WHAT PEOPLE WANT

Hi, folks! Welcome to November!

Today's thought for the day concerns the market. Perhaps that should be The Market. What is it? And how do we work with it?

For whom do we write our scripts and screenplays? Generally, we write them for ourselves. Nothing wrong with that - if you're not enjoying what you're doing, why do it? At some level or other we have to write for our own satisfaction, otherwise writing anything at all is difficult. This is why our era of multiple rewrites is such a curse on writers. We lose our own investment in the script as we try repeatedly to satisfy a gormless producer and their team of marketing idiots.

But - apart from ourselves - who do we write for?

For the people, of course. For the consumers, the great unwashed, the masses out there who are crying out for quality entertainment.

Right?

Actually, no. The market - in the UK, at least - amounts to about five people. If we're sticking with TV, for now, the 'market' might amount to one person.

That one person is to be found somewhere at the top of the TV tree. Their word is law. They say yea or nay.

Forget about the multitudes out there. Yes, I know it's with them in mind that we toil at our work stations. In an ideal world, a writer would write directly for the audience, for the consumer, but ours is not an ideal world. In the real world, we write in order to satisfy an executive. One person.

That person might have started their new job that week. They might be scared shitless by the sudden responsibility of their post. They might be having a bad day. They may not be in the ideal position to make a sensible judgement.

Worse than that. They might well be caught up in the media buzz.

In London, the media world is surprisingly small. There are certain places where media people hang out. Some of these places should be bombed. The Groucho Club, for instance, is an example of everything that's wrong with today's media. Rather than spending time out there, amongst their people, their audience, the consumers who pay their wages, our successful media types lock themselves away in an ivory tower with others of their calling and do all they can to avoid the people they really work for. Which is bad.

The 'media', as we think of them, have demonstrated sheep-like instincts in recent years. They all bleat the same message. They're all looking for the same thing. What that is, exactly, changes on a more-or-less daily basis.

I had a film script once. This was what we call a 'spec' script. I had taken it upon myself to write it without bothering to get it commissioned first.

It had taken me two-and-a-half years to find the subject and a further twelve months to complete the script. It was based on one of the world's greatest love stories - one that, as far as I could tell, had never been turned into a movie before.

I put everything I'd got into it. Everything I'd learnt over a decade or so of working in the industry.

My agent practically combusted spontaneously when he read it. The film department at my agency got involved. It was all looking very good.

But then, things went rather quiet. I started asking what was happening. Little by little, I began to hear a rather familiar refrain:

'It's not what people are looking for.'

This struck me as odd. I thought, 'So what you're saying is that nobody out there is really interested in an epic based on one of the world's greatest love stories?'

Still, the same message kept coming back. 'It's a great script, but nobody's looking for this sort of thing.'

The screenplay was entitled 'Tristan and Isolde'. Four years or so after I'd written my script I began to hear about a major production, with Ridley Scott as executive producer, that went by the title 'Tristan and Isolde'.

There was no plagiarism, here. Examples of producers and companies running off with your ideas and making them without crediting or paying you for them are legion. But in this instance I was to learn that Ridley Scott had spent something like twenty years looking for a 'Tristan and Isolde' script.

So. The script that 'nobody' was looking for could have been sold. Had anybody decided not to listen to the herd but to just get out there are sell it.

I had been told, in no uncertain terms, that there simply wasn't a market for my script. I had refused to believe that. And I had been right. But by then it was too late.

This situation creates enormous problems for the scriptwriter. What it means is that The Market, so called, has nothing whatever to do with what people want. It means that The Market is whatever the media sheep think it might be today. Tomorrow, it'll be different. However, if your script was rejected on a day when 'Nobody's looking for that sort of thing', who's to say that it will be revived when, suddenly, everybody's looking for that sort of thing?

Who are we writing for? For the viewers and listeners? For the executives who have the power of life or death over a script? For the media herd (most of whom have no ideas of their own, which is why they swill around listening out for somebody else's idea, until today's consensus has been agreed on)?

What is The Market?

A good writer will always know, instinctively, what the public will be looking for - not now, but in two or three years time, when, with a fair wind, the project might just about be ready to hit the screens.

Sadly, the people he or she will be relying on in the media to advance the project can only reference what they saw on the box last night.

This is a real conundrum. I suspect it will continue to be a nasty Catch-22 for the earnest writer until the media industry sorts itself out. When the media realise that the writer's creativity and natural instinct for what people want, what stories they want to hear, matter more than the moronic received wisdom of several hundred hangers-on whose purpose, in life and in the media, is obscure. It will not change until the decision makers stop surrounding themselves with people whose judgement is risible but whose sole purpose is to keep the media mogul isolated, away from the clamour of creatives.

Till then, we find ourselves in an awkward and often unworkable position. We spend months - possibly even years - developing and reworking our material, content, deep down inside, that there is a market for this sort of thing. Sometimes, it turns out we were right. But the boat has been missed, because too many people without ideas of their own have convinced themselves that they know what The Market is and what it wants.

Till then, we will continue writing, not for the majority of citizens, but for a tiny handful of people - those who hold the power, and those who cluster round them trying to look like they know what they're doing.

All the time, the gap between the writer and the true market (the audience) widens dramatically.

This is not a good thing.

WHAT PRODUCERS DON'T KNOW ABOUT SCRIPTS

I had a series with the BBC. The scripts had been commissioned, one after another, with such alacrity that my agent was prompted to say, 'This is unheard of.' There had been discussions about the second series. Then - a quick round of musical desks, and I've got a new boss.

'We like the scripts', I was told, 'but there'll have to be changes.'

An intake of breath. Wait for it.

'We want the characters to be younger.'

Now, this wasn't the first time I'd had this note on this particular project. At the start of the whole process, nine months earlier, I'd been told to drop the ages of the characters. And I had done so, as far as credibility would allow.

(One of the characters was a consultant forensic psychiatrist. There's about a twelve year training period involved in becoming one of these rare and exotic creatures, so thirty was about as young as I could reasonably make the character. Besides - who'd want a consultant forensic psychiatrist in their twenties?)

But this time, I was worried. For a start, the scripts were written. The previous management had accepted them. Suddenly, though, there had to be changes. The characters would have to be younger.

So, presumably, a lead character who had twin children would maybe not have those children anymore. And all the others would be a slick bunch of 'Hollyoaks' rejects. And we couldn't have them making mistakes because that would make their youth seem like folly. So maybe they'd have to be better at their jobs than their slightly older and more experienced originals. Which means that we've just thrown any attempt at realism out of the window.

The project died, there and then. I knew that to make major changes to the characters would destabilise the stories we'd got.

The note - 'We want the characters to be younger' - had not been thought through. Implementing the new requirements would create major script problems. The management would then weigh in with another dumbass idea, with more suggestions as to how to make it work (it was working to begin with, but then we started making changes) and the whole thing would gradually unravel.

It's too easy these days for producers to make remarks such as 'We want the characters to be younger.' I'd had a glimpse of this new tendency at the BBC a year or two before. This was on a series I was familiar with, having worked on Series One, and it was only after the third draft of my script had been handed in that someone in management - Armani suit, just back from the Algarve, definitely the new breed - stepped in and demanded that the beginning and the end of the script must change. The result - that script was ruined.

What makes producers think that they're entitled to behave like this? If they haven't got a sensible suggestion to make, why can't they shut up?

They really do seem to believe that a script is a document that can be rewritten ad nauseam, pulled this way and that, until it has reached a kind of homogenised state that nobody could take offence at.

In reality, what producers are doing when they fiddle with our scripts is they are taking away our own individual style, our voices. They are removing the 'author' from his or her own work. As a result, the script will lack 'authority. It will be 'unauthorised'.

This takes us back to yesterday's blog. Producers these days say that they like working with soap opera writers. Soap scripts are designed and constructed in such a way that they can be changed over and over again. Scenes do not rely on one another - a whole storyline can be lifted out and replaced.

In a real drama script, the story evolves, developing organically, as, little by little, the flesh of the script is put onto the bone of the plot. Making any major change at any point in the process, especially if that change has not been thought through, can ruin the story. Till then, the characters have been developing, taking on the forms that they require for the story to work. Suddenly, the characters are capable of being anything, doing anything, if it appeals to the producer. It doesn't matter that this new kind of character behaviour is violently at odds with the way the script has been developing. The producer has demanded it, so that's that.

In days gone by, producers tended to be excellent script editors. They also knew how to delegate. A scriptwriter was hired to do a job. They were hired because the producer believed that they could do this job. They were helped, advised, guided, but generally left alone to do the job they'd been hired to do.

Not anymore. Respect for scriptwriters and scripts has pretty well vanished. Producers who simply do not understand scripts, the processes by which they come into being, the delicacy of the strands which hold the various elements of the script together, feel that they have a natural right to alter any aspect of the script, at any stage in the process, whenever they feel like it.

This is wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong. It leads to appalling scripts. It leads to endless pointless rewrites, and to writers trying to incorporate stupid ideas delivered by producers who haven't got a clue.

It leads to producers trumpeting the merits of soap opera writers over and above experienced dramatists.

It leads to crap drama.

This is what writers are up against, these days. If it isn't tough enough breaking into the industry, the writer then has to be broken by that industry. On many series, they only employ writers because it takes too long to train a monkey to type.

So - suggestions, please, as to how we can overturn this horrendous state of affairs. We need to generate a debate on the future of scriptwriting for film and TV. At the heart of that debate must be the status and role of the writer.

Until some semblance of the old respect for writers is restored, we'll continue to see our working conditions deteriorate, and the quality of our scripts too.

How do we persuade big, scary producers that we know what we're doing - that we don't need their idiotic input?

Any thoughts?

CRISIS? WHAT CRISIS?

Soap opera is not drama. It is melodrama.

At a BBC Drama Group launch, some years ago, Script Doc sat at the back and watched as clips from the forthcoming drama season were screened for assorted hacks. Amongst the single-strand dramas (films, in other words), series and serials came a few excerpts from the BBC's soap, 'Eastenders', which takes place in a mythical land somewhere near the Thames. And Script Doc wondered, 'What is a soap opera doing here in the midst of all this drama?'

The fine points of why soap and drama are two different things can be explored elsewhere. The point is that Script Doc was right to feel a bit of concern, somewhere deep inside, about the classification of soap as drama.

Not so long after the Drama Group launch in question, the Doc came across an interview with one of British TV's up-and-coming young producers. 'We like working with soap writers,' said the Bright Young Thing. 'They always deliver.'

This statement intrigued the Doc. Was Ms Producer suggesting that drama writers who don't specialise in soap actually don't deliver? Or was she saying something else?

I think the latter. Soap writers have no ownership of their characters. They are accustomed to rewriting a script because somebody, somewhere, has changed their minds about something. A drama writer has an emotional investment in the script. Too many rewrites, too much second-guessing, inflict untold damage on a real drama script. Soap scripts can be rewritten indefinitely. Soap writers simply do as they're told.

Soap has become the behemoth of British TV. Even shows which struggled to define themselves as something other than soap have adopted soapy elements. Emotionally manipulative, socially meaningless, dramatically contrived, soap has come to dominate British TV drama over recent years.

So what, you might well ask. Well, as writers have lost control over their own scripts, the BBC has fallen into the trap of believing in celebrities. This is the classic Hollywood producer's mistake.

We're currently seeing a startling number of complaints made to the BBC about two massively overpaid comedians whose questionable prank calls made to an elderly actor have offended many people. Nobody queried whether the prank calls were a good idea at the time. They were made by two of the BBC's highest-paid celebrities, so how could they possibly have been a bad idea?

Let's compare the level of editorial control exercised over Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand with that wielded by drama producers during the script stage. In the first instance, no editorial control whatsoever. Those two are celebs and therefore they can do no wrong. In the latter instance, all writers must be soap writers so that they will accept excessive, even abusive and exploitative levels of editorial control without the reservations that a real drama writer would have.

Power has shifted in the industry. This has taken about twenty years to achieve, prompted initially by the right-wing governments of the 1980s (Margaret Thatcher's husband was a particularly vocal, and unelected, critic of the BBC). What has happened during that period can be compared with the banking sector. A small, hugely privileged elite has been allowed to accrue enormous amounts of power - without responsibility - and has been rewarded with grossly inflated pay.

In the meantime, the majority of creatives have been forced to toe the line, on short-term contracts, and have been subject to the whims of over-promoted suits.

All writers have become soap writers. Hacks. Carefully screened and trained up to believe that creating the soapy drivel that passes for drama these days is some kind of achievement.

Today, there is one rule for the celebs and another for the drones. The former get showered with money and told to do whatever they want. The latter are kept on a tight leash and face oblivion if they dare to question the wisdom of their gobbledegook-spouting 'superiors'.

Ladies and gentlemen, that is a system in decline. It is a slave economy engineered to benefit a tiny minority. By treating writers as slaves while allowing celebrity loudmouths to demand ever higher fees, the BBC management has shown the contempt it feels both for the vast majority of its staff and - even more tellingly - for the consumer (that's you and me, folks).

But there is good news. As noted in a previous blog, the BBC's grandly-titled Head of Fiction is leaving White City imminently, and the removal of her dead hand can do the BBC's drama output no harm. But the real issue is a bigger political one.

Governments around the world have, in recent weeks, woken up to the devastating effects of a certain mindset being allowed to dictate its own terms. The partial nationalisation of certain banks represents a huge political upheaval - the final realisation that a system based on greed and the imagined impeccable status of a lucky few will inevitably create its own demise.

Where the banking sector is concerned, we have all lost money. Where the BBC is concerned, we have all been short-changed. Senior management has been too busy enjoying its perks and congratulating itself to tackle the real problems that are now endemic within the Beeb. Staff morale is at an all-time low. The viewer is fobbed off with no end of junk. The creative voice has been silenced in order to allow the inane, self-centred babble of a few so-called celebrities to be heard. Standards have declined, opportunities have dried up, some people have become fabulously wealthy.

Is this what we want?

Let's hope that a fresh wind is about to blow. We've lived in a world of lies for years now. The consequences of doing so are now coming home to us. And, if history has taught us anything, it's that revolutions happen when too many people are browbeaten into harming their own interests for the sake of a pampered minority.

Don't be a soap writer. Don't be a slave.

Stand up for real drama. For the right to write, and the right to be heard.

The voice of the writer matters more than the right of a couple of overpaid celebrities to make prank calls.

FLASHBACK & VOICEOVER

Imagine a flashy, trashy TV series. Something like 'Miami Vice'.

Our two leads work for Lieutenant By-the-Book. They are Flashback and his colleague, Voiceover.

Flashback was probably in 'Nam, where he caught the dreaded VFS (Vietnam Flashback Syndrome) disease. That, or he saw his wife murdered. Or - well, you know the sort of thing: a trauma that just won't go away.

Voiceover is a smartass with a personality disorder. He has a compulsive need to narrate his own story, to tell himself, and anyone else who'll listen, what's going on.

What adventures these two could have! Voiceover could tell us precisely what he's thinking and doing while Flashback is continually reminded of something that happened in the past. One stays cool while the other goes bonkers - but it all works out right in the end. Voiceover can tell us what he and Flashback have learnt from the experience, while Flashback rearranges his memories so that they don't keep jumping up and biting him on the bum. And they'll both have a wry laugh with By-the-Book, who just ten minutes earlier was about to fire them.

What a pile of faeces.

They'll probably commission it.

Flackback and Voice Over (V.O.) are two of the budding screenwriters most familiar allies. And, if you want my advice, you'll steer well clear of them both. Because they're idiots.

Scripts convey information. Two kinds of information. They tell us what we see and what we hear. This information is presented in the present tense. The script tells us what the characters are doing and what they are saying to each other.

Flashback and Voice Over are attempts at presenting information that, in reality, we are able neither to see nor to hear. Both take us inside the head of a character. With Flashback we are given a privileged glimpse of a character's memories. With V.O. we hear the character's thoughts.

Apart from the fact that both are unrealistic, they both tend to be used for the wrong reasons. Flashback is often deployed by the writer to break up a dull part of the script (no script should have dull bits!) and to hint at an on-going build-up of tension. Voice Over is resorted to so that a) the plot will make sense, and b) the audience will identify with a particular character.

Neither is necessary.

Flashback can be used as a structural device. Some of my favourite films start with the death of the main character and then go back to tell the story of his life. That's fine.

And there's a clever way of using Voice Over to make smooth transitions between scenes (effectively, making the soundtrack cut at a different moment from the visual edit, so that the dialogue from one scene can run over or anticipate the start of the next scene). And that's fine.

But otherwise, I almost always feel that the writer has plumped for using Flashback or Voice Over, not because they should, but because they can.

Let this be a warning to all beginners: KEEP AWAY FROM THE EFFECTS PEDALS!

Flashback and Voice Over are easy options. They're often used as if they were a natural addition of the screenwriters palette. But they're not. They're cheap tricks. And I've hardly ever come across a script that would not benefit from being rewritten without them.

Try writing your script without indulging in these fancy practices. Try writing it straight - just what we see and what we hear - as if the camera just happened to be there to capture the action.

You know, before he wandered off into Cubism and started painting women with their eyes in the wrong places, Picasso really could paint a perfectly representational scene. He did what every artist should do: start by learning how it's done before you try breaking the rules.

Start by mastering the straightforward, linear narrative before you get the toy-box out. Try it. If you can tell your story without using Flashback and Voice Over, then they were never needed in the first place.

Chances are, your script will work a lot better without them.

CALLING THE SHOTS

A screenplay is a blueprint. I'm sure most of us have, at one time or another, tried to follow some kind of diagrammatic instructions. Perhaps we've had to assemble some flat-pack furniture.

You'd be a bit miffed if the people responsible for designing those instructions left out crucial information, wouldn't you?

The eventual product - the movie, the TV show - is put together following the instructions given in the script. The screenwriter provides the detailed plan, the architect's design.

Evidently, then, we don't want to leave out anything from the script that we believe is important to the end product. And we certainly want to leave as little as possible to chance.

But there are certain things we're not allowed to do, or are strongly advised to avoid doing. One of these is telling actors how to speak the lines. Another is telling the director where to put the camera.

I wrote a sequence, once, of various people arriving at different doors. Maybe five or six short scenes, each with a small snatch of dialogue. The director decided to shoot them all together in one continuous, fluid shot. He was showing off. It took hours to set up and cost a lot of money.

I didn't mind because it was fun watching them set that one up. I also felt that the director was fully justified in making that creative decision.

Tell you one thing: if I'd tried to write those five or six short scenes as one continuous sequence, dictating in my script that the camera starts up high on a cherry-picker and then steadicams in to a first floor apartment, the chances are it wouldn't have happened that way. The director would have decided that it was unfilmable.

Besides, who was I - a mere writer - to tell him where to put his camera?

Now. Here's the screenwriting secret. It is our job as screenwriters to tell directors where to put their cameras but WE MUSTN'T LET THEM KNOW WE'RE DOING IT.

Let's take the tricky matter of writing action sequences.

Some scripts are easy to read. Others aren't. One of the principal differences between the two is layout. The pages of an easy-to-read script tend to be very white. Too much ink on the page makes a script difficult to read.

We need our screenplays to be neat, clear, clean and easy on the eye. There is also a rule that a page of properly formatted screenplay should equal roughly one minute of screen time.

Let's say that you have to write an action sequence. If you expect that sequence to last, say, three minutes, then the action sequence in your script should be three pages long.

Nothing will make your script harder to read than three pages of solid ink describing what happens during the action sequence.

I have a rule of my own. It goes: when writing action or describing a scene, use short paragraphs of four lines maximum. Less than four lines - fine. More than four lines - no.

Break up the paragraphs. Don't write in solid blocks. Short paragraphs, with a single line gap between them, are easy to read. Massive chunks of text are not.

This turns a daunting, three-minute action sequence into short and snappy bite-size units of action.

It also allows you - up to a point - to direct the scene. Each short, pithy paragraph of one, two, three or four lines (max) is like a single shot. You'd be a fool to put 'LS' (long shot) or 'CU' (close-up) in your script, because that's for the director to decide. Besides, why bother? The way you write that short paragraph, that discreet unit of action, will indicate how it is meant to be filmed.

Our job as screenwriters is to visualise the entire story, moment by moment, and to describe it, moment by moment.

A lot of writers make the mistake of introducing a character without describing them. How is the reader to imagine what that character is like if you don't provide the basic information? How is the casting department expected to find the right actor if you don't tell them what to look for?

How that character is introduced is up to you. You're the one who first sees that character in your head. So write what you see.

Writing in short paragraphs means that you don't describe the scene. You describe the shot. And then, in the next short paragraph, the next shot. And so on.

Actors need things to do. It's a terrible mistake to write page after page of uninterrupted dialogue (boring, boring, boring). It's also wrong to put (sarcastically) or (angrily) in there in an attempt to tell the actor how to speak the lines.

Don't write it. Show it. If the character is getting angry, show him getting angry. Give the actor the appropriate actions - clenching fists, punching walls - but don't write (angrily) there in the dialogue. If you give the actor clear instructions to behave angrily, the line should come out the way you want it to.

It's the golden rule. Don't tell it: show it. Write each scene the way you see it in your head. Short paragraphs make the script easy to read. They also allow you to adjust your focus. Each paragraph tells us what we see. So, one paragraph might briefly describe a crowd. The next might describe one person in that crowd. The next, what that person is looking at. Implicitly, you're providing camera angles. You're writing the scene exactly as you see it unfolding.

Don't tell us that a character is depressed. Show us. I read scripts all the time which state things like 'So-and-so looks thoughtful'.

Try telling an actor to look thoughtful. Do thoughtful, darling. Give me thoughtful.

Rubbish. If you want them to look thoughtful, give them thoughtful things to do.

It's by being CLEAR and PRECISE like this that you get to direct your script. It's by being vague and imprecise that you allow directors and actors to do their own thing.

An architect wouldn't produce half a plan and leave the builder to make up the rest. That could be a recipe for disaster.

You're the architect. You decide what the building should look like, what it's made of. It's your job to make sure that the building will be aesthetically pleasing and structurally sound.

Write the script the way you see it. No camera angles, no actor's notes. Just what we see, moment by moment. Don't tell actors and directors how to realise your vision. Tell them what we see, and then let them give us that vision.

Don't tell. Show.

And be CLEAR and PRECISE about it.

FIREPROOFING YOUR SCRIPT

My first lesson in fireproofing came while working on a well-known British TV series.

Police are called to a house to investigate a burglary in progress. They arrive to discover that the householder has already apprehended the suspect. In fact, he's beaten him unconscious.

In my scene description for the bedroom in which the supposed burglar is found I had casually written: 'There is blood all up the wall.'

Oh, naughty screenwriter. Bad, bad screenwriter.

It was pointed out to me, by a very lovely script editor, that this could be taken as an invitation to the stage management people to cover the bedroom with Kensington Gore. The scene would then look like Sam Peckinpah had shot one of his slow-motion sequences in there. So could I please amend it to: 'There are two or three drops of blood on the wall'?

My next lesson was on another primetime TV drama. On this occasion, petroleum spirit was seen being poured through a letter-box, followed by a burning rag (ooh, isn't my work nasty?). Again, it fell to the script editor to ask me to specify that THE AREA AFFECTED BY THE FIRE EXTENDS NO FURTHER THAN THE DOORMAT. Otherwise, it was pointed out to me, Vis-FX would burn the house down.

You see, we forget, us screenwriters. While we're so busy, thrashing out our marvellous scripts, we forget that it's so very, very easy to write out a sentence, but when it comes to production, that casual, seemingly throwaway sentence can mean hours of work for somebody.

Another TV series - this one involves a hospital. I had written, without really thinking about it very much, that one car swerves to avoid another car. Easy enough, you'd think.

Er - no. Just the paperwork involved in that one 'stunt' wiped out part of a rain forest. I actually felt quite ashamed. Thoughtless me, dashing off some line about a car swerving. Did it not occur to me that that could be dangerous? That somebody would actually have to make a car swerve it order to film it?

Vile, wicked, inconsiderate screenwriter!

Perhaps I should have been more specific about how much the car had to swerve.

While all this was going on (there was about five years between the blood-on-the-wall incident and the potentially-deadly-car-swerve) I was also learning that it was not just set-dressers going berserk that you had to guard against. You don't just have to take precautions against over-enthusiastic special effects teams. In fact, anyone involved in the production side of things can make a mess of your delicate labours.

Actors, for example. By and large, they don't have to do much. A car fetches them from the hotel. They get pampered by some fresh and fragrant make-up artist. They get fed and watered very nicely. And all they have to do is walk a bit and say something or other. Simple, yeah?

Don't you believe it. Watching some actors at work on your script will make you want to cry with joy. Others will make you wonder whether the laws on involuntary euthanasia shouldn't be relaxed.

And what about directors? On the whole, I like directors. They only want to look good by turning your crummy script into screen magic, and there's nothing wrong with you taking the credit for their brilliant ideas. But don't imagine for a single moment that a director can't cock up your script.

Editors? They take decisions about what gets left in and what gets taken out when you're not looking.

In short, you slave away in a dark room on iron rations, desperately polishing your lovely script until it shines. And then you hand it over to a bunch of monkeys. Some of those monkeys are exceptionally talented. But they're still monkeys.

You have to protect yourself. More importantly, you have to protect your script.

My first lesson in this involved making the script 'stage-management proof'. My second lesson was about being 'Vis-FX proof'.

No one ever told me to make my scripts 'director proof' or 'actor proof'. I learned that from experience.

And here's the catch. Actors and directors can get a bit shirty when the screenwriter tries to tell them how to do their jobs. Sometimes, they'll do the opposite of what it says in the script, just to prove who's the boss.

So we have to be clever. We have to anticipate all the many different ways that somebody involved in the production can interpret our words and then make sure that there's only one possible interpretation.

In fact, this brings us to the essence of good screenwriting, which is all about being CLEAR and PRECISE.

It's all too easy to just write a line of action or a line of dialogue. But to fireproof it, you have to be aware that somebody else is going to be let loose with that bit of action, that brilliantly witty line. And that person may well want to make their presence felt by following their own interpretation of what you might have had in mind.

Don't give them the opportunity.

Be CLEAR and PRECISE.

It's your job to be in control of the script. Bitter experience will teach you that, if you don't carefully consider the possible ramifications of everything to write in your script, there's every possibility that you'll be embarrassed by what somebody does during production.

After all, it's your name that goes out after 'Written by'.

Fireproof your script. Be CLEAR and PRECISE about everything that happens in it. Don't leave any room for interpretation. Be CLEAR and PRECISE.

Unless, of course, you really do want blood all up the wall.

CHARACTER & CONFLICT

According to William Faulkner, 'The only thing worth writing about is the conflict in the human heart.'

Try telling that to the makers of 'Butt Lovers #4'.

But there's truth in it. Most of us will have been told, at some point, that drama is all about conflict.

'Drama' actually derives from a Greek verb meaning 'to do'. As we now know, character is what character does. The hero's character is forged as he or she takes steps to achieve their objective in the face of obstacles.

It is what the hero does to overcome the obstacles which stand between him and his objective that forms the story. The drama is generated by the hero's struggle to reach his goal. What the hero does forms the drama.

As I've said before, it's amazing how many scripts get written in which the hero doesn't really seem to want anything. If the hero doesn't actually want something, there can't be anything or anyone preventing him from getting it. Ergo, no story. No drama. No conflict.

But there's an added refinement. Hopefully, you will never attempt to write a script without making sure, before you start, that you have got a

HERO

who has an

OBJECTIVE

to achieve which they must overcome

OBSTACLES.

It's vital that your hero wants something. We can look at this another way:

The BUDDING SCREENWRITER wants to write an AWARD-WINNING SCREENPLAY but LACK OF CONFIDENCE, INEXPERIENCE and the SHEER WALKING-ON-BROKEN-GLASS PAIN OF SCREENWRITING stand in the way.

Fine. But why does the screenwriter want to write an award-winning screenplay? And what's really holding them back?

Why do you want to write a screenplay? Sigmund Freud believed that what the artist really wants is power, fame and the love of women (or men). Because the artist doesn't have those things he or she sublimates their desires into their artistic endeavours. With any luck, they become successful and achieve what they always wanted: power, fame and the love of women (or men).

What does your hero really want? Yes, yes, we all know that heroes want to save the world. But why bother? What's the real motivation? And what's really stopping them from getting off their backsides and doing a bit of world-saving?

You can add depth to your characters by remembering that we all have inner and outer objectives, and inner and outer obstacles.

Let's say that your hero wants to win an Olympic gold medal. That's an outer objective - it can be seen, it can be grasped - and the audience needs to know about it early on in your script.

Your hero should also have an inner objective. Where does the desire to win Olympic gold come from? It's a lot of bother. There must be a reason for the hero to go to all that trouble, and it isn't the desire for a bit of bling.

Similarly, maybe your hero's obstacle - the thing that's standing in the way of them winning the gold medal - is that they're grossly overweight. That's an outer obstacle. There'll be an inner obstacle, too, which probably accounts for them being overweight.

The hardest obstacles to overcome are the inner obstacles. And while the plot might be all about the struggle to win gold, the story is really about achieving the inner objective - a sense of self-worth.

The story takes place on two levels. On the one, 'outer', level, it's about someone who has to get in shape and beat the competition in order to win Olympic gold. That, basically, is the plot. But there's an 'inner' level to the story that is possibly more important. On that level, it's about someone who has to overcome crippling self-doubt, personal unhappiness and perhaps some kind of trauma in order to win the praise that they never received from their father and to rid themselves of their inner demons. The struggle then isn't against the other competitors so much as it is against themselves.

All your main characters - HERO, VILLAIN, SIDEKICK and LOVE INTEREST - should have objectives and obstacles if they're going to be real characters. But you can take that further. Give them some depth. Let them have inner objectives and inner obstacles in addition to their outward desires and external problems.

And be aware of your own inner objectives. Why do you really want to write a screenplay? What is your real motivation? How will it feel to achieve your own inner objective? Keeping that in mind just might keep you going when the going gets tough.

And remember, 'The only thing worth writing about is the conflict in the human heart'.

Because the real drama consists of the struggle to achieve what we really want in the face of what's really holding us back.