Incredibly, this is not fake news.

Even though I've had a whole year to absorb the shock and the divine majesty of all this, it still feels utterly surreal and amazing.

Yes, Imagine Entertainment, the Hollywood production company founded by Ron Howard and Brian Grazer, have optioned my novel The Last Days Of Jack Sparks. I expect you know Imagine's pedigree, but just in case, they've made huge Ron movies like Apollo 13, The Da Vinci Code and Frost/Nixon, as well as the likes of 8 Mile, Katy Perry: Part Of Me and the upcoming film adaptation of Stephen King's The Dark Tower.

I'm writing the first draft of the Sparks screenplay as we speak, and I'm having a real blast. Ron and his great folk at Imagine have been an absolute pleasure to deal with.

As for more details, I promised that my newsletter subscribers would hear those first. So if you'd like to hear how this development deal came about, or what it's like to have a meeting with Ron Howard, sign up to the newsletter and get a free book!

Here are a couple of online articles about the deal:

Screen Daily

Movies.com

I'll also be talking about the deal in the next issue of the mighty Starburst magazine, out April 21. Oh, and the US paperback edition of the book is imminent: April 4 through Orbit Books. Shriek soon!

​Here's The Last Days  Of Jack Sparks at...

Amazon UK | US | Canada

Some writers think about their careers and advancement in a rather curious way.

It can be comforting for the writer in his or her ascendancy to think of career advancement as largely luck-related.  That it's a matter of writing novel after novel - or script after script - and firing them into a machine full of other National Lottery balls, which may one day be picked out.

This view is, at best, complacent and at worst, dangerous - at least for the writer who holds it.  One thing's for sure: if it really is at all useful to think of a writing career as a lottery, then you are squarely in control of the odds.  There is nothing random here.  When entering a scriptwriting competition, for instance, it can be tempting to find out how many other people are going for it too.  That, however, is the Devil whispering in your ear, reinforcing that whole idea of luck being a big part of this.  If you've sweated blood over the bulletproof script, it shouldn't matter whether there are one or one million other contestants.

People like to talk about the aspects of competitions which seem to make the process more arbitrary - the judges having a bad day, or just not 'getting' you, etc - but I say forget that stuff.  It doesn't help.  You're just either pre-emptively armouring yourself for a potential failure, or trying to salve wounds which were almost certainly your fault.  Let rejection hurt, but take responsibility for it as you heal, learn and strengthen.  Take the time for a reality check if necessary.  Whatever it takes to ensure that your next project is a decisive step forward.  Never succumb to that deeply weird Writer Quirk which compels you to sling imperfect or even half-finished work into a competition "just to get something in".  God knows, I've done it myself over the years and have come to think of it as supremely self-defeating.

Many years ago, I saw an 'aspiring' writer publicly contact a Doctor Who writer on Twitter, asking if he'd like to collaborate.  When Doctor Who Scribe, not impolitely or unreasonably, asked why he would want to do that, the aspiring writer replied that Doctor Who Scribe had been so lucky with his career and it'd be good to give something back, quack quack quack... frankly, I stopped listening after "been so lucky with your career".  Uh, no.  Doctor Who Scribe hadn't been lucky - he'd worked incredibly hard to get where he was, over many, many years.  It felt so insulting and demeaning to what DWS had achieved.  That rather ignorant attitude summed up a blind alley of thought which we must avoid at all costs.

Look, don't get me wrong: of course there's an element of luck involved with building a career.  When it comes to launching projects, for instance, the stars can seemingly align or scatter on a whim.  Some doors of opportunity open or close depending on trends and taste.  No doubt about it.  What I'm saying is that it would be a massive mistake to overestimate luck's contribution - or to start talking about how ultimately your fate is in others' hands.  Go down that rabbit hole and, before you know where you are, you'll be whining about the whole "It's not what you know, it's who you know" thing.  And oh sweet lord, that's definitely a whole other blog post.  In short, yes, contacts are really important.  Make them.  You must.  But it's increasingly untenable to complain about being shut out of some imagined 'system' by 'The Man', in a world when you can make direct contact with the vast majority of the TV and film industries via Twitter.

We all have to take responsibility for our careers.  The only armour we need should be our work, as opposed to insidious denial and excuses.  We must write to win.  We must toil away at the furnace until we come away with something amazing. 

Your script, your novel, whatever it is, should be the ultimate representation of you.  Your unique brilliance, which no-one else in the world can possibly have.  Your creative DNA, all swabbed up in a PDF.  Even when compared to a winning Lottery ticket, that's priceless.

The ninth and final series of Peep Show starts tonight. I’ve seen half of this series and can confirm that it is superb. Episode three, in particular, brought tears to my eyes with its brilliantly-plotted ridiculousness.
 
Obviously, this tremendous Channel 4 sitcom reaching the end of its lifespan is a sad thing. Having said that, no-one involved seems to have ruled out some kind of return to the show in future, such as specials and what-not. So it’s not too sad. And to celebrate Series Nine’s launch, I’ve dug up an interview I did with the show’s creators Sam Bain and Jesse Armstrong in 2008.

I interviewed the duo in a Clapham boozer, ostensibly for a feature in The Word magazine (RIP). They were a friendly, self-deprecating pair, as dryly funny as you’d expect – and like any self-respecting writers, were delighted when I bought them lunch. While The Word’s feature focused on the story of how Peep Show came to be, and how it works as an entity, I naturally couldn’t resist asking them all kinds of things which would be primarily of interest to writers and would never make the article. I was thinking of you, dear reader. And, clearly, myself.

Sam and Jesse met in the early 90s, while on a university writing course in Manchester. After producing various short stories, they spent a while doing their own thing – novels, short films. They finally got together to collaborate on a script in about 1996, and did a few. 1998 saw them start writing professionally, working on various shows until Peep Show finally convinced the world of their genius in 2003.  Since this interview, of course, they’ve gone on to write for the likes of Four Lions, The Thick Of It, In The Loop and Veep, either together or individually.  Anyway, let’s hop back in time to that pub chat…

So when you started work on Peep Show, did it feel like the classic last roll of the dice? A now-or-never type deal?
Sam: In retrospect, that would’ve been quite pathetic, because it was quite early in our careers! But we definitely felt like we’ve been through the mill a bit. We’d done Days Like These, that big ITV show, which really flopped big-time. So that was quite interesting to be around.
Jesse: Then we did another flop – Ed Stone Is Dead, which starred Richard Blackwood as a man who’d died, then come back to life.
Sam: We were part of a large writing team, but it turned out to be another big failure that we were involved with. After those big projects, it was a bit of a fallow time. I mean, we were always doing okay - we would write links for The Big Breakfast…
Jesse: And a lot of sitcoms, which was good training.
Sam: We know a lot of writers who have real talent, but haven’t had their own original sitcom. And that’s just because they haven’t had the confluence of the right people, the right commissioners, the right production company. It’s a real piece of luck when you can get everything to work, and it all comes together.

Bedsitcom is one of the entries on your pre-Peep Show CV…
Jesse: There are a number of people who have been really important to our careers. Andrew O’Connor was a producer who went on produce Peep Show. But before that, he developed a couple of projects with us, and believed in us when we were at our lowest ebb. That’s when you need the money and the support. Bedsitcom was one of the shows we helped him out with.

And how was working on Smack The Pony?
Jesse: That was one of the ‘jobbing writer’ things we did before Peep Show. I don’t think we ever thought we were particularly good at writing sketches, but it was our first experience of telling people in a pub about a show you’d written for and they’d go, “Oh! I’ve seen that”. So that was quite a nice feeling – to work on a quality show. We’d worked with lots of good performers, but Smack The Pony’s were at the cool end of comedy, rather than the… less cool end.

You knew Peep Show stars David Mitchell and Robert Webb before Peep Show, right? How did that come about?
Jesse: We were all part of a writing team experiment at the BBC. We liked them a lot and we had a show which we wanted to write for them. The four of us wrote episodes for the BBC with Gareth Edwards. It was a really good show – a bit like Peep Show, in the sense that two guys shared a flat, and they were a bit like Mark and Jez. There was also a Super Hans figure! It was a helpful process to develop a show like that – we got a sense of Robert and David’s voices, and spend a lot of time collaborating with them. They’ve really got their DNA into Peep Show, because we’ve got similar comic sensibilities. Not always, though – they write amazing sketches that we could never come up with. There’s just a big common ground of comedy stuff that we know from that period – what works for them and what makes them laugh. Not only how they speak, but good comic things that they appreciate. It was an incredibly important and fertile period for us. There are plots and idea and vibes that we still go back to now and plunder.

Did you cannibalise any of it for Peep Show?
Jesse: We did, actually. The Peep Show episode where Mark’s sitting on the toilet at the end is a more developed version of something we originally wrote for that show.

What are the main benefits of writing as a duo?
Sam: With comedy, if the other writer is laughing, you know you’re onto something. It’d be so hard otherwise. You get constant feedback.
Jesse: It’s a morale thing, because it’s quite tough when you’re starting out. It’s good to have someone to talk to and laugh with, about the constant disappointments! With two people, as well, if one of you isn’t having a great day, you can still keep going. It probably triples your output, at least, because you’ve always got double the ideas and can work things out together. As long as you’ve got the same work ethic and sense of humour, it’s gold.

So how does your writing system work? Is one of you the typer, while the other one paces around?
Sam: For the actual writing, we use the same method as Richard Curtis and Ben Elton used on Blackadder. We write separately, then cross-edit. But when we are breaking plots, one of us will write stuff down. Often Jesse, because he types faster.
Jesse: I do have a good typing speed. I think that was one of the things Sam originally liked about me. He thought, “This guy can really type!”.

What’s your estimated words-per-minute speed, Jesse?
Jesse: Wellll… it’s not amazing. I’d say 45 words, tops. But on a good day, I go like the wind!

So does one of you ever say, “Hold on a minute, why did you rewrite my scene involving the goose-heads in a bag? That was hilarious, you bastard!”.
Jesse: That’s what collaboration is. We have three of those moments, per page! Co-writing works because you’ve found a way of negotiating difference of opinion. Of course, it’s not always three moments per page. Sometimes I’ll send a scene to Sam and he’ll completely re-write it and I’ll be very pleased because I know it wasn’t totally working. Equally, sometimes you might think, “Hold on, I thought that quite good. Didn’t you think that was quite good?” And what you need to be able to do, to have a professional collaboration, is ring each other and go, “I really liked that bit”. Hopefully, the way the conversation then goes is, “Oh, I liked it too, but I didn’t like this about it, or I didn’t understand this bit, or I didn’t think they would do that”. Occasionally, you’ll have a difficult conversation but generally you’ll hit on a third idea which is a mixture of both ideas. That’s just how you have to be able to work, with that level of communication.

You must have a pretty good shorthand with each other by now.
Jesse: Yeah. Swear words. We say that things are either “shit” or “good”.
Sam: Or, in our case, “shit” or “acceptable”.

If you ever reach a complete stalemate, does the readthrough ever become the decider?
Sam: Yeah, actually, sometimes you do that and see what happens.
Jesse: Often, like a lot of writers, we overwrite. It becomes a difficult decision, as to what to cut and what to leave in. That can often be the most painful part of the process. Up until that point, everything’s like, “Well, give it a go, try it that way – we can always put it back”. But as you move towards that final script, you know that if a joke goes, no-one’s ever gonna see or hear it. That’s why the readthrough is really great, because you know when something’s working or not, and that’s illuminating.

There’s bonus behind-the-scenes readthrough footage on the Peep Show Series Five DVD, which makes it look like you’re all having a right old hoot.
Sam: We only film the laughter, of course! Not the uncomfortable, painful silences.
Jesse: It probably looks pretty self-congratulatory, because we all like each other in the room! And our director Becky Martin is a good laugher. It’s important to hear people laughing when that material’s first done.
Sam: The readthrough is make-or-break for us. If a script dies, you have to start again. It happens.

Does the readthrough freeze your guts with terror?
Jesse: No, it’s exciting.
Sam: It’s scary and exciting. We often end up heavily rewriting at least one episode after the first readthrough. Last series, we did major surgery on a couple. We expect that, so it’s not a huge surprise. Obviously it’s disappointing because you want it all to be perfect, but it never is.
Jesse: What often happens is that the episode you thought was great ends up lagging behind and becomes the runt of the litter. You’re like, “Shit! I thought that episode was great, but now it seems to be crap!”.

Did Peep Show’s POV concept go through Channel 4 quite smoothly? Or did someone go, “Christ, I don’t know about that?”
Sam: On almost the eve of filming the first series, our lovely commissioning director, who’d been very supportive all the way through it, had a kind of wobble. He said, “Look, the scripts are great, and so are David and Robert. But do we really want to do this weird filming? Is it going to blow it out of the water?”. I think Andrew O’Connor told us about that afterwards! We didn’t know about that at the time. Andrew talked him down!

Beyond Peep Show’s neat camera-POV gimmick, it’s Mark and Jez’s internal monologues which really make the show work and make it special. It’s a different approach to the comedy of recognition - revealing people’s lowdown, dirty thoughts, which we might often be ashamed to admit we share. Are human beings that rubbish, or is it an exaggeration?
Jesse: It is an exaggeration…
Sam: We all think reprehensible thoughts. I certainly do, as much as possible.
Jesse: We could have people thinking nice, kind thoughts, and it might be a more accurate picture of the average person. But it really wouldn’t be as funny.

How did you feel when the first episode of Peep Show went out?
Jesse: Absolutely terrified. I particularly remember waiting for the Guardian Guide review, which people who I know read, and thinking “Oh fuck”. I lose all sense of perspective in things I’ve been involved with. You swing from thinking it’s possibly going to change civilisation as you know it, to thinking it’s utterly worthless and not really any good at all! So other people’s reviews become disproportionately… interesting! We’re keen watchers of other people’s comedy, and shows come and go all the time, without really entering the public’s consciousness. Peep Show could so easily have been one of those shows which people vaguely remembered as the thing which Mitchell & Webb did before their massive series!
Sam: And we would’ve been saying, “Yeah, we still know them. They’re still nice to us!”.
Jesse: Sean Lock had a show on at the same time as ours. We thought it was a great show, but it never really ‘arrived’. Our show could’ve so easily been like that.
Sam: Our show is quite small. But after five series, you feel like you have some little place in the culture. You feel as though everyone who might like Peep Show has had a chance to watch it.

I’ve hardly ever met anyone who doesn’t like Peep Show.
Jesse: That’s because we’ve had them all hunted down and killed.

The character Jeremy is hilariously selfish. Was it ever a concern, though, that he might become too unlikeable?
Sam: That was a concern in the first series. One thing we tried to do in the second series was give him a love interest. That did help, because we then saw him being more passionate and vulnerable, like a puppy dog, which then made him more likeable. Also, Robert’s a very good, versatile actor, who can do that stuff really well. It was one of the most important changes, after the first series. We saw the more emotional sides of Jez.

Any other learning curve realisations, after the first series?
Jesse: We’ve always been very keen to improve our storytelling. I’m very proud of the first two series, although there’s the odd story which doesn’t quite hold together. We’ve tried to improve our consistency as we’ve gone along.

The media’s partyline on Peep Show is that it has fairly poor viewing figures, but does well on DVD. How true is that?
Jesse: There are a few caveats to that one. With more and more TV channels, what used to be not-so-great viewing figures are now quite acceptable viewing figures for Channel 4. But that’s basically true: it has the culty thing of having a smaller, loyal audience.
Sam: It doesn’t really bother us that much. The show keeps being commissioned, we get good reviews. We’re not too worried about beating Jonathan Ross. It’s a good position for us to be in.
Jesse: Channel 4 has been pretty good for us over the years. It would be nice to give the people that we deal with there, like [Channel 4’s head of entertainment and comedy] Andrew Newman, a birthday present in terms of a massive viewing spike. But on a creative level, the main thing is to have the respect of people who I respect. People who I like, like the show.
Sam: We’ve been very supported by Channel 4. They’ve never said, “You’ve got to buck your ideas up or we’ll cancel!”. The only thing they ever did was suggest we put a sexy girl in the second series – which turned out to be the American character, Nancy. But that wasn’t even exactly about changing everything: it was about maybe getting a few more viewers.
Jesse: Luckily, we’d had the sexy girl idea anyway.

Mitchell and Webb are credited with additional material on the show. How does that work?
Jesse: Before each series, we have a “plot party” at one of our houses. We tell them things we’ve been thinking about, and they tell us what they think of storylines. They offer up ideas and maybe things develop out of that. At the other end of the process, we’ll often send them a script that we’re not happy with and they’ll suggest lines. It’s nice for us to have input from their very good comedy brains and to know they’re available.

I noticed that one episode in Series Five was written by Simon Blackwell – a different writer, for the first time… 
Jesse: It wasn’t mentioned in the Radio Times, which was unfortunate, because Simon’s brilliant. It was something we’d been toying with for a while, wondering if Peep Show was too personal. But he did such a brilliant job. We storylined the episode with him, so we still felt involved! Most people wouldn’t have noticed a difference, good or bad. It was such a shame he didn’t get credited more widely.

So how did that come about? Was it a time thing?
Sam: Yeah, time mainly. We just didn’t quite have enough time to write the full series, for various reasons. We also wanted to experiment with another writer on the show and see if it worked.
Jesse: We’re very collaborative – there’s always been a big committee around. We like having a lot of comedy brains around, so it wasn’t really such a big deal, having someone else come in and go that extra step. Although it actually quite a big deal for us to let them write the script and hand over the reins.

It must have been nice, when Series Five was commissioned while Series Four was airing.
Jesse: Absolutely. The show grows a bit on the back of David and Rob’s fame. And of course we won a BAFTA, which was good.
Sam: Did we?
Jesse: Oh, didn’t I tell you?

Series Five’s final episode was quite brave territory, I thought, in the sense that Jez joins a cult which could be interpreted as a Scientology affair.
Jesse: Well, we’re both in a cult. So that was handy.
Sam: People have asked if it was all about Scientology, and we thought about doing that. But we didn’t know enough about the subject to do a specific satire of Scientology. It’s just about that world where people go into these places and feel a little wobbled and changed. It felt like a good area to do – especially with Jeremy. I did a ‘personality test’ about ten years ago, while researching a script. It was an emotional experience, which was the jumping-off point for the story. I went in there, not really knowing what I was dealing with, and leaving feeling quite emotionally raw. You go in there, thinking you’re going to patronize these idiots. Then you come out thinking, ‘Maybe my life is all a failure. Maybe I should call my mother and apologise. Oh my God, I need a drink!’. The most interesting scenes, for us, were when Jez was going in and coming out. We only did one scene where he was fully fledged.

How would you sum up your experiences in writing the film Magicians, which also starred Mitchell and Webb, but sadly didn’t do especially well at the cinema box office?
Jesse: It was fascinating and Andrew O’Connor directed it, so it was nice to hang around him and David and Robert. It’s hard, getting a film to sustain over 90 minutes. The thing we always think about sitcoms is: if you get a tone that works, most other things will follow from that. Most shows fail, and a lot of them don’t have a certain tone. With film, you don’t get much of a chance to finesse your tone.
Sam: There are no pilots for films.
Jesse: Yeah, you get one shot. We like a lot of things about Magicians, but you need a lot of time to make something really good. We feel like it’s a piece of work that we’re not unhappy that we did. We’re glad we did it and it’s a good film in many ways, but we did learn a lot from doing it. God, I sound like a politician! But it was hard: there were bruising reviews for it, and that was quite tough. A lot of that came from being a well-loved TV show – and because it had David and Robert in it, comparisons were naturally made.
Sam: Everybody mentioned Peep Show. The irony was, we got the film made because of Peep Show, but it was never anything like Peep Show. So everyone was disappointed. That’s a very difficult thing to overcome.
Jesse: It’s one of those films which didn’t take off, but it doesn’t mean we don’t want to do more. We definitely intend to write more films. Just because one film doesn’t take off, doesn’t mean you can’t do the next one. We’re doing rewrites for American films at the moment.

When Magicians was released last year, there seemed to be a mini-wave of magic-centric flicks, with The Prestige and The Illusionist.
Jesse: Yeah. Sam rang me up after seeing The Prestige and said, “Oh my God, it’s going to look like we nicked a lot of the same plot ideas”. I’ve still never seen it.

How does Peep Show fit into the TV comedy landscape?
Jesse: I think it’s at the very apex of civilization, let alone comedy! There are a lot of good shows around, but there still isn’t a really good mainstream sitcom.
Sam: Gavin & Stacey might be that breakthrough show. It feels like it could do that. It’s not in-your-face like Nighty Night, which ripped your head off and shoved it up your arse. It’s more characters and relationships, which works very well.

Can you see Peep Show mellowing any time soon?
Jesse: We won’t be Gavin & Stacey, no. Hopefully there’ll be some emotional stuff for people to get behind. But I think we’ll always want to have a bit more edge...

Peep Show Series Nine starts tonight on Channel 4 at 10pm.

One of the many mistakes made by new writers and indeed some not-so-new writers, is showing their work to people too soon.

That initial urge to share your work ASAP is only natural.  Until other people absorb your stuff into their brains, it exists in a vacuum.  Might as well not exist.  If a script sits on a hard-drive with no-one around to read it, does it make a difference?  No.  Only to you, at this point in time, unless you have an agent or editor badgering you to finish it, or at least waiting for it.

Hand in hand with that drive to show people, comes the feeling that whatever you write in that vast, gaping, intimidatingly blank Word or Final Draft file will be read.  Sometimes, that feeling can bring about a terrible paralysis.  You're standing on the brink of a huge vortex of possibility.  Worst of all, there's the sense that This Is It.  No more talking: it's time to do.  Time to prove yourself to the world.  Again.

Me, I love the first draft.  I love that open road, beckoning you to burn rubber along it.  Most of all, though, I love the fact that no-one will ever read this shit.

This is because the first draft you hand to Important People should never be the actual first draft.  Crucially, it should be the first draft you've decided to show them.  Personal first-draft, public first-draft.  Very different beasts.

With that in mind, I like to call my first salvo Draft Zero.  For one thing, it sounds cool.  Zero-anything is cool besides, off the top of my head, Size Zero.  Zero tolerance, Patient Zero, the Zero Room, Zero Mostel, allowing absolutely Zero to stop you finishing this script or novel.

For another thing, the concept of Draft Zero helps cement the idea in your head that this draft is your own personal sandpit.  Sure, you're taking it seriously and making every effort to construct a strong skeletal structure to which you'll eventually graft muscle, organs and finally beautifully flawless skin, Hellraiser-style.  But at the same time, you have absolute carte blanche to fuck it up.  You can't win unless you're not afraid to lose.  Forget all external pressure and fuel yourself with internal pressure: the burning desire to write this story before you die of anticip-p-p-pation. 

Launch yourself into that sandpit and write like the seven winds.  Momentum is everything.  Never look back.  Pretend you're being chased by a shark which devours words (an image which reminds me to strongly recommend Steven Hall's extraordinarily vivid and imaginative novel The Raw Shark Texts).  Some writers continually stop, survey what they've written, then go back to fix it.  If that method works for you, great, but I can't do that.  Momentum, momentum, momentum.  When I realise I've messed up, or that things will need to be fixed later, I make Running Notes, then just keep writing.

When you reach the end of that fun, breathless marathon, what you have is Draft Zero.  And it's yours.  All yours.  A template for future greatness.

You'll go back to rewrite it again and again, restructuring, ironing out the many flaws, de-clunking that often laughable dialogue, shifting or destroying wonky plot-points, starting to introduce or strengthen those lurking themes.  And at the end of that process, that's when you emerge triumphant from your steaming, churning brain-factory with The Actual First Draft.

Draft Zero is your own personal, very private first-born.  Enjoy the vacuum in which it resides.  In space, no-one can hear you scream that it hasn't turned out quite how you expected.

My novel The Last Days Of Jack Sparks is currently half price in the UK Kindle store, at a mere £1.99 for a limited time! My novelette Auto Rewind is also new to Kindle this week

There’s a script note I’ve given rather a lot over the years – to myself and other writers – and yet it doesn’t get talked about all that much (except for this week, when a post by the mighty James ‘Sitcom Geek’ Cary reminded me to write this). 

Since launching my Script Analysis service a few months back, I’ve applied this note to a fair number of the varied and splendid TV and film scripts I’ve received.

Don’t tell the script reader things which the viewer won’t see or hear onscreen.

It’s easy to fall into this trap.  Why?  Because we’re keen to communicate with the reader and get them on board.  We want them to enjoy the script and get the story, without getting confused.  But our eagerness leads us to forget that readers enjoy scripts most when experiencing them as a viewer would – when they’re picturing the drama in their heads and gleaning all information solely from what’s ‘onscreen’.  

So if your script’s action lines start sidling up and whispering privileged information about offscreen stuff, you run the risk of snapping them out of their own imaginations.  You can remind them they’re reading a script rather than watching something.  Suddenly they’re no longer visualising, but processing purely written information.  You also make it harder for them to gauge how well the script is actually telling its story onscreen, where it counts. 

Here are some examples of imaginary action lines which commit this cardinal sin…

INT. LINDA’S BEDROOM - NIGHT
Linda lies on her back, staring at the ceiling.  She’s been awake for hours. 
How do we, as viewers, know how long she’s been awake?

INT. BAR – NIGHT
Dan props up the bar, nursing a whiskey.  He’s thinking about what Susan told him this morning.
How do we, as viewers, know this?  Even an Oscar-winning actor would find themselves hard pressed to convey specific thoughts using only their facial muscles.

EXT. SPACE
The massive and imposing Stornbecker 8 spaceship glides into view.  This vast behemoth is home to over 200 scientists who specialise in the latest cloning techniques. 
How do we, as viewers, know it’s home to over 200 scientists specialising in the latest cloning techniques?  Sure, we’ll hopefully gather this stuff in subsequent scenes as we venture inside the ship, but why tell the reader up front?  It’s a waste of a line.  And more importantly, the reader is no longer wondering, ‘Hey, I wonder who might live in a spaceship like this’.  Let’s look at another example of robbing the reader of questions…

EXT. GOLF COURSE – DAY
Pete runs breathless past the 18th hole, towards a pub called The 19th Hole. Something falls from his jacket. He stops to snatch it from the ground, then takes a moment to study it: a photograph of his dead wife HELEN.
How, in the name of all that’s holy and unholy, do we, as viewers, know that’s his dead wife in the photo?  This, by the way, is the first time we’ve encountered Helen in this imaginary script and so we have no idea who she is.  And crucially, we shouldn’t yet.  When we read the script we should have the exact same experience as the viewer, wondering who the woman in the photo might be.  So from this point on, the script reader and the potential viewer are having two completely different experiences.  And since the Mystery Photo Woman would have been a good hook, the script reader is actually less engaged.

Sometimes we writers fall into this trap by mistake, in early drafts.  Other times, we try it as a crafty cheat, to avoid having to find ways to convey information, either visually (ideal) or by dialogue (the last resort).  But it’s very much a false economy and can cause real problems.  If Helen is never established onscreen as Pete’s dead wife, she’ll forever remain a mystery for viewers.  The writer has told the script reader but never the viewer.  This is an outrage!

So, we need to watch ourselves when it comes to this stuff, especially when flip-flopping between prose and script (and it’s arguable that ‘show don’t tell’ still applies just as much to prose as it does to script, even though the prose writer gets to communicate directly with the ‘end-user’.  Depending on the narrator’s POV and story, we should still ideally be looking to convey things to the reader via characters’ surface lives – through their gestures, spoken words and actions.)  As a general rule of thumb, look out for these three warning signs:

• You find yourself writing about what a character “feels” or “thinks”...
• Or using the word “clearly” or “obviously”, which often tends to be code for “I’m not sure how to convey this visually”, eg ‘Tim is obviously finding this new bar job a struggle’, instead of something like, ‘Tim, caked in sweat, pours two drinks at once.  He glances over at a row of frustrated, waiting customers, then knocks a stack of glasses over.  Smash!’
• Or naughtily delegating work to the director and/or actors. One example of this might be starting a scene with ‘Lisa, Colin and Tom are chatting on the sofas. Suddenly, the door bursts open’.  Guess who has to supply the actual words these people were chatting?  That’ll be you, unless this is some kind of crazy arthouse-improv show.

Are there exceptions to the above?  Should we never write little asides for the reader’s sole benefit?  Yep, there are always exceptions.  When introducing new major characters, it’s more of a matter of taste as to whether you tell the reader their relationships to each other (‘TED holds the door open for his elderly mother IRENE’) – provided, of course, that you also remember to establish these onscreen.

Another example might be giving the reader a brief reminder of a smaller character’s identity, eg ‘Rob, the homeless guy from earlier, stares menacingly up at Tara’s window.’  The viewer will have the advantage of instantly recognising Rob from earlier, but the reader will thank you for a prompt.

Such small exceptions aside, scriptwriting is all about visual storytelling.  And that’s why we must treat reader and viewer as one and the same.

Hello you!  Here are a few tough-love pointers about approaching people in the scriptwriting, TV, film, prose and generally creative industries.  Specifically, via e-mail.  I'm sure this won't apply to you, because you're lovely and you know better.  But it might.  And that being the case, you may find this useful.  Here then, are Eight Ways To Annoy People Whose Help You Want...

1) Appear in someone's inbox, out of the blue, and immediately ask if they'll read your project. 
If you really must do this - although you shouldn't - at least put some effort into that e-mail and a little finesse.  A pro script-friend of mine recently described receiving a really abrupt e-mail from a complete stranger, asking if he would read their script.  The e-mail barely introduced the sender and didn't even end with a sign-off line.  That's a great way to make a terrible first impression. 

When you've written and finished a thing that you like, it's easy to build up a head of zealous steam, to the point where you assume the world is waiting to read it.  Take a deep breath and calm yourself.  Approach your contact-to-be politely, lightly and in a personalised way which doesn't make them think they're Number 227 in your Xeroxed Introductory E-Mail campaign.  As I said, ideally don't ask them to read your project in this opening salvo.  You wouldn't do this during an opening exchange at a party, so why do it in Cyberworld?  And Good God...

2) Attach your project to your introductory e-mail
Don't do this, ever.  It's rude, even though it might not seem that way to you.  It's the equivalent of striding up to someone at a scriptwriters' festival, saying hello and shoving a hard-copy of your script into their bag.  Bear in mind that most writers - me included, sadly - can't read other writers' scripts, for two reasons: lack of time to read anyone else's work and legality (if a writer reads your script, then has a similar idea down the line, or is already working on a similar idea, you might turn out to be paranoid and insane and all, like, "You stole my idea!  I sue you!  I appear in your garden at 3am, harming myself and shrieking!").  So when you send someone a script right off the bat, that seemingly innocuous PDF of yours could well be violating the recipient's personal, professional and legal boundaries.  Once someone receives a PDF, I'm pretty sure it's impossible to prove they haven't read it, if things should turn all weird and litigious later on.  So don't put them in that position.

3) Attach your project to your introductory e-mail, because the recipient's colleague/boss/whoever has suggested you send it
This is still rude.  I know, because a good few years back, I did it myself.  A TV show's producer suggested I send a script to his script editor.  With a head full of zealous steam (beware, oh beware, the zealous steam), I rattled off an e-mail to the script editor and attached the script.  Never heard back from that script editor, and quite rightly so.  I still regularly wince at the very thought of it and groan at the fact that I'm possibly forever filed away in that guy's head under "Presumptuous Amateurs".  Even if someone else has recommended you send a script, still take that deep breath and write that polite, to-the-point introductory e-mail, explaining that X suggested you send them your script.  Do they have time to read?  That's much nicer, isn't it?

4) Play down the size of the favour
This is admittedly a relatively small pet niggle, and may be exclusive to me and my brain, but I doubt it.  Don't play down the size of the favour you're asking this stranger/new contact.  I'm talking specifically about saying "I wonder if you could do me a small favour...".  Oh, it's only small, is it?  I'll be the judge of that.  This is the kind of thing it's so very easy to write without thinking, but well worth a mention.

5) Chase them up on a read
If a relative stranger agrees to read your thing, for free, in their own time, don't chase them up on it within six months.  Seriously.  That's just wrong and will irritate the Christ out of them.  You have to be prepared to play the long game here.  I've waited literally a year for industry folk to read scripts, and personally wouldn't chase them before a year was up. 

If that impatient demon in your brain - the one entirely composed of zealous steam - forces you to chase someone up, at least do it indirectly.  Message them about something else - ideally something which isn't asking for another favour.  Nine times out of 10, this will jog their memory and provide a subtle prompt.  It still runs the risk of annoying them, but it's a lot better than a "Did you get my e-mail?" e-mail, a week after the first.  While I'm at it, let's all agree never to write "Did you receive my e-mail?" e-mails any more.  It's 2011.  The vast majority of e-mails get through.  We know this, and yet still we persist with this irritatingly transparent tactic. 

6) React badly to notes
So this stranger has read your thing for free and given you some thoughts.  You dislike and/or disagree with one or more these thoughts, so decide to fight your corner.  You passive-aggressively - or downright aggressively - inform the helpful stranger why they're wrong and/or why they've misunderstood your grand masterplan.  Congratulations!  They didn't particularly want any response to their notes (all those questions they asked in the notes were rhetorical, by the way, for your project-analysing use only) and now you're synonymous with two Twitter hashtags in their brain: #DifficultToWorkWith and #OverlyDefensive.  Tremendous.

7) Ask a huge question, the size of the MOON ITSELF
This one isn't exactly likely to enrage people, and is once again really easy to do without thinking, but it will assuredly make their life harder.  And if you've made their life  excessively harder, they won't thank you for that.  I'm talking about big, wide-ranging questions like "How can I go about getting into scriptwriting?".  That's big.  Whole books are written on that subject.  In fact, are you sure you shouldn't buy a tax-deductible General Script Advice book, rather than ask a pro to write several paragraphs of advice for free?  Then, by all means, you can ask more targeted, specific questions of this person.  This will serve a double-duty: it makes it a lot easier for them to answer the questions, and you seem more clued-up from the very beginning.  Everybody wins, nobody loses, hooray.

8) 'Forget' to thank them
Never forget to thank someone who has given you advice, help and especially notes.  This is possibly the most infuriating thing of all, and there seems to be an epidemic of this behaviour going around.  Almost every industry pro I talk to, shares the annoyance at not being thanked for helping people.  This now seems to be a 'thing'.  Strangers appear in your life, out of the clear blue sky (© Larry David), ask for help/advice/a script read, are given that valuable stuff for free, then fail to even thank the helper.  That's downright weird behaviour, which has certainly happened to me a few times now.  Why would anyone do that?  Besides being supremely irritating and ungracious, it pretty much guarantees that the person will get zero help or advice from me again.  Don't burn bridges.  Don't spread the epidemic which makes helping people literally a thankless task.

Writers, producers, script editors: anything to add to this list?  Comment away!  I want stories of people who have contacted you, out of the blue, and proceeded to screw up their chances of you ever helping them.  I'd also like stories from people who have made mistakes while contacting new people.  Let's stockpile this stuff and get a little closer to establishing Best Practice when progressing in this industry and forging new professional relationships.