Deadlines/Producers

The first draft of the collaboration by the name of Jones Bones is pretty much complete - and we pretty much did it to our deadline too, give or take a few days.

It's been very useful to impose artificial deadlinery. When you're writing on your own, it's easy just to sink into your idea like a warm bath and then soak about in it for a bit. Obviously one would get out before the water turned cold. Not sure where this metaphor is going.

Deadlines though, they great - they're a big looming Sword of Damocles - and although I know nothing horrible will happen should I go over the alloted time, with a collaboration, you always have that nagging feeling that the other person is sat there with his already written pages, a stopwatch, and a voodoo doll of you - just waiting, in the dark. Better to avoid that and get down to the writing.

It feels like a strong script this one - which means nothing of course, everybody thinks their own scripts are great. But this feels exciting and fresh - it's been a pleasure developing and writing and it feels really different and odd - and for something that started off as a glib joke, to have morphed into a whole world with real breathing characters is very satisfying.

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In other news, my children's series pilot Hawkington High went off to two producers - one didn't feel it was for her - which is fine as she is primarily a comedy producer and was not really, by her own admission, au fait with children's programming; the other producer though, liked it and asked if she could pitch it to CBBC for the upcoming commissioning round. So yey, let's see what happens with that.

I've been here before of course - last year was the saga of Sally Davies Vs The Animal Kingdom - a script I really put my all in to - and was deemed unsuitable by the CBBC bods in charge. And with this years CBBC competition entry not making it anywhere even close - I do wonder if I have this script right. I'm totally in love with the idea and the characters, but that's not always enough - you have to convince others of that in the writing.

I suppose when you do send off a script, and this is true for any genre or opportunity, you have to remain pragmatic about it - not getting your hopes up, learning from the rejection, taking the feedback on board, etc. And maybe my worry is that I'm aiming too high - the mere idea that a new writer like me could get a series commissioned is rather silly when I think about it.

Self doubt - what a curse - keeps me sane though.

Drama's Bleakest Week / Update

- Probably contains spoilers for EastEnders and Criminal Justice -

I think I made the right choice this week - Criminal Justice vs Flashforward - Criminal Justice won - it was superb - such a bleak, unhappy, miserable Autumn drama - just what we need for these cold dark nights.

Amazing writing, let's hope the BBC Writersroom puts the script online so we can see if the white starkness of the Miller family home was also evident on the page. I don't think I've seen anything on television with such a subtle approach to exposition - minutes and minutes passed with no words - just strangled expressions and hazy camerawork. And Maxine Peake - what an actress - at times she reminded me of her role as Myra Hindley - she was distant, cold and unloved, no doubt for entirely different reasons.

EastEnders gave us Stacey Slater spiraling into madness. Lacey Turner has a gift of role, and seemingly a great mentor in 'how to act Bi-Polar' in her mother Jean. There's something really uncomfortable about seeing the two brought closer together in their shared illness - uncomfortable in a good, challenging way. EastEnders always goes the extra mile to give us misery and pain, and that's why I love it. Can't wait for Monday, did Bradley stay? Oh did he?

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Other news in bullet points:

• The rather excellent Six Sentences site accepted a short story of mine - the remit, write a story in, you guessed it, six sentences. My story is called Horse, and you can check it out here.

• I'm working on a fantasy crime drama collaboration which appears to be going frightfully well - the characters are nailed, the beat sheet is written, the plan for further episodes is written - now there's the fun of the script to get through - we've given ourselves a deadline of two weeks to get the first draft nailed. Eek!

• The pilot for my TV show idea, The Chair, is stepping up a gear - not much I can say about it, but we should be scripting the last week of October, filming in November, editing over Christmas, and then sending out to commissioners in the new year. A long process, but we have the support of our exec producer who is crazily enthusiastic. Good fun.

• Still working on my Manchester set drama Baby Sisters - enjoying it so far - it's the first script I've written set in the best city in the world, so it's fun to drop scenes in places I go to. Love my four leads too - they feel real to me, which is no doubt a good thing. Yeah, this is going to be a good one.

• Got my reply slip from the BBC writersroom for Hawkington High last week - so fingers crossed. Got some producer interest from it too, which is all very exciting. I do wonder if it really is something CBBC would go for now - feel like I'm not totally clear what their remit is after watching some of their shows and reading their commissioning brief. If anybody wants a gander at it, then here it is.

Okay, enjoy your Sunday, thanks for reading.

The Finish Line

Woosh! Out into the ether goes another script - Hawkington High - my high concepty-philosophical-fantasy-kid's series which I've been working on this year.

It's been finished for a while now - I gave it a month of safety, stuck it in the virtual drawer of my hard drive, and gave it many successive reads over the last two weeks and polished it to a high mirror shine.

Off to the writersroom it goes. Any producers want a read?

I think it's ready.

But then I got to thinking: how do you know when a script is finished?

I think this one is ready - obviously I think it's magnificent, otherwise it would still be in that drawer. But really, is a script ever ready?

You write and write and re-write and re-write some more, and then you leave it for a bit, and then you re-write some more, and then you send it to friends/family/readers/producers/agents/Spielberg etc, and then you get more notes, more changes - you chisel away, refining, honing - it's getting closer - it's nearly there - then you get more notes from more readers and more producers and more friends - and then you hone again.

Writing is re-writing - but when you're like us lot - lovingly working those malleable spec scripts into a nice round happy blob shape - and you don't have a filming date on the horizon which will put a finish line on your scripting duties - how do you know when to stop?

Do you keep re-writing until the end of time? James Moran went through 20 drafts of Severance, I imagine most other great films out there are the same. And many of them don't have excellent bear trap sequences in them like Severance. So how did all those other films know when to call it a day and let the cameras roll?

Maybe it isn't as black and white as that. Maybe you just know when it's ready. I think I got to that stage with this one.

And if I get some helpful feedback from writersroom, advising a rewrite, then I'll rewrite some more.

Because you never really finish a script.