I’m not making resolutions because they’re always good intentions which go to hell before Spring, so these are things I will do. I will.

1) Most importantly, and the base on which all other declarations are built, I will take my career in my hands and make things happen for myself. It’s too easy to write something, send it out and wait for a response, plus it just doesn’t seem to be working. I will stop putting things off and making excuses and will apply for anything and everything regardless of how unlikely I am to succeed.

2) If I get no positive responses on my last screenplay from agencies or production companies by July (a year after I started) I will find a local producer and director and try to get it made myself.

3) I will write a radio sitcom. It’s a challenge and it’s much easier to get them made than TV ones.

4) I will start entering short story competitions regularly again and will adapt some of my existing short stories for short film.

5) I will stay on top of my submissions to agents, production companies and publishers.

6) I will write a one act play, people always seem to be looking for them.

7) I will get over my luddite tendencies and use the internet to promote myself better.

I will ignore the rule about not cold-sending material to existing sketch shows. (I will also not get my hopes up about their responses)

9) I will do stand up again.

10) I will quit my day job and find another one. I am not doing another Next Christmas sale!

  I will now print this out and stick it above my computer. Happy New Year.

Just a brief post because I feel the need to share my enthusiasm for one of my Christmas presents with people who will actually recognise what a great present it is, and outside of writers I’m not going to find anyone.

The present is volumes 2 and 3 of Backstory (which I think I first came across on Wordcloud) which my parents  have tirelessly tracked down since it is long since out of print (volume 1 is still playing hard to get). The books consist of a series of interviews, mostly conducted by Patrick McGilligan, with screenwriters from the golden age of Hollywood and beyond. In an industry that glorifies the director but often forgets the writer they are a tribute to a bunch of unsung heroes, afterall we’ve all heard of Alfred Hitchcock but how many people hadve heard of John Michael-Hayes who wrote Rear Window, The Trouble With Harry, To Catch a Thief and others? (admittedly Hitchcock co-wrote but still).

But as well as being a tribute they are a tool for any screenwriter working today. As I’ve said in this blog before, the more I write the more I become interested in the habits of other writers; how did they solve the problems I am now facing/ Maybe you pick up new techniques maybe you disagree completely but it’s always interesting. And if you want to learn something about screenwriting then why go to the myriad books on ‘How to Write the Perfect Hollywood Screenplay’ by someone who has never had a film made, when these books are available filled with interviews with the men and women who wrote the words on which Hollywood’s golden age was built. Times and tastes may change, great writing doesn’t.

Or thereabouts. I’m not sure on the exact rules.

With the New Year nearly upon us one of the many resolutions I will be forgetting by February will be to write this blog a little more regularly. Once a month would currently be an improvement. It also feels like time for a new challenge, I have plenty of things on the go at the moment, too many really, but with the day job being particularly hard going at the moment, and other projects entering the less creative and more fiddly stages, I feel the need to start something new if only to maintain my enthusiasm for writing. I will absolutely positively not set myself a deadlines with this, it is to be something to pick at when I can and it will take as long as it takes. Unlike the bulk of stuff I write this will require some serious research, something I usually shun like the plague (because I am basically extremely lazy).

It’s a book by the way, just an idea which came to me but which, via long pages of notes, is starting to take shape into a coherent story.

Is this a smart thing to do?

No.

No. Actually it’s a pretty dumb thing to do, I have way too many claims on my time and that’s unlikely to change any time soon. I would be far better advised to focus on one thing at a time.

But on the flipside I want to write it. I’m good at splitting my time between many projects and it makes me happy. Plus there really is no satisfaction in having an idea and thinking ‘I’ll work on that somewhen’. Nor is there any literary prize for the best idea for a book you never quite got around to.

Both those things having been said, and this is the deciding factor, I divide my writing time into bits where I work on different things and I currently have nothing to write while watching TV (except this blog). For some reason I always write the first draft of books with the TV on so this is ideal. Of course once the first draft is done it will take it’s place in the lengthy queue of things that require real focus and can’t be worked on with repeats of Top Gear in the background. But I’ll deal with that when I come to it. Perhaps by then the day job will have ceased to be a necessity. Here’s hoping.

It’s been almost a month since I wrote anything on my writing and partly that’s because I’ve been incredibly busy with the day job and when I have any spare time I want to use it doing proper writing not this crap. But it’s also because I knew that the subject would have to be the fact that the rejections have started to come in for my screenplay The Infernal Comedy, which was, a very few of you may remember, the subject of this blog when it started a year and half ago.

To date, the rejections (and there are still only a few) fall into two categories; not taking on new clients and not our sort of thing. The first irriates me more because I research agencies pretty carefully before sending anything and I would think that ‘not taking new submissions’ would be a handy (and pertinent) thing to put on their website. The second of course is the more worrying because they have probably read at least the synopsis and decided it is not saleable. They may be right.

I’m a  long way from desperation and I still have my back up plan, which is to start approaching independant producers (the script is conveniently low budget), but, no matter how prepared you are for this sort of thing, no matter how inevitable a part of the industry it is, it’s still hard not to take it personally.

The point I suppose is that agencies don’t make it personal at all, nor should tey, if they started thinking about all the people they were making incredibly miserable with a single stock letter I doubt they could do their job. A high percentage of people who read myscript before I sent it out liked it, why isn’t that being replicated? Because they were looking for something different. A writer is an investment to an agency, one which they cannot take on lightly, a script may be technically flawless (modesty forbids me to comment) but it needs more, it need to be something the agent is passionate about and which they can sell. And God knows your average agency is in a position to be fussy, there’s plenty enough struggling writers out there, and we can’t all have written Citizen Kane.

So that’s their perspective, and I try very hard not to hold it against them (if only because they might read this blog), what about mine? Well I’ve been doing this a while now and I think I’m more sanguine about the whole process than I was but it still takes the wind out of your sails. I think it was best summed up by a friend of mine (she’s an actress but the principle remains the same), she said that now when she gets a rejection she just cries for a day instead of a week. I’m not really a crier, I’m more of a stomp around the flat and berate the bathroom mirror-er, but again, the principle is the same, I admit that I will get nothing useful done that day and put it completely behind me by tomorrow.

Anyway, onwards and upwards. I should also mention that my musical now has a kick-ass solo for the lead female. It’s fantastic to be working on something where I write some notes and a week later a song comes back, then i sit back and listen and think ‘Wow, I did a great week’s work’. This one might still be Citizen Kane…

My original plan writing the songs for my musical was to write them as I came across them while writing  the first draft of the script (when i say ‘write them’ what I mean is write notes on them to send to my composer who writes music and lyrics). That idea went out the window quite quickly. I write my first draft based on my scene by scene and it really doesn’t take long. But I did not include any detail on the songs in the scene by scene, really just a brief description and certainly nowhere near enough to send to composer. Had I written the songs as I got to them then the first draft would have taken weeks, or longer, and would have just been very stoppy starty, which I don’t like.

So the first draft of the script (or ‘book’ I should say since it’s a musical) is finished but the songs are still making their way out at a rate of about one a week, which is more or less the same rate at which they make their way back to me as music and lyrics so that all seems fine.

Regular readers may recall that myself and composer were not 100% sure how the song writing was going to work. Of course I wanted to have an input but we swiftly learnt that me writing the lyrics and her setting them to music was satisfying to neither of us and resulted in the only duff song so far. But I have problems just writing notes or dialgue versions of what I want to be sung . Mainly the problem is that I know I’m writing a song, and I keep slipping into rhyme and rythmn. If you know you’re writing a song then it’s hard not to write one.

We have now found a method which works, though i have to admit it’s not that energy efficient. Basically I write a ‘song’; I write proper lyrics to a tune in my head, I write bits of dialogue, notes and random ideas, whatever occurs to me. I send this to composer who uses my song as a guide for the sort of thing I’m looking for. Seldom does she use more than a few of my actual words. Seldom does she adhere strictly to my ideas. But what comes out is usually what I asked for, just not executed in the way in which I suggested. It’s like saying ‘I want a song like Heaven on Their Minds’ (a great number from Jesus Christ Superstar, written before Lloyd Webber got lazy and started phoning it in), you wouldn’t want that exact song, you’d want soemthing that conveys the same feeling. That’s what we’re doing, except that the song I want has to sound like one that doesn’t exist, so I make up a song and the composer writes one like it.

As I said, not enery efficient, in fact a fairly round about way of writing, but it currently has a 100% success rate of producing awesome songs.

You can’t argue with results.

I apologise for the pun. (although I’m quite proud of it)

The composer for the musical I’m writing does not really believe in drafts (even when she writes the book as well in fact). This is something of a sticking point because I am a great rewriter, I find it tough to know when to stop, and when I get a song through my tendency is to send it back with notes. Which, I hasten to add, she is 100% fine with, but sweeping changes are not encouraged.

I know there are people who prefer the one draft method, some who do years of preparation in advance, and others who just have the gift of getting it right first time (or ‘bastards’ as I prefer to call them). But I have come to rely on my redrafts.

All of this comes from the fact that I am currently writing the first draft of the musical. This is a quick process for me, i do a large amount of prep work and in places I am basically transcribing the messy shorthand scribbles of my Scene by Scene. And it’s not that good. It has potential, the structure is strong and so is the story, but it is unnuanced, rough and the characters all sound the same. But because it is a first draft I don’t care, that’s fine. For me the first draft is all about getting the whole thing out on paper. I find that if I write in detail as I go, then the scenes are good in themselves, but I am writing the scenes, not the whole story. Whereas, if the whole thing is down then every change is done in relation to the piece as a whole, I know how changes in the first scene will affect the final scene. Something I might not know if I was going for perfection first time out.

But that’s just me.

The second draft is a bit more polished and it’s that draft I usually like to have read through and get some feedback on. With this particular project that read through will happen just before Christmas and I’m looking forward to it. It’s always a little scary hearing a script read out loud, especially when you are initing criticism afterwards but I now look on it as an opportunity to really improve the script and have developed a mental screening process; I don’t listen to the stuff I disagree with or don’t care about.

Theoretically the third draft is it, but with a musical, or with anything that is going to be performed live multiple times, the process never really ends. That’s why there are so many different cast recordings available of popular musicals. Some (Chess for instance) you can trace their evolution as songs come and go, the writers still searching for that elusive perfection. Regular readers of my sporadic blogs will know that I am a HUGE film fan, but live theatre has this advantage; Citizen Kane will always be Citizen Kane, but Les Miserables is different every night. (of course silent film, with it’s live music neatly bridges the gap but that’s another blog)

Sort of inspired by BBC 4′s new show about British novellists, which I suppose is more Listening to Writers but the principle is the same.

We all read the work of other writers (I assume) but I think reading about how they write can be rewarding too. Though not all of them want to talk; PG Wodehouse is one of my favourite writers but in is his Over Seventy, which is the closest he really comes to an autobiography, he dismisses the idea of talking about writing completely, claiming that the actual process is boring (as was much Over Seventy i’m sorry to say). Now, for the average person he may well be right, (I discovered early on that, while ‘I’m a writer’ is a pretty good chat up line, following it up with a description of what that entails is whatever the exact opposite of a chat up line is.) but for other writers it can be fascinating. Wodehouse’s last unfinished book ‘Sunset at Blandings’ comes with notes in the back showing how it might have panned out and talking about how he worked. From this I learnt that all wodehouse’s country houses (and there are many) are based on real places to ensure that their geography remains consistent throughout his books. How is that not interesting?

In a completely different type of writing I saw an interview with composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim explaining how he uses the metre of a song to time a joke. And that the famously awakward ‘love farce’ line in Send in the Clowns is deliberately awkward so that the actor is forced to enunciate the words, contributing to the needling nature of the song.

This very morning I caught the tail end of an interview with a novellist on BBC Breakfast (annoyingly too late to find out who the hell he was) who said he spent two years planning a book then 50 days, 6 hours a day, writing. It works for him.

I’m not saying that I read or listen to all these people and adopt everything (hell, they mostly disagree with each other) but it’s always interesting to hear whatever successful writers have to say; maybe you learn something, maybe it’s just another point of view. The advice Terry Pratchett gives young writers is to create a pair of characters then let them talk and interact until a plot comes out of it. That’s basically what I did with my last sitcom script.

And that’s a huge thrill, for me at any rate, when a writer you admire recomends something that you already do.

It’s a little early (or late) for new year’s resolutions, but my mid year one is to read more of what writers have to say about their work, about the process and the inspiration behind it. There may well be absolutely nothing to learn because, God knows, you can’t emulate inspiration, but that makes it no less interesting to read about.

Well not exactly stolen.

It’s like this; when George Lucas wanted to show some of his film school buddies a rough cut of his film ‘Star Wars’ (back when it was just called ‘Star Wars’) he famously filled in the gaps where the spaceship effects were not ready with footage of dogfights from war films. I feel I could do similar with songs from musicals to fill in the gaps in my musical.

With no prior experience of writing musicals (pantomimes don’t really count), I am inevitably going to take inspiration from musicals I am familiar with. I am not a musical expert so that is a relatively small pool, which may be just as well as it ought to lead to at least some consistency in the songs.

Of course musically none of this matters since I’m not writing the music, it’s more the role that the songs play within the narrative, how they sound in my head and of course how I describe them to the composer.

So, for better or worse, when I consider my opening number I hear a combination of Double Talk from City of Angels and Bobby from Company. My leads’ first songs bear a resemblance to Where I Want To Be from Chess and Who Knows from Westside Story respectively. Interestingly, where I am unable to make this comparison, I find the songs to be a bit thin, and they are all the better when i have a think and find something to take as a point of reference.

Is this a good thing or a bad thing? I really don’t know. Having so little experience means that I am playing it by ear and I probably won’t know until some way into the process whether or not I am doing it right. That said, it seems to me that as long as I am not the one writing the songs, and as long as I do not mention my inspiration to the composer or exert any undue pressure on her to push a song in a certain direction, it can’t do any harm. We are all inspired bywriters we admire. I freely admitted that the film I wrote which started this whole blog thing was inspired by Frank Capra’s films and the writing of Robert Riskin. While the sitcom I have been working on is more than a little influenced by Galton and Simpson.

Based on those examples I do at least pick my inspirations well. The writer who has most influenced my musical must be Stephen Sondheim, thanks to his character based songs and brilliant lyrics. Sondheim (best known now for Sweeney Todd, courtesy of Tim Burton’s adaptation) celebrates his 80th birthday this year and enjoyed a special Prom in his honour on Saturday night. If you missed it I would heartily reccomend the BBC i-player, it was on radio 3 as well so you shouldn’t have too much difficulty in finding it. If you have even the meanest interest in musci you will not be disappointed.

Very exciting week; the composer I’m writing my musical with has sent me a rough version of one of the songs. Of course it’s not perfect, music goes through drafts like any writing does, but it’s pretty damn good! Perhaps most importantly it is not what I would have imagined, not what I would have written (if I could write music) which means that the finished article is going to be a genuine collaboration.

Regular readers will know that I don’t collaborate much. And people who know me can probably guess why. One of the main problems I have had with the musical so far is letting go of the reins, I’m just not used to sharing responsibility and my instinct is to plough ahead as if I’m the only one working on it. One way I have alleviated this is bt sending regular (roughly bi-weekly) updates to the composer so she can comment and so on.

And that’s just as well because I’m seriously re-editing the opening scenes. Two of them have bit the dust completely, one song has gone and the scene substantially changed. And the more I change at the start of course the more needas to change later on. It’s a big job, this is my first real attempt at writing something historical and I think my primary instinct was to stick religiously to what happened when and include everything. My writing instincts are now kicking in and I am turning the events more into a story (without changing the fact s of course).

It’s also the first time I’ve written something serious for the stage, on screen or in a book you have so many more editing options, half the challenge on stage is to be able to keep events natural while being forced to work within a very limited number of scenes. I think I’m doing this better now than when i started, hence the major re-think but it’s still tricky. Subtleties which I would montage my way through in a film need to be addressed with intelligence, and there are days when that just doesn’t feel like an option I possess.

At the moment it feels like the ideas are just pouring out of me, I could probably change every single scene, and for now that’s a good thing. I’m not writing yet so I just note all the ideas in the structure and see how they play out. Which of course brings me back to my collaboration problem again because keeping track of all these changes must be a complete pain in the arse.

In conclusion; I’m glad I don’t have to work with me.

Despite a horrifying week at the day job I’ve managed to find the time to type up my sitcom notes into the fastest written pilot I’ve ever produced. I now plan to let it sit until the read through is imminent, and then do a quick polish. I want to know what people think of it in it’s current state; largely unpolished and with few writery flourishes. To be honest it’s little more than a conversation which (hopefully) exhibits similars peaks and troughs as a more action oriented script. I genuinely don’t know, all I know is that I like it and it’s fun to try something new.

So, with that out of the way I can concentrate on the musical, and it has really been brought home to me this week how much of a pain I must be to work with. Because I tend to write alone I have built up my own method whcih involves writing down every idea that occurs to me and slowly paring back to the essentials. But this is somewhat problematic when you have a partner trying to write songs which I keep cutting/moving/completely changing the meaning of. I am now sending regular updates to my composer so she is kept apprised of what is going through my head, which may not be useful but will at least prevent me from wasting more of her time.

The songs are getting under way now and we’re trying a couple of methods of writing. I’m writing lyrics for one of the songs which she will set to music, with another I’m providing detailed notes on what the song is supposed to be saying and she will write both lyrics and music. At this stage it’s very much trial and error to see what works.

The story is in place but I am now unhappy with some of the early scenes, they are too expositionary. Were it a film I would edit away the problem but onstage a scene needs to be a certain length. I need to give the scene more of a direction and then filter the necessary exposition through it. At the moment the lead comes on, he is told some stuff to take him into the next scene and the scene ends. That won’t do.

Some of you will have heard me talking about a film I have in developement called Wake Up. Well, unfortunately it is now on hiatus for at least the next year, it’s subject is deemed too close to Philip Nolan’s Inception and a low budget film can’t hope to compete so the production company does not want to risk it. And they’re right, i don’t want my story (which is infinitely superior to Nolan’s!) to be thought a poor relation, or worse still an attempt to cash in. It sucks, but I’m happy to wait if it means getting the film right.