up, quite the opposite; the REALLY bad writer is the one who didn't realise the script was shit in the first place and sent it in anyway.

Be aware, though, that one thing I think you want to avoid at all costs right now is showing them the work-in-progress. Every exec in the land thinks that they can read incomplete drafts and usefully comment on them. In my experience, almost none of them are capable of this. If they read something bad, it colours their impression of the thing from here on and there is nothing you can do about. No exec should read a draft until you're happy with it, and you are explicitly not happy with your draft at this point, so don't show it to them.

I find it helpful to think of this like you're an architect: they have asked you to design them a house. For whatever reason, be it their requirements or something external, the walls will not bear the weight of the roof. The whole thing is going to collapse unless you find a fix. In this analogy, sending them the bad, incomplete script is like building the house so that they can watch it collapse. They don't need to experience the house collapsing because it will just make them nervous and they will start to doubt your abilities as an architect, because collapsing houses tend to have that effect. And you don't want to explain structural engineering to them because, if they understood it as well as you do, they could design their own damn house. They must simply take your word for it that there is a problem and engage in a discussion about the range of possible solutions.

So talk through the issues, point out where solutions might lie, be open to their suggestions and, in situations where you're pretty sure that the plot or character point they are most keen on is the thing causing the problem ("I just really like the idea of paper walls and a lead roof"), dig into the whys and wherefores of that aspect and try to find a new way to give them what they want.

As a writer on a work-for-hire project, you are responsible for an important part of the machinery of that project. It is therefore absolutely right for you to raise the red flag when something is in danger of blowing the whole thing up.

This call might not be pretty. Depending on the experience and temperament of the execs, it may not be the easiest conversation you ever have. But I think it's the grown-up thing to do. If you dodge it, you're making trouble for yourself down the road, when you hand them a script that doesn't do what they thought it was going to do. That will lead to you being fired (in itself, not necessarily a bad thing - that's a subject for another time) and, quite possibly written off as "not collaborative", which is code for "Do Not Work With This Person".

Above all, though, keep in mind that this happens to everyone. It happens to the people you most admire and respect. If you haven't experienced it yet, you will.

The last time it happened to me was four episodes into the new five-episode season of "Who Killed Aldrich Kemp?", when I was literally about two weeks away from the start of recording and it occurred to me that I might need to junk the whole thing and start again. I didn't, there was a fix. Because I followed all the steps and had the difficult conversation with a very understanding producer. That wasn't fun, but the show is better for it (judge for yourself on March 24th - see what I did there?), and this script I'm struggling with now will be better for the angst it is causing me this week.

Hang on in there. Whatever doesn't kill you... will almost certainly come back for another go.