BLOWING MY OWN TRUMPET (sort of)

I don't normally do this, but at the request of the fabulous Screenwriting Goldmine, I've been asked to post some of the feedback I've received over the years for my Script Doctor services.... I'm blushing...

Matt Percival

"Cracking script coverage packed with good advice to help make it the best it can possibly be! “

Andy Smith

"Have to echo all the comments on here, Si's input on two projects currently in development, has been invaluable and, to be honest, absolutely essential. Thank you Mr Spencer! "

John Ellis

"More helpful than anyone I've come across in the biz for improving my script -- including my professional "friends." If you need someone to guide you into the deepest parts of your story, Si is the man! "

James Power

" Si has a rare gift for encouraging other writers to hunt for what is most crucial and interesting in a script. His notes are highly perceptive, concise, full of humour and are always helpful. Si has given me a master class in tv and film writing. Since working with him on a number of projects, I have been accepted on to a BBC academy and have completed several scripts for Channel four and the BBC. I am also developing a series for Sky. It has been a privilege working with him and I hope to do so again in the near future. "

Margarita Felices

""Thanks for the critique - exactly what I needed. You have inspired me to think a little more outside of the box with my genre and I am back at the keyboard enjoying my manuscript once again.”


Cllr Keith Martin 

" I've had Si's help on shorts, treatments and a screenplay. It's a pleasure to work with him. His expertise and experience is obvious. I cannot speak highly enough of Si's professionalism or his friendly and supportive editing and criticism. He is the bee's knees!”

Keith Storrier

“Si is a lot better at reviewing scripts than I am at reviewing script reviews (which is good for me, not so for Si). But here goes anyway... Si's review of my feature script was both honest and encouraging. After reading his notes I was re-energized, educated, uplifted, motivated, and lots of other positive sounding adjectives, and I got the impression that he was SINCERELY interested that I produce my best possible work as opposed to "Thanks for the cash, here's your notes, now piss off". He addresses both the good and bad points of your script (because you need to know what you're doing right as well as what your doing wrong). His suggestions for improvement are clear enough to be understandable but 'hands-off' enough to allow you room to maneouver (i.e. he doesn't write it for you). I'd have no hesitation in using Si's services again and recommending him to my struggling screenwriting chums.”

Adele Kirby

"As a dancer I paid for dance classes from a great dancer who didn't really know how to teach. As a horse rider I have, at times, paid for riding lessons from people who were better riders than coaches, or better coaches than riders. But luckily as I writer, I pay for what is essentially coaching from someone who is not only an excellent writer, but outstanding critiquer as well.

Si has assessed both my prose and scripts, and has not been afraid to throw down the gauntlet in either case. That can sting, but his enthusiasm for books and television imbues his reviews, as does his wide-ranging knowledge of both. He is able to look not only at the project as it is presented, but in the context of current, past and possible future trends and markets - ie what might happen when you get the damn thing finished, and how to maximise your chances of making those things happen. He talks about your project, in the real world, and I found that both daunting and exciting.

It's always a nerve-wracking process waiting for critiques to arrive, but in the end, I have found that Si provides a constructive road-map forward, identifying and highlighting potential in the projects that even I have not seen. He asks me to think bigger and better, and those are the challenges writers must always remember it is our duty to rise to.”

Peter Finlay

"So you've written the script that's been in your head for all that time and you let the trusted friend read it and even say "Tell me what you really think". If you're like me, your ego's been treated fairly well, but what you do next is a struggle, because all you've been told is what you probably already knew. So get the script to Si!

... He knows what he's talking about. I learned far more about my script in the time it took me to read his two page analysis than I'd figured out over the previous year. He won't re-write it for you, but he asks the questions about your plot and characters that you should probably have asked yourself. Plus, he has the skill and experience to point out, fairly gently, where you, if you'll forgive the pun, have lost the plot. I went back to my story with my enthusiasm doubled and am now half way through a re-write that is surprising me by what it's producing.”

Alexander Stewart

" If you need fair, constructive, honest, sensitive and an often brilliant review on your work, this is where you need to get your report. Simon's honesty and advice is exactly what I was looking for - to push me and my script into much better territory. It all chimed with the voice at the back of my head. Highly recommended.”

Markus Wills

"Was very impressed with the review, and most of all the honesty and advice that was given on all different aspects of my script. It’s the kinda stuff you wanna hear and learn off to make it as a writer, and it delivers just that.”

Mason Phillips

"The best aspects of Simon's appraisal were the honesty and insight. I don't want anything sugar-coated as that's not going to help me but I do want a tough message delivered with sensitivity. He's Good Cop, Bad Cop and Parole Officer rolled into one.”

Tara Byrne

“I was given my first commission by Si Spencer. I was nurtured through the process by him but he didn't make me feel like the 'new writer' or highlight my newbie mistakes. He encouraged me to put what I wanted to into the episode while he steered the structure and story to the best place”.

Sean Ryan

“Your review (of my work) was very detailed and very well written and much appreciated”.

 

P. Maher

 

“I am so grateful for the material you sent. A Master Class in screenwriting… your ideas are really resonating and hitting some very true notes in my mind… blooming genius”.

THE CASE FOR BOOK BURNING

I was an early reader, and a voraciously precocious one - Huxley and Orwell, Salinger and Asimov before the age of ten, intercut with Professor Branestawm, Uncle the Elephant and Molesworth. At puberty I discovered Catcher in the Rye and its infinitely more relevant and enriching British counterpart Billy Liar. In retrospect, in my current 'fine and joyous mood', those two books probably changed my life for the worse  more profoundly than if I'd been hit by a car or contracted polio.

There's a lot written and said in defence of books (and from hereon in, please assume the word to include all literature, art, comics and music), but increasingly in recent years I'm beginning to think they've ruined my life far more than any narcotic I've ever dabbled in, more than of my other dubious lifestyle choices. Indeed, I'm convinced that without books, I wouldn't have got anywhere near those unsavoury practices in the first place. Books are a gateway drug and sure, like cannabis, many people can happily read books for many years with no ill effects, but for a few of us, books and all those bastard siblings mentioned before are a life-destroying addiction.

I'm not being flippant here - I was an academically bright kid, above bright, I was in the top three of my peers and not merely artistically. I was a brilliant mathematician for my age, chemistry and biology, physical geography, geology and astronomy - I was well versed in all of them way above my years as a youngster. It was the astronomy that did it. Without the astronomy I would never have fallen for a small collection of short stories called 'The Golden Apples of the Sun'. Ray Bradbury, you horrible fucking mind-poisoner, you lied to me! I expected rockets and gravity and mechanics and you gave me murderers and relationships and religion and magic and hopes and dreams way beyond a normal person's aspirations. And you talked about Twain and Poe and Lovecraft and Shakespeare and so many other pushers of your twisted fantasist genre and sucked me deeper and deeper into your shooting gallery of dissolute strays.

Since then I've been bingeing on the lies of people who tell me that life is so much more dark or beautiful or sinister or kind, more glorious, more depraved, more rich and more infinite, in short more interesting than it actually is. They have reprogrammed my expectations till I now believe in ultimates of good and evil, that beauty exists, that honesty, decency and kindness are universal traits throughout humanity, but at the same time duplicity, corruption and self-interest are just as prevalent - worse I believe these things have structure, patterns and logic. I live in a life of narrative, light years from any concept of reality, just as sure as if I was permanently hallucinating on some psychotropic drug. I've dabbled in most narcotics to some extent or another (of course I have! Books told me it was okay! Books told me they were cool, sexy, enlightening!), but even during a brief dalliance with heroin, there were periods of lucidity and when it began to infringe on the reality of my social life and income, I gave it up with relative ease.... Oh but not this...

 Books never let you go; they're in your bloodstream all the time, more potent and more dangerous than any drug and while they feed you incredible highs and what feel like genuine emotional experiences, once you let fiction under your skin it takes over. Soon your politics, your emotions, your spiritual beliefs, your opinions on friends and all your human relationships become tainted by the disease. I do my damnedest to behave the way I believe my favourite characters will behave and am constantly amazed when the world responds differently.

Worse still, like one of those ridiculous ghosts or aliens that these horrible purveyors of unreality peddle, I've become part of the whole sick machine; my DNA is now programmed to think in narrative, character and structure. After 25 years of writing professionally, I genuinely can't even eat without it; it literally puts the food on my table... I'm a pod-person inhabited by the need to carry on the cycle of lies. Instead of being a doctor, or a chemist, or a pharmacist or a marine biologist or astronaut or any of the myriad of useful things that were potentially in my life's path before Books, I spend my days locked in my head constructing perfect murders, ideal fucks, imaginary people falling in imaginary love before their imaginary hearts are broken, I slice and dice, lick and suck and wound and savage and destroy... and then foist it on others to feed their habits. I live in a world of ghosts and mermaids and beautiful owls and demons and magick and endless similar bullshit while outside an entirely different universe kicks me around from pillar to post failing to grasp why I'm unable to comprehend it.

In short, I'm beginning to believe that Books have destroyed my life and my sanity and I fear that unlike other drugs, there is no withdrawal, no treatment program or rehabilitation.

SWALC II NOV 26TH

CLICK ON FLYERS TO ENLARGE PLEASE

100% Dynamite - Part 4

The Grass is Singing by Doris Lessing

Okay, this one is unusual on many levels, not least because it's the first in the project that I'm not reading in translation, but also because Ms Lessing has a massive body of work behind her, so the choice was a little harder to make. I plumped for this - her 1950 debut novel and the one that instantly made her name, so for the first time (though obviously not the last) I'm reading something for this project with a substantial amount of age to it.

For the first time on this mission, I'm having to skew my perspective to a different generation, something that's especially important when reading 'The Grass is Singing' because it's written from the English perspective of a woman trying to expose racism and colonial exploitation at a time when even the concepts were still radical and fresh. It's very easy to be shocked by Lessing's casual use of the derogatory language of fifties Rhodesia, but at the time there simply was no other vocabulary for what are loosely seen as workers, but in effect are little more than indentured slaves (is that the right word? Or have I just given these slaves false teeth?). So a word of warning then; for all Lessing's clearly apparent political standpoint and her indictment of colonialism, this is a novel of its time and some of its language and attitude reflects that.

The rosy eye of hindsight aside however, the great news is that this is a real novel, in every traditional sense of the world; no imagined biography, no post-modern reinterpretations of mythologies; this is a structured story about people and events with a coherent narrative that uses a simple tragedy to highlight a greater injustice - it even starts with a murder.

In technical terms, this is well-familiar ground - a body dripping blood, a grieving husband and cops bundling a slamdunk perp into the back of a paddy wagon in handcuffs. This is 1950, and I suspect Lessing is as much enamoured of the writings of James M Cain and Dashiell Hammett as she is the political stance of Orwell and Huxley. In fact, speaking of Cain, there's something of the Mildred Pierce about the central character, Mary, albeit in a tragic and grim reversal of her story arc, the arc which the novel then elegantly and movingly lays out in front of us as back story, with the reader constantly aware that this is not going to end well.

As contemporary as the language, structure and style are however, there's clearly a sense that Lessing is tapping all the way back to the height of the English novel's development when it comes to character dynamics. There is much that harks back to the Brontes and Austen in the story of a woman of relative sophistication dragged from the best that Rhodesia has to offer as society into the bush through an unsuitable marriage. Similarly, we can recognise the twisting sexually-charged sado-masochistic power exchanges of Heathcliffe and Kathy or Rochester and Jane Eyre in Mary's relationship with houseboy Moses. Similarly, the relationship between Mary and her Jonah of a husband, Dick Turner is a shifting interplay that echoes back from the harridans and wounded heroines of Hardy and the weak patriarchs of Dickens.

Ultimately, that relationship and its repeated failures form the core of the novel - for all that the 'Grass is Singing' has some brutal lessons to impart about colonialism and the appalling treatment of subjugated indigenous human beings in the dying days of Empire, its true strength is in the paradox that the very people who are (quite literally) wielding the whip are as much victims of the great imperial lie as its more obvious sufferers. It isn't the blatant brutalities and sins of colonialism that bring the protagonists down though; there's no great revelatory moment of cruelty or revolution, rather a slow drip of unfortunate circumstance, imagined slights, minute human errors, each one slowly eroding the security and well-being of the central characters, clawing them downwards into catastrophe.

Dick has been raised to believe in the invincibility of the power of the English, the agri-technology of the industrial revolution and the god-given supremacy of the white man; Mary has been raised to believe that civilisation is ice-cool movie theatres, elegant doilies and a house full of children to prolong the long pink shadow of the empire. Thrown into a barely finished shack on barren and intransigent land with a surly work force who smell independence in every nation around them and a financial system weighing Steinbeck-like on their backs ready to foreclose and steal their land, the imperial dream becomes a sweltering fester of disappointment, impotence and infertility. It's a very human and familiar story that seems to play out decade after decade around the world; an epic dream sold as manifest destiny that ordinary real human beings could never possibly fulfill.

And yes, there's a bigger picture behind the failing farmstead; an allegorical overview of the imminent self-implosion of colonialism, no more vividly apparent than in Mary's death, but this is a work free from polemic; the characters whose attitudes and beliefs are loathsome when viewed from this side of a new millennia are frail sacrifices to their own false expectations and dreams and so hugely sympathetic as a result. Given its time of writing, this is an astonishing and subversive approach to Lessing's core message; the Britain of 1950 would never have countenanced or cared about a simple diatribe suggesting that colonialism was bad for Africans; the genius of the seemingly conventional and familiar melodrama of The Grass is Singing is that Lessing is warning the reader that imperialism diminishes the oppressor as much as the oppressed.

SWALC - SEPTEMBER 10TH

SWALC - LORD CLYDE, ESSEX RD N1 SEPTEMBER 10TH 1PM - 6PM (www.thelordclyde.com for contact details)

Book signings are like boring speed dates, conventions are just weird. Here's a chance to meet a bunch of writers and artists from a wide gamut of genres, media and backgrounds in a natural environment - the pub - and just sit and have a chat about their work.

Top writers, artists, comedians and musicians will be milling about happy to talk at length (within reason) to anyone about their work in that most wondrous of British traditions, the local pub, with great beers, good wine, excellent food, games, performances, competitions, bookstall and a convivial atmosphere with no walls between creators and guests.

here's the list so far...

Gail Renard - author of 'Give Me a Chance', her autobiographical account of spending 8 days at the John and Yoko bed-in as a 16 year old.

Nick Harkaway - author of 'The Gone Away World', an award-nominated masterpiece of a debut SF/fantasy novel, mixing political satire, high concept SF, comedy, killer mimes... breathtaking.

Rufus Dayglo - acclaimed artist on the still-going-strong cult classic comic heroine Tank Girl and keen taxidermy collector and illustrated man.

Jeff Povey - award winning short-film maker, novelist and staff writer on Eastenders, Holby and loads more.

Philip Gladwin - writer and editor and brains behind the brilliant writing program and website, Screenwriting Goldmine (its like Script Doctor, but professional and proper like)

The makers and some of the cast of Peacock Season, an astonishing feature-length comedy starring the cream of the british stand-up scene and made for an amazing £38 and a lot of favours.

The Comic Book Alliance - a whole swarm of Britain's comic artists signing their magnificent new anthology book 'Spirit of Hope', a fabulous creation raising money for earthquake victims in NZ and Japan.


Abigail Blackmore and the Blind Date crew. Blind Date is a brilliant short film that we'll be airing and its already won Audience Awards at the LA and Austin, Texas short film festivals.

Some idiot called Si Spencer who's done Grange Hill, Eastenders and the Bill as well as loads of comics inc. graphic novels The Vinyl Underground and Hellblazer: City of Demons, the first page of which is actually set in the snug bar of the venue

Webley Wildfoot, who was there at the birth of a 'well known spin off to a popular family SF TV show' and has documented the traumas of the event in his 'entirely fictional' work 'Torch, Wood & Peasants'.

There's music from Paul Mosley, without a doubt my favourite contemporay musician; imagine Nick Drake singing Tom Waits songs to the music from Bagpuss with a bit of electropop and Hi NRG thrown in.

Shooting schedule allowed, the brilliant Justin Edwards (Thick of It, Sorry I've Got no Head - everyting) singing a couple of comic songs, plus more music, some poetry and a Lennon singalong at the end... and I'm STILL waiting to hear from more folk, so it could get even bigger.

There's going to be a bookstall, so you can buy stuff and get it signed, but also a book drop - bring a novel you don't want, take one of out of the box for free. I'll try and organise a few games too and it would be BRILLIANT if people came in fancy dress as a fictional character. There'll be yummy-licious bar-snacks on sale all day and weather permitting a barbecue in the elegant seclusion of the beer garden.

All you've got to do is rock up and just chat to anyone you like. No formal signings, no lectures or seminars, just a day in the pub milling about chewing the fat, drinking of the beer and relaxing. And it's all FREE!!!!

100% DYNAMITE - The Nobel Project 3

The Desert by J.M.G. Le Clezio

So once again, I’m reading intercut dual histories, set many years apart, but Desert is a very different book to ‘The Way to Paradise’, dealing as it does with two anonymous and fictional unknown protagonists, their lives several decades apart somewhere in North Africa (and more on that ‘somewhere’ later).

The first narrative (which essentially forms a framing device for the second, longer story) concerns Nour, a young tribesman on an immense Saharan trek, following their Imam/tribal patriarch as many tribes flee white colonial oppression in the North to rendezvous at a sacred place to muster for an uprising. It’s an immense and incredibly moving story, a macrocosm rendered comprehensible by being seen through the eyes of a small boy, and it’s an all too familiar story of one of colonialism’s many ‘Trails of Tears’. Thousands upon thousands, dispossessed and unable to fully comprehend the futility of their situation, march in quiet optimism behind a leader who has never failed them – there’s a grim inevitability to the story as starvation, thirst and in-fighting slowly morph the optimism to desperation to nihilistic acceptance.

The second story takes place some decades later in a North African coastal shanty town, where a young girl, Lalla is undergoing an another all-too-familiar trope, the rite of passage from girl to woman. There’s no sense of hope here initially, only browbeaten resignation to the misery of the battered, fly-ridden shacks, the relentless heat and unchanging poverty. But Lalla dares to dream; she listens to the stories of the old fishermen who have travelled the world, she runs to the desert to the tribal vagabond kid she calls the Hartani and she dreams of the eyes of the mythical, mystic Blue Man.

Essentially the two narratives play as elegant counterpoint to each other; the slow erosion of hope and identity under biting desert winds played against the shanty girl whose imagination soars with the gulls and drives her to find an escape. And the links between the two characters, while never exactly delineated, are always clear. Lalla is a foundling, the daughter of a desert woman, Nour is among the last of the nomads. Le Clezio never fills in the precise drawstrings that connect the two, and the novel is all the better for that lack of exposition, because this is not a story about two heroes, but about nations, cultures, belief systems and histories – Lalla and Nour are simply our entry points and our exemplars.

But therein lies what was to me, a bothersome flaw to the novel. Le Clezio has chosen an epic, sweeping writing style, grandiose and majestic but deceptively simple in vocabulary. If Mueller uses the personal one-on-one familiarity of the classic fairy tale narrative, Le Clezio’s writing embraces the style of The Saga, or the Greek epic, where small stories are buried like mileposts in a vast plain of narrative. The problem with this style is that leaves no room for pesky little trifles like context and historical perspective. There are no dates, no recognisable place-names, no western historical indicators to tell us when and where this is happening. I absolutely understand that to have included too much of such detail would have been deleterious to the narrative style, but I found myself frequently wondering what the context was, which armies people were fleeing and when, and even where Lalla lives. It’s disorienting to be without a map or timepiece when you’re reading and while I applaud Le Clezio’s courage in rejecting these details, it made for a tough read – a two page foreword would have helped.

But that’s a minor quibble; this is a scorching novel, powerfully evoking the elements as human metaphor, personalising the political and painting the minutiae into a much broader tragedy of colonial evil.

Next Up: Hopefully more familiar ground with ‘The Grass is Singing’ by Doris Lessing

STILL not a press release

(so googleblog went a bit whack yesterday so please read the post below then this one)

Guests thus far at SWALC are...

GAIL RENARD who's written bucket loads of telly, was chair of the WGGB for a while and at the tender age of 16 worked her way into a Montreal hotel room to join John and Yoko's bed-in for a week. Her book about the experience 'Give Me a Chance' was released earlier this year, so come talk to her about meeting Lennon and join us in the Lennon-inspired closing singalong.

NICK HARKAWAY's first novel 'Gone Away World' is a critically acclaimed and utterly astonishing mix of political satire, action, SF, emotional heartache, comedy and killer mimes. Nick's a martial artist, inspiring blogger and the son of John Le Carre.

RUFUS DAYGLO took over as artist on the acclaimed comic book Tank Girl from Jamie 'Gorillaz' Hewlett and utterly made it his own. Rufus has a fine collection of taxidermy, some of the wildest tattoos you've ever seen, and he'll be sketching stuff for people and drinking beer.

PEACOCK SEASON is a truly astonishing dark feature length comedy movie about the ugly side of the Edinburgh festival. Shot on a princely budget of £58, the producers called in every favour they could to fill the movie with the cream of international stand-up. We'll be showing the trailer and various members of the cast and crew will be on hand to chat.

PAUL MOSLEY is an astonishing musician and designer; one time member of critically acclaimed 'Moses', as a solo performer he is without a doubt the best indie performer in London. Somewhere between Tom Waits, Nick Drake and Oliver Postgate's composer Vernon Little, Paul's latest album Bad Boy Blue comes with a lushly illustrated book. Paul will be doing a few numbers in the snug and leading the closing singalong at the old joanna.

PHILIP GLADWIN has written for and script-edited countless flagship TV shows, but more recently is best known for the online resource 'Screenwriting Goldmine', a treasure house for writers with a vast array of books and software. Phil will be mingling and generally impersonating a self-effacing George Clooney during the day.

WEBLEY WILDFOOT is a totally fictitious character whose book 'Torch, Wood & Peasants' bears no relation to any TV spin off from any other popular BBC SF show. In no way is it a true account of how shoddily a major broadcaster treats its creative talent, nor is it funny, insightful or contain a commissioned but never used script from the first series of an about-to-be revived show.

And there's me of course... I'll be there to talk about Eastenders, The Bill, Grange Hill, working with Neil Gaiman, Russell T Davies and writing graphic novels. In fact my latest GN, 'City of Demons' opens in the Lord Clyde, so you can take pictures of yourself IN the opening page of the book. How metatextual is that?

And there's LOADS more still to confirm... watch this space.

NOT a press release

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

100% Dynamite - the Nobel Project 2

'The Passport' - Herta Muller

So, this is already turning out to be a fascinating project (for me, at least). From the lengthy work of Llosa, I turn to this slender 92 page novella of prose poetry. How to describe it?

'Chewy' is the first word that springs to mind, chewy in a good sticky-toffee way though it's a grim and hideous story. Friends of mine know I've been wrestling for many years now with my own prose-poem novella, so finding this was both a joy and a series of repeated axe-blows of despair. A joy because I see that I'm not crazy, it can be done, despair because Muller has chosen a totally different poetic style and makes it work supremely, whereas I'm wading through overwrought sentences channelling the spirit of James Joyce on a rare good day, and Stanley Unwin on all too frequent bad one.

Muller's writing style seems at first glance mundane; Short factual sentences, often stripped bare of metaphor and adjectives, but then out of nowhere comes an astonishing piece of imagery or a convoluted cobweb of repeated phrases. The closest I can come to a comparative is that it's like reading a nightmare narrated by the Brothers Grimm. There's a fairytale quality to Muller's construction of repetition, her seemingly casual insertion of a horrific visual image, and I guess that makes perfect sense because 'The Passport' is an allegory. Her story is very simple, but the reality of her story is so arcane, sinister and corrupted by evil, that Muller clearly feels the only way she can truly get across the enormity of the narrative is to retreat into archetypes of fable; the journey through the dark wood, haunted animals, demonic trees and protective talismans.

The plot, stripped down to its basics is simply this - In Ceacescu's Romania, a rural miller seeks a passport for himself, his wife and daughter so they can travel to Germany and escape the barbarism of communism. A passport isn't easy, and he has to bribe his way to the document in a series of increasingly humiliating and costly payments. A lesser writer would have written the straight skinny; the bribery, the corruption, the sexual exploitation, and while it may have made a stark and grim piece of documentary fiction, it would be far less of a read.

Muller knows that all such regimes are tainted by the culture of the nations they seek to oppress; many so-called communist states were riddled by the feudalistic cultural tropes of the nations' ancient history, so it makes perfect sense for Muller to tell her story in that context. By choosing the language of folklore, mythology and the ancient beliefs and prejudices of medieval serfdom, she makes it plain that her present day world of bureaucracy, cruelty and grotesque corruption is just as uncivilised and riddled with evil.

This truly is an astonishing book, unlike anything else you've probably read, Despite the brevity, it took me almost as long to finish as the previous epic, partly because it's sometimes like joyously and heroically hacking through a forest of thorns to reach the narrative within, but also because at times the imagery and language shine so immaculately that you find yourself stopping to read and re-read sentences, paragraphs and even entire chapters. The good news is that each chapter is short, sometimes no longer than a couple of paragraphs, and while there is a consistent through line, each chapter is presented as a separate and distinct short story. I wish I knew a lot more about Romanian folklore and history so I could appreciate this more fully, but at the same time, it really doesn't matter; Muller's fairytale archetypes are universal, but always approached with a fresh and startling eye and ear, and ultimately they are simply the trappings of the far darker truth of the core of the narrative.

And it's just so damn chewy. Delicious, like a toffee apple but packed full of barbed wire, owl claws and dying wasps.

NEXT: 'Desert' by Mauritian J.M.G. Le Clezio, a dual narrative set in pre world war 1 and post world war 2 Morrocco apparently, so once again, another history lesson.

100% Dynamite - The Nobel Project

'THE WAY TO PARADISE' by Mario Vargas Llosa (NPW - 2010)

So I had no idea about this book whatsoever, or its author, except he's Peruvian, which after Paddington and Michael Bentine, increases my knowledge of Peruvians by 50%. As a novel, it's a fantastic work of biography - actually it's two fantastic works of biography. Who knew that Paul Gauguin's grandmother was a French-Peruvian pre-Marxist revolutionary who travelled throughout England, France and South America (sometimes dressed as a man) recording the terrifying working conditions and appalling exploitation of workers and women? Not me, and the detail Llosa describes of both 19th century life and early 20th century Tahiti are immaculately researched and utterly fascinating.

There's no doubt that these are two astonishing stories; I knew nothing about Flora Tristan and it turns out she was undoubtedly one of the most remarkable women of the 19th century. As for Gauguin, I was aware that, in the words of Nick Cave, 'he'd buggered off and gone all tropical', but I knew nothing about his earlier life, his travels in Latin America or why he actually went to Tahiti and what he did there. So, result there - I learned enough about both characters to probably wing my way through either as a specialist subject on Mastermind (if they asked me on today, before it all slipped away). Shame about the writing though...

Llosa choses to go for a simple (and slightly irksome) double narrative of alternating chapters between the life stories of the two. It's actually a smart and well-used technique, to alternate between two p.o.v's, but it's one that's more commonly used for characters who's lives actually intersect, so we can get a sense of perspective, foreshadowing etc. In this case, as Gauguin never met Flora Tristan and barely knew anything about her, I can't help thinking that Llosa could have just written two separate books and spared me the hassle of having to skip back 20 pages each time to remember where we left the last chapter. Yes, there are parallels in their lives, but I can't help thinking that they're parallels that Llosa has chosen to weight in his favour, and ultimately, he doesn't draw any conclusions from those parallels, so why bother?

None of this is helped by Llosa's turgid writing style. I did get the impression that I wasn't reading neccessarily the best translation, but the translator can't be blamed for some of the terrible segues into flashback that Llosa employs. I once worked with a new writer on a massive script, and at one point his central character suddenly remembers an encounter from the day before. I told him he couldn't just have the character remember something; the audience needed a visual trigger to let us know why it was that the person popped into her head. All wide-eyed and innocent (I should stress, I love this writer dearly) he said 'Yeah, but she's looking out of the window. The first time she met xxx she was looking out of a window too'. We both laughed long and hard as I explained to him that 'looking per se' really isn't enough of a visual trigger.

Llosa could learn something from this... time after time we get links along the lines of 'And then you sneezed. Remember how you sneezed too that time twenty years ago in Peru?' as a device to begin a flashback sequence. And that's another thing; for some bizarre reason, Llosa chooses to address the entire narrative TO the central character, speaking directly to either Tristan or Gauguin. I'm sure there's some smart-ass literary term for it, and I imagine there might be some cunning purpose to it, but most of the time it makes the author sound like someone gently shaking and waking an elderly amnesiac to remind them who the hell they are and what they've been up to. Making your central characters seem enfeebled is not an endearing trait.

There's been a lot written on 'the imagined biography'; where a novelist writes a fully factual account of someone's life, but takes the liberty of getting inside the subjects' head and explaining their motivation. Peter Carey did a stunning job on Ned Kelly, and to be fair, everything in here rang true to Llosa's painting of the characters, but I always get a little rattled about a writer making up emotional reactions such as just how Gauguin actually felt after his sole homosexual encounter (if indeed it was the only one). Just how does Llosa know this stuff and is he doing a disservice to a real human being, who he clearly admires, by just making it up?

In essence, this is two amazing stories, written in a fairly irritating way. I'd recommend reading it, but only for the biographical reading and only if you're into Gauguin or 19th century French and Peruvian political history and proto-feminism (which fortunately, I am, so huzzah!)

Next up, Herta Muller, a Romanian German who apparently writes almost exclusively about oppression under Ceaucescu. Should be full of shits and giggles, I'm guessing.

Hello? Hello? Am I late?

So.... I kinda let things slide for a while. Well nearly two years. The idea at the time was that I'd start up the Script Doctor page on Facebook and do some kind of double whammy thing in here with weekly posts, going into more depth on the joy of being a writer and all its challenges.

I forgot though that I'm a writer, and as such, spend my time either avoiding writing, or actually doing it. The blogosphere seems to be a sort of halfway house for people who feel inspired to write, but don't actually have anything of any great length to actually write about. I don't mean that in a derogatory way - I subscribe to and enjoy reading a lot of blogs - but it's seems best suited to the well-worked comedy riff, opinion piece or review. I tend not to think that way; my mind either works in complete scripts and stories or long, sprawling narratives that take weeks and months of mapping out and planning; really not the kind of effort or space suitable for this medium.

At various points though, several people have said to me 'What happened to your blog? I liked that', and at various points, I've thought about something and decided 'that's quite a complicated thought process that would get kind of lost on facebook or twitter' and then just given up on it. Plus, right now I'm on a kind of manic upswing, fuelled no doubt by the sudden reappearance of Vitamin D in our lives, but also I think from several recent encounters with readers (I won't call them 'fans' - horrible term). The final straw was commencing my mentalist Nobel prize project; the goal being to read a major work by every Nobel Literature Laureate. Good or bad, I'm pretty sure they're all going to be quite big, complicated books, so if nothing else I can use this space to record my critiques here. To which end.... (see next post)

Mea Culpa

I swore I wouldn't do this, and even while I AM quite clearly doing it, I'm going to do it as evenly and politely as I can, but if I don't do it here, RIGHT NOW, I'll direct this spleen to the person in question and that wouldn't be fair.

As a caveat, I should point out that this person isn't part of my facebook network or on my bloglist, so they won't ever get to read this and I will do everything I can not to reference directly any of the things that are galling me to the point of apoplexy.

Because, what do you know, it's about a new 'writer'. This writer is a company director, who was personally advertising for collaboration on their 'nearly finished' script - they put themselves out there. I sent them my rate card, which anyone will tell you is the cheapest in the business - I sent them my CV, which is quite clearly very comprehensive in terms of experience. They replied, very professionally, that an editor wasn't what they were after right now, they needed a collaborator, a writer.

I casually replied that I'd done a fair bit of the old writing thing myself and pointed him again to my CV; (At this point I should mention that in the last few months of putting myself out there as a consultant, I actually enjoy any new stuff coming in from other people - its been a long time and, good or bad, there's always an energy and a buzz in any writing, and with it only being a few months, I'd forgotten the unforgettable - that there's an inverse ratio between arrogance and talent with unsold writers).

They sent me the script, with an attached note that having read my CV they doubted that I'd be suitable to judge it appropriately, but they'd let me have a look anyway. I should have known at that point; the snooty attitude to mainstream drama with a huge audience, the twisted prejudice that a serial dramatist just bangs the stuff out on the day... I've heard it before.

Maybe it was bloody-mindedness on my part, maybe, as I said, I'm still freshly back and loving other people's work, maybe its the months I've spent in my own very dense writing, missing the weekly collaborative meeting and the pints afterwards, but I read it...

And do you know what? It was BLOODY BRILLIANT. Sharply observed characters, an astonishingly original idea, dialogue that damn near set fire to your eyes as you hurtled from one rattling revelatory page to the next, poignant heart-breaking relationships that simultaneously described the nature of the individual AND the human condition as a whole. Breath taking.

But it wasn't, was it? What I did in that last paragraph was the most basic stupid trick in the book and this person couldn't even muster anything even that obvious. It was poorly typed, misspelt nonsense with such bad characterisation that you couldn't even say it was stereotyped. The single dramatic incident happened off screen and was an accident, the relationships between characters were paper thin, laid out in the first five pages and didn't change throughout. The sole nod to drama was the idea that someone in peril and pain was a bad thing, which it is, but its not drama, especially if its an accident. It bore no relation to reality, everyone spoke like puppets and not a single issue was resolved.

Anyway, there is a writing lesson here. which is vent your spleen in a neutral space, throw up all the crap and THEN write the real stuff. Because I will have to reply to this person at some point and if I'd done it in the last half hour, he'd have got this, and I'd have been ashamed of my poor writing.

Sadly, I think that's something this person wouldn't understand

And lest I forget...

Here's a better place to find daily updates and info....

http://www.facebook.com/pages/SCRIPT-DOCTOR/138062651688?ref=ts

Hoist By My Own Petard

I hadn't really anticipated quite how quickly the whole Script Doctor thing would take off and it's been eating into my writing time, and even more so my blogging time. For a few days now I've been meaning to write about the importance of the 'field trip', after a specially good day of going about the local environs doing a few chores. You've got to treat these errand days as research - slap on the ipod for that Scorcese soundtracking feeling and keep your eyes peeled, the human stories just come flooding in - the image of a man in a kilt on a bike with bagpipes on his back cycling past a heavy-dreaded rastafarian with a guitar in red, gold and green is surely going to appear somewhere in one of my scripts.

The overheard lines, the silent confrontations laden with volume-speaking body language, the facial tics and postures are all your meat and drink; observe them with a keener eye than any anthropologist. It's all free material. Get out there once in a while, but get out there with your senses honed

Slap on the Wrists

How remiss of me; skipped a few blogging days, but thankfully out of a responsibility to prioritise deadlines rather than general lethargy. The good news is it's because I'm getting more work than I expected at this early stage as a script doctor; that and one of those brilliant, half awake swimming upwards from sleep revelations about my novel have caused a dramatic rethink having solved its major plot flaw.

Anyway, what I have been meaning to write for a few days is how much the writing of comics and the writing of television have proved mutually beneficial, specifically how comics-writing has helped my television. I can't remember where I stole this from but I once read somewhere, 'the comic writer's job is not to get in the way of the pictures'. Much as I love Neil Gaiman's prose, movies and general imagination, I do find that sometimes with his comic work, he provides the narrative in his words and doesn't leave the artist enough to do in terms of story-telling. And I've been just as guilty of it; fans of Vinyl Underground (both of you) know that I peppered the action with huge chunks of historical background (and believe me you should have seen it before it was edited. By and large though, both narrative captions and fat speech balloons get in the way of the images and this has been a valuable lesson in telling onscreen drama. Can I tell that story in a picture instead of expository dialogue?

The other great lesson you learn from comics is scenic structure - the very nature of the left hand/right hand page means timing your reveals to the left hand splash, it means placing an image or a phrase in the bottom right hand panel of the right hand page that makes you want to turn over to see that splash.

It makes you structure a location inside the confines of page count rather than natural duration, thereby condensing and compacting the information to the optimum method of story-telling, a lesson every TV writer should take note of, not just for a cleaner purer script, but also because of the production demands - if you've ever actually had to plan a shooting schedule script for a script, you'll know that all too often the writer is often either spending too long in one room or haphardly moving from one location to another for no other purpose than visual effect.

You also have to write 'non-consecutive dialogue'. The confines of the panel structure mean that sometimes 45 seconds has clearly passed between one panel and the next and you have to make the character's response seem natural despite this gap; this means cutting out extraneous conversational normalities to get to the salient point. While I'm not saying this works on the screen, the discipline involved is a good way of shedding extraneous fat from your dialogue.

This panel structure also helps you choose exactly which killer camera angle, still image you want the audience to respond to, something TV and movie script writers often ignore.


So in short, I'd recommend this as a small experiment. Take a vital scene from your script and try blocking it out in three comic pages, starting on a left hand, five to six panels for the first two pages and a splash page for the third. See just how little dialogue you can get away with, think of the most dramatic images you can to convey your ten to twelve snapshots of the script, and the best 'turn the page reveal'. I think you'll be surprised.

Equilibrium

And as was clear last night, I missed the perfect equilibrium. As a result I woke at five, head filled with nonsensical and shameful scary nightmares, all plot related before dozing again for an hour and finding the shimmering pieces of the bad dreams falling like kaleidoscope diamonds into place for the key to the plot I'd been wrestling with for weeks.

In other words, the recycle bin of my brain had been fighting with the smart stuff, and eventually the smart stuff won through. As a result, my creative side is tired exactly when it should be, about nine o'clock, unlike last night where it kept me awake and kept awaking me. The balance is preserved and perfect and I feel sated with expelling words, like the opposite of a good dinner.

Excellent

St Vincents here we come

There's a mythology about writers being great drinkers, either as bon viveurs or dark tortured lonely souls with a bottle; as a man who believes he hovers and vacillates on the lowest points of the graph between the two states, but does write every day, here's my take on the theory.

There's an optimum number of words you can spill in a day; if you don't cough enough out in a given timespan they sit like bloated otters in your gut and weigh you down in indolence. Heave up just the right amount and both brain and body hit a synchronicity of exhaustion that drops you into a happy void of contentment.

But push it just that step too far and over-write and its all The Red Shoes and crazy and the fingers are too fast for the mind which then overtakes the fingers and so on , into a vicious arms race of inspiration and industry... and thats the point where you need to reach for the bottle to stem the flood of opinions and objections and musings and mullings or you'll quite simply just Roald Dahl pop...

and its in those moments (and I speak from experience of trying many other soporifics) that you find yourself reaching for the liquid anaesthesia to quell the barmy ceaseless flow of verbiage...

so lord today, too many pages done and a leap of editing to do tomorrow, please let blessed liquor lethe do her work and club me into blissful wordless oblivion.

Tale of the Expected

Friday - failed to subvert expectation. New deadline tomorrow.

Subversion of Expectation

Thursday's rolled around so fast, so time for another bit of practical homework. Subversion of Expectation is one of the absolute golden rules of Western Drama - I don't know why this is or when it began. Certainly in previous eras in Britain, and still today in other cultures, the idea of lying to the audience was/is anathema. You didn't stand up to sing the jolly minstrel ballad, only to reveal that actually the Squire's a decent bloke after all, his wife was just misled and the gypsy lover was a lying scumbag.

These days though, the worst abuse you can heap on a story is 'Well, I saw that coming'. People want the twist, the character turn, the sudden reveal (as long as its earned). This of course makes our life harder and harder, because not only do we have to find those twists and turns and subversions, but as our audiences grow ever more cynical and story-savvy, we have to be able to make them convincing but invisible. It's no longer enough to set up the unpopular, ugly, scruffy character as our perp, only to find it was the golden boy what dunnit after all.

Whatever your opinion of The Bill as a whole (and please don't express it here, cause obviously I'm emotionally attached), watch an episode and see how week upon week they pull this off, usually to great effect. Three ad breaks in an hour, and just before each there's a neat plot twist where it turns out everything we believed in the last fifteen minutes has been turned upside down. It's incredibly difficult to achieve, especially given the self-imposed narrative strictures of the police p.o.v. and the limited guest cast budget.

But that's not the homework; the homework is to observe how startling it can be to totally break the rule of Subversion of Expectation - the film I've chosen to demonstrate it is 'A Room For Romeo Brass', Shane Meadows' second major feature. I'm not going to give any spoilers out here, just recommend you watch it with a writer's eye and enjoy the sheer ballsiness of Meadows' refusal to kowtow to such a fundamental dramatic law and pull it off (Although he does cheat ever so slightly with one character, but I would still argue that their action is 'expected', just not in the manner in which it plays out).

And now I'm going to take a stab at my own small act of subversion by hitting a deadline tomorrow.

Enjoy 'Romeo Brass' and don't have nightmares