Fiction Reboot

A couple of weeks ago I answered a few interview questions from novelist/academic researcher/teacher Brandy Schillace, and the results are now online. I spouted stuff like:

"Through my teens I read classic science fiction and ’60s British thriller writers. Then I had the advantage of a very solid three years of education in English Literature that opened up new avenues to me, from the medieval mindset to the poetry of Thomas Hardy. I think the point is that as a reader I had a big, big net, and a special fascination with popular fiction. I can remember buying Westerns and Romance novels, neither of which were of particular interest to me but I felt driven to find out what was going on in that kind of writing. I looked at William Goldman and Michael Crichton and saw that it was possible to be both a novelist and a screenwriter; Goldman kept the distinction clear and Crichton’s later, less substantial work showed what can happen when you don’t, so I learned from both of them."

and

"Research is nothing more than expanded observation and as such, it’s key to all creation. Art’s about insight, and you can’t offer insight into nothing. Research is about continuing to write with authority after you’ve detected the limits of what you know."

More dazzling autobiography and Secrets of the Universe here.

And while you're visiting, dig around a little. Dr Schillace's interest in the intersection of science, medicine and literature give her obsessions and researches an inevitably Gothic tint. Her published academic work covers areas of psychology, neurology, weird science and reproduction; here's a podcast recorded in the Wellcome Collection's club room, in which she discusses recent work on syphilis and Dracula, while if your imagination isn't piqued by her search across Europe for the Labour Device, an eighteenth-century "mechanical phantom used in the teaching of male midwives", then I don't know what would do it.

#LitChat

Tonight (Friday, March 30th) I'm putting on my grownup's hat to be guest host in a moderated one-hour Twitter conversation about writing in general and The Bedlam Detective in particular. Anyone can join in and I hope you will, or it'll be a pretty lonely hour for me.

You can follow the conversation using the #litchat hashtag, and join in by including the tag in your message or question. I'll be using Tweetchat to sort and filter the tweets. The moderator will be on the lookout for tweets without the hashtag, but even a safety net can sometimes be slipped through. Read more about the event here.

You don't need to follow me to participate. I'm on Twitter as @Brooligan, if you do care to follow, but don't expect to learn the secrets of the Universe. A selection of recent tweets appears below, by way of proof.

The LitChat will take place at 4pm EST, which I think equates to 9pm in the United Kingdom. Which I think makes it 1pm in California? Apparently different parts of the US put their summer clocks forward at different times, which results in a schism between EST and EDT to add to the usual East-West Coast differences. Chuck in last week's hour-forward of the UK's clocks and I'm amazed that life goes on, we all aren't at war, and planes don't fall out of the sky on a regular basis.

Thanks to Carolyn Burns Bass, #litchat founder and moderator, for the invitation.

Those Tweets:

Tried absinthe once. Next time just punch me in the face and blowtorch my tongue.

The Clarke Awards are for SF. The Dave Clark Award is for drumming more enthusiastically when you see your own closeup on the studio monitor

La-Z-Boy and Ladyboy. Sound very similar. Wonder how much trouble that must have caused over the years.

Karl Lagerfeld. To quote my grandma, what the f*** has he come as?

I'm singing along to a Bob Dylan track, and have to concede that he's way the more tuneful of the two of us.

"Doesn't suffer fools gladly" is code for "unpleasant asshole". Unpleasant assholes assume it's a compliment.

I sometimes look back and wonder if I'm the fool that others have suffered without letting me know.

"After viewing this item (The Bedlam Detective) customers buy Sherlock Series 2". WTF? Get back here. @steven_moffat says you smell.

Is it too late to organise an international manhunt for the bloke who told Christopher Lee he could sing?

Been asked to talk about the papers on local radio this Sunday morning. The D-lister rolodex must have come full circle again.

If you get a mommyjacker on Mumsnet, how do you tell?

Now that Terra Nova's been cancelled the field is again clear for my SPARTANS VS DINOSAURS (I'll do it one day. I will.)

Coughs and flu in the Brooligan house. Place has been rattling like the Bronte parsonage for the past week.

Used translation software to put on an article on Prof Challenger from German into English. THE LAND OF MIST came out as COUNTRY OF MUCK.

And finally, the perennial...

By the way, did I ever mention I had a book out..?

Savage Season Interview

From an interview just posted on the Savage Season Books website:

"I’ve never consciously scheduled my career to the extent that I could say, Oh, yeah, I put this aside and focused on that. If you do this for a living then you’re relentlessly pushing to do all you can all the time in whatever medium. And when you feel a bit of give, see a chink of light, sense the opportunity to get something off your wish list and out into the world, then you pour all of your energies into that."

See me sort out the future of publishing, the impact of the eBook, selling your stuff to America, the role of the small press, and everything short of World Peace here.

(Actually, it's mostly "me, me, me")

And while we're at it, internet, there is no such thing as a "sneak peak".

Bitter Crazy Ranting, aka an Interview

Interviewed by Eleanor Ball for Write Here, Write Now, and you can find it here.

"A lead writer is Britain's gelded version of a showrunner. Both write show-defining scripts, set the series arcs, brief the other writers and take a final pass on the scripts for consistency. But generally speaking, a lead writer has no producing power. If you can fire a director, you're a showrunner. If a director's giving you notes, that's a lead writer."

Click and read more.

Saturday Event

On Saturday I'm giving a talk-with-clips about my TV career at the Lass O'Gowrie on Charles Street in Manchester, and as the day gets closer I'm growing convinced that no one is going to turn up. If you've an events diary or similar feature and might be interested in giving it a mention, feel free to pass the information on.

I was born in Salford so this is a homecoming for me. I'll be covering ground from my start with Doctor Who through working with Brian Clemens on BUGS in the 90s with side-trips into TV horror and Rosemary & Thyme, right up to the experience of remaking Eleventh Hour in Hollywood for Jerry Bruckheimer (the first version, with Patrick Stewart, was shot in Manchester).

The talk's in an upstairs room of the Lass at 6.30, right after my old friend Bryan Talbot speaking about his Grandville graphic novels. It follows a day of events with Johnny Vegas, who I suspect will have no trouble pulling an audience.

Johnny Hollywood, the Commentary

You may be curious as to why I appear to have a habit of interviewing myself, so the previous post could benefit from some explanation.

The first Johnny Hollywood entry came about as a result of a freelance journalist contacting me through my publisher to request an interview for a well-known magazine. I said okay, he sent me a list of his questions, and I imagine I must have put in an hour, maybe two, drafting the kind of responses I'd be happy to live with.

I never got to see the piece he wrote, but I gather that he'd canvassed about a dozen different writers with the same list of questions. From all the responses he cherry-picked selective quotes. Which is... well, it's not illegitimate. I'm not even saying it's wrong.

But I reckon it's pushing it, a bit.

Rather than see the words wasted, I shunted them onto the blog. A few weeks ago another interview request showed up in my mailbox. I didn't know the sender but she has a site for aspiring writers, from which it's obvious that she's sincere. Now, I never want to forget that my roots are in fandom - old-school fandom, the kind where the convention book rooms were huge and the screening programs tiny, of zines and apas that were often the nursery slopes for the next generation of pros. I'm conscious of my debt to the Bob Shaws and Rob Holdstocks of that world, so I try to behave as I think they would.

Well, as soon as I got a spare hour I fired off my responses, and despite a follow-up query it's been radio silence ever since. So I chopped out some early-career stuff you may have read before, and onto the blog it went.

So here's the outcome of that. In setting up a website and later a blog I made myself accessible, but maybe the internet now makes it too easy to get hold of people and some boundaries are called for. So if you want to ask me anything, ask me here, where it's personal.

But if you're setting out with Google and a list of boilerplate questions, looking to drum up some content from someone whose work you've never even read, from now on I'm gonna have to pass.

Johnny Hollywood Explains it All (2)

How do you stay motivated to finish a novel? How do you stay focused?

I don't start a novel unless I've got a story that gives me a little sense of awe whenever I think about it. Not out of vanity, I mean that sense of having lucked into something classical and timeless like a myth or a folk tale. As long as that sense is here, you never want to let go. The motivation and focus take care of themselves.

What is your writing schedule like? Do you write in the mornings, evenings, and for how long?

I mess around in the morning, start getting up to speed in the afternoon, have a productive burst when I get there, and I'm done by early evening. If I could lift out the productive burst and get it out of the way at the beginning of the day, the rest of my time would be my own... but it doesn't work that way. Over the longer term, I set wordage targets if it's a novel, page count targets if it's a script. I have a year planner or a calendar and I keep a daily score, so I can see how I'm doing as I work toward the target.

How do you get your ideas? What is your method for remembering them?

The way for me to get a new idea is to complete the work on an old one. It creates a hole in my life and the new idea slides into it. That's the only answer I know. I wish I controlled the process, but I'm pretty much at the mercy of it. As for remembering ideas, I jot notes whenever I have odd thoughts. At some point you find that the notes are like jigsaw pieces and fit together in a way you maybe didn't expect. It's great when that happens. It feels like a gift from your subconscious.

If you get writer’s block, how do you get over it?

Feeling blocked usually means I'm out of love with what I'm doing. My only answer is to cast around for something else.

What are your thoughts on self publishing?

"A physician who treats himself has a fool for a patient." If self-publishing were the way, I'd still be writing stories about a detective with a steel head and a tuxedo. It's okay if you just want to play to your circle, but being a professional in the public arena means riding out rejection and raising your game. The best publishers are the ones with the best editors, and your best editor isn't you.

What piece of advice would you give to someone thinking of becoming a writer? What is a good starting point for them?

If you're thinking about doing it, then maybe it's not for you. It's like sports or anything else, you burn to be active from the get-go and you don't stop to weigh it against other options. But read, and read well, and read widely beyond the kind of thing you want to write. Study technique, look for things that you can use and make uniquely your own. Aim for simplicity and balance and eventually your prose will sing.

Writers Who Direct

In Conversation: A Writer's Perspective is a projected series of author interviews edited by James Cooper. Volume One is available now and is a publication of The British Fantasy Society.

Contributors include Joe Lansdale, Graham Joyce, Ramsey Campbell, Mark Morris, and Tim Lebbon. My conversation with James was in the form of a series of emails over about a year, keeping the sense of a developing exchange rather than a simple Q and A.

This from our discussion of writers directing:

The experience of directing Oktober (a four-hour miniseries for ITV) was both exhilarating and harrowing. It was hugely time-consuming, and that’s partly one of the reasons why I haven’t done it again since. I wasn’t writing anything else or generating any new ideas at all for more than six months, and when I came out of it I virtually had to start engineering a comeback. Add together the prep time before it, and the time spent getting back up to speed with something new, and you’re pretty much talking about a couple of years out of the game. If you’re a full-time director, when you finish a job you move straight on to your next script; when you’re a writer, you have to go back up the mountain.

Having said that, I absolutely loved it. I mean, come on, for a while there I had my hands on the train set. Professionally it was the most taxing thing I’ve ever done. Imagine launching yourself out into something like that, in the certain knowledge that from day one you’ll be out of your depth. I had a terrific first assistant (industry veteran Roger Simons) to steer me in the day to day practicalities, and even those among the crew who clearly didn’t think I was up to much gave 110%.

How satisfied was I? I’m never satisfied. You know the old saying about, be careful what you wish for because you might just get it? Well, there’s a certain reality underlying it. The stuff’s always perfect in your head, but even when you get it down exactly as you visualised it, that’s the beginning of a journey, not the end of one. You’re then contending with a question that you’d never otherwise have to face... Well, I got what I intended, so why isn’t it having the effect that I imagined? And you want to make it over, do it again but different, incorporate what you learned, get it a bit closer to what you meant. And you can’t.

Nuggets

Early last year I completed a questionnaire circulated by the editors of Vector, the critical journal of the British Science Fiction Association. I was a member of the BSFA for a while, before I found that my changing tastes and inclinations meant that the British Fantasy Society was probably more for me; on moving over, I found myself consorting with most of the same crowd.

The BSFA was my big introduction to old-school fandom; global in reach, literary in its foundations, passionate in its concerns. For a solitary writer, it was a link to a welcoming subculture with a genuine identity and a sense of its own history. It was my way into friendships close and distant that have lasted to this day.

The questionnaire was a re-run of a survey first conducted twenty years ago for Mexicon III by Paul Kincaid. Can't remember how I responded back then but these are some of the answers I gave this time around:

On science fiction and fantasy
I think of myself as a mainstreamer with an sf/f background that tinges almost everything I do. Can't say it without sounding pretentious but I try for a sense of mythic resonance in the mundane.

Influences
When you start writing, you imitate what you love. I loved Wells, ERB, Bester, Clark, DC comics, the sf ballast mags of (to me) mysterious pedigree that somehow showed up at the local newsagents'. My major influences are probably everything I was blown away by between the ages of 12 and 25. Thereafter I began to separate my sense of what was mine from what I'd read.

On the use of British settings
My novels have tended to alternate between closely-observed British settings and closely-researched foreign landscapes, usually (but not always) with a British main character for point-of-view. Never planned it that way and it's not a very commercial way of thinking; the market likes you to find something that works and keep repeating it.

Do I detect a different response to my work from publishers in Britain and America?
Yeah. To UK publishers I'm a forgotten 90s horror writer. In the US I'm upmarket and literary.

The most significant developments in British science fiction and fantasy over the past twenty years?
Corporatisation of mainstream publishing houses has led to a massive loss of editorial know-how, and to the elimination of the specialised lines and imprints that were sustained by that know-how. The rot really set in when marketing people began directing editorial decisions, instead of serving them. It's great that the small and indie presses do so much to keep the flame alive but it's not the same.

And btw, 39 was Rob Hansen's convention membership number, not his age.

I believe.

Questions from Planet Hood

It was quiet on the lot yesterday. Apart from the crews on the stages, most people seemed to have left early to travel for Thanksgiving. I went for a wander and found my way onto the giant set for Miami Trauma, Jeffrey Lieber's show for Bruckheimer which is now shooting. I don't think I'm giving any secrets away if I say that it's pretty spectacular, and resembles a space station in a big-budget science fiction movie.

My medical thriller episode for The Forgotten had completed its filming over on Stage 6 the day before. It'll move into post-production next week and I'm really happy with the way it's been turning out. Director Guy Ferland nailed and enhanced every scene; now I know why Medea turned out as it did. This episode is a nice blend of creator Mark Friedman's vision for the series and the things I'm best at. And as we move toward production on the show's 'back five' they've been letting us be more adventurous, more character-driven, funnier when we need to be.

As with my earlier episode, many of the crew from just about every department had previously worked on Eleventh Hour. Over the days of shooting I got into numerous conversations about the series, with everyone expressing dismay at its cancellation. Many made the point that shows with lower numbers are being hailed as this season's successes.

When we wrapped and all shook hands after the final shot of the day - the 'Martini' - I told DP David Stockton that I looked forward to working with him again. His parting response was, "On Eleventh Hour, the Movie!"

Which brings me to the Resurrection Campaign, a fan-driven movement which instantly grew out of the Renewal Campaign on the day the cancellation was announced. While I'm entirely sympathetic to what these guys are doing, they're completely independent of me. They're working to their own honest agenda, not some devious one of mine.

When I heard that there was a feeling of disappointment at the lack of response to their approaches, I contacted one of their number, Kellie, and said that if she wanted to collate some questions from the participants in the Planet Hood forums I'd do my best to answer them here.

What are your thoughts on our continuing this campaign...is there hope?

I'd rule nothing out. I thought the British show was dead in the water until I got an email that said, 'Congratulations on the American sale'. But at this stage we'd be talking about a rebirth rather than a renewal. Normally I'd be a pragmatist and think, okay, that was good while it lasted, dust yourself off and move on. But what keeps me attached to it, even while I'm working on The Forgotten and developing other shows, is that the appetite for the material is proven but nothing else is filling its niche. It's an action show with hard science. The science may be dramatized - its processes shortened, its effects exaggerated - but the audience can sense that those processes are grounded in a reality. You didn't get that from The X Files, you don't get that from Fringe. They go the fantasy route. Which is entirely valid, but those are different worlds.

What are you and the producers willing/able to do to help bring the show back? Are Bruckheimer and Warner Bros interested in trying again with another network?

For my part, I could be up and running overnight. Cyrus and Ethan have moved on to other things but for the past six months I've effectively been in training for the gig. As far as Bruckheimer TV and Warner Bros are concerned, I'm on great terms with everyone there but they play their cards close to their chests. I'm not aware that reviving Eleventh Hour is high on anyone's agenda right now. Not because they don't believe in the show, but because all their energies are deployed elsewhere. A cancelled show doesn't normally stay in the portfolio until something unexpectedly puts it there.

What more can we do as fans to help bring the show back?

Stay visible. I can't say that any specific thing that you're doing will lead to success, but the fact that you're doing it proves there's a continuing audience for the show.

Have you had any contact with any of the actors about the possibility of the show's return?

Rufus and Marley had already moved on when I got out here. But that's a conversation we'd start when there was a real possibility of making it happen, and it would take place in the context of their other prospects and commitments. Most things are negotiable.

Have you had any feedback/interest from any of the networks we have contacted?

Not personally, no.

Did CBS ever give you a reason for canceling the series?

My understanding is that they believed they had a strong development slate for the next fall season, and also that they could profit more from shows that their studio division, rather than Warner Bros, owned, even if those shows drew smaller audiences. Which explains why they picked up Medium. I know that Nina Tassler was a strong supporter of Eleventh Hour, and for that I thank her. But there was another CBS executive who let slip a few injudicious remarks when talking to a class of film students, which appeared later in one student's blog; we knew then that there was a faction within CBS that was less receptive to arguments for the show's renewal.

Did Warner Bros ever give a reason for their choice to release the DVD as manufacture-on-demand and in the US only?

I've tried to find out. All I know is that if it wasn't for the personal interest of Danny Cannon and the good graces of Peter Roth, there wouldn't have been a DVD release at all. Which to me seems mad. I can walk into any video store in LA and buy the British version. You can't tell me there's less of a market for a Bruckheimer show.

What made the show so expensive... and will this affect someone picking it up?

Sets, locations, dressing, and crew moves. Most shows have a 'precinct' - a series of regular locations where a significant proportion of each week's story can take place. It's already built and dressed, and in some cases is pre-lit. By always setting a certain number of pages in your precinct sets, you can get a lot of your material shot efficiently and at basic cost. Hood and Rachel were always on the road, and a big part of the appeal of their stories was that they'd show up in a new place every week. In production terms, every story was like a pilot.

Some shows reduce their costs by leaving LA, taking advantage of tax breaks in other states and using local labour. Leverage, which I love, shoots in Portland. Battlestar Galactica shot in Vancouver. Mental shot in Bogota (to unhappy effect, I'm told) while in The Starter Wife Australia's Gold Coast doubled as Miami. But...

But a top LA crew is a phenomenal thing to watch in action, and Eleventh Hour's production team were integral to its success.

I go back to what I said at the beginning. Rebirth rather than renewal. I need to gain more ground here, and somewhere along the line I'd need to meet someone who's interested in working with me, who has the power to greenlight shows, and who feels the spark when I pitch the idea of reuniting Rufus and Marley for a feature-length special or miniseries. I'd need to get the production company and the studio onside, since they own the property, but two things would work in my favour; a killer story, and a noisy fanbase. I can't now see a network picking it up, and I'm not even sure that network TV is the best place for Eleventh Hour stories - anything with any edge to it makes the networks very nervous. I can imagine doing the special as a piece of 'event' TV for one of the more quality-minded cable channels, where the prospect of snagging even a fraction of the show's 12m network viewers could have an appeal. We'd have to make it to a budget. But if the special proved enough of a draw, there would be an argument to go on and make episodes.

Thre's a saying in Hollywood, that I picked up from Lynda Obst's book Hello, He Lied - ride the horse in the direction it's going. I can't force it to happen, but I can stay prepared to take advantage of any opportunity that may come up while I pursue those things I can make happen.

Television Q and A

How did you begin your career in television?

I was writing for radio at the time. It was a science fiction piece for Radio 4’s Saturday Night Theatre and Martin Jenkins, my producer, sent the script over to the Doctor Who production office. So out of the blue came this call to go over and talk to them.

Was it easy to find steady work writing for television?

I’ve never had steady work. The nearest to it was the time I spent on BUGS, where I wrote 10 shows over 3 seasons and acted as consultant on seasons 2 and 3. But even then it was a case of “one sale at a time.”

How much input did you find you had in a production of one of your screenplays?

That’s always going to vary. Once the script’s locked, there’s no reason to have the writer around except as a courtesy. You usually get a call when they’ve changed something and it’s caused them a problem and they need it fixed. If it’s something practical like a location they couldn’t get or a sequence that doesn’t work as planned, then great, that’s what I’m there for. If someone’s made a perverse change and failed to foresee the knock-on effect, I’m less sanguine.

How did you find you were treated by other members of the creative team when working on a project?

Again, that varies. In general I’ve been treated very well.

What was your biggest breakthrough in television?

I’d have to say Chimera. Prior to that I’d done just a couple of Whos and one episode of a crime show. Chimera took me from contributor to creator and put four hours of prime time drama on my CV.

Which gave you more creative input, being a writer or creator of a series?

It’s the difference between being paid to drive a car and being hired to design one. Actually that’s not entirely fair. But when you write for a series there’s a lot that isn’t on your shoulders. I can’t imagine why anyone might prefer that.

Were you ever frustrated by the workings of the television industry?

Daily! Dealing with the industry involves a whole separate set of issues from the act of writing.

Do you think writers are given enough credit when it comes to the creative process and audience appreciation?

Obviously I’m going to say no. But the fact is that there’s a very small number of names get on the front of a show and the writer’s place there can never be disputed. Although in feature films particularly, you get directors who encourage the notion that the writer’s role is to type up the director’s thoughts. One of the things holding back British TV is the resistance to a writer having a true executive producer role on a show.

What is your opinion of modern television drama?

On the plus side, it’s a relief to see that the drab hand of social realism is no longer holding it down. Throughout the 90s almost every British drama looked and played like an effing soap. And the kind of technology we’re getting now – HD, widescreen, downloads – is what I’ve spent my life waiting for. The downside is a lack of confidence and direction... of old-fashioned showmanship. Everybody wants to be edgy and relevant and issue-driven. And no one wants to see it.

What is your worst experience as a writer working within television?

Being excluded from a project I'd initiated.

What was your best experience as a writer working within modern television?

If I had to pick one moment, I’d say walking my dog down Gotham City’s main street on the Pinewood backlot after a meeting in the Chimera special effects workshop.

Which do you prefer, writing prose or screenplays for television?

Standard answer, and it’s always true... when I’m doing one, I yearn for the other.

Do you believe there is a big difference between writing for television and writing for feature films?

Yes. Mainly in choice of subject. A feature film is a one-off universal myth. TV’s a continuing parade.

Chimera photo by Stephen Morley

Eleventh Hour USA

The show debuts tonight on CBS in the slot right after CSI, and I'm holding my breath, crossing my fingers, and wishing 'em luck.

I talked about the show concept, and influences, and the whole issue of adapted formats, in an interview with Tom Green for the Writers' Guild newsletter a few weeks ago.

Tom asked,

Did producers/commissioners consider Eleventh Hour to be sci-fi? Is it a genre they worry might put people off?

And I said,

When I sold Eleventh Hour I pushed it as the Prime Suspect of science – a pro-science procedural with today's Bad Science in its sights, grounded entirely in the current state of technology. So no, it was never meant to be science fiction. Although I’d have been happy to see sf writers involved, because they tend to know where the line between actual science and speculation lies. Most arts-background people are far more ignorant of science than professional scientists are of culture. What I wanted for Eleventh Hour was the same kind of probity that you’d apply without question in a legal drama or a medical show. The last thing I wanted was a pasting from the Government’s chief scientific advisor.

If you want to see the full interview, you can find it here.

Next Friday on NBC: Crusoe.

Book into Film

Inspired by the questioner mentioned in my previous post, who wanted to know how best to scan a novel into his computer before starting to adapt it, I've dug out some thoughts that I put together for a Writers' Guild newsletter some time back. Harry Potter and the Lord of the Rings series had just got under way, and provided handy examples. The pic shows Sophie Ward, who starred along with Nigel Havers in Peter James' Prophecy.

Adapting is not a matter of reformatting. Adaptation is re-imagination. When you're reading prose, the incidents may run as vividly in your head as when you're watching a movie, but don't let that mislead you into thinking that there can't be that much difference between them.

Back in 1997, Pumpkin Books published the full text of Dracula: or, the Un-Dead, the first-ever stage adaptation of Stoker's novel. Performed once-only in a bare-stage reading with the sole purpose of securing theatrical copyright protection, it was exactly the kind of cut-and-paste, prose-into-playtext version envisioned by that Guild member a full century later.

As a historical document, it's fascinating; but viewing it as drama, it's hard to disagree with Henry Irving's back-of-the-stalls opinion of "Dreadful."

It doesn't work. It doesn't play.

It doesn't offer an equivalent experience in the target medium. And that, really, is what it's all about.

True adaptation is neither for the inexperienced nor the faint-hearted. Like Richard Gordon's Sir Lancelot Spratt, you have to be ready to make a huge incision and then dive in with both hands. You have to absorb the book and try to get inside the author's thinking, trying to get a sense in your bones of what he or she was gripped by and reaching for.

In the end it comes down to two raw materials. Impulse, and image.

These were the things that came before the prose. By impulse I mean the shape, the feel of the thing. Its tone, its purpose, its play on the emotions. And by image I mean the elements through which all those vague components are externalised. Images are those things that stay in your head when you've forgotten the plot. And often they're the things that are in the author's head before the plot gets worked around them. How many times have you read an author saying something like, "I got this idea in my mind of a man walking down a dusty road with a saddle over his shoulder, and I wanted to know who he was, where he'd come from, where he was going..."

Images aren't so much pictures, as key moments. William Goldman recommends finding the five most important ones in a story and charting everything else around them. Sometimes you'll be able to take material from the book in order to do that, a lot of the time you'll find yourself inventing stuff in the spirit of the book. You need a structure that works for the screen, you need a narrative progression that can be rendered in terms of things you see and sounds you hear because, let's face it, that's what a movie is.

In recent months we've seen a couple of adaptations within our genre that are, by general agreement, as faithful to their sources as commercial celluloid is likely to get. I'm talking about the Harry Potter and the Tolkien - although I've actually heard at least one Tolkien purist griping along the lines of, "They shouldn't have been walking along like that, they should have been walking like this..."

The Potter was a pretty straightforward job, but given the size of the enterprise and the unforgiving nature of some of the judges that awaited them, I think that Jackson and his co-writing team had to be more bloody, bold and resolute than most. LOTR is as near to the page on the screen as you're likely to get; but break it down, beat by beat and moment by moment, and you can see that it isn't the page on the screen at all.

Adaptation means absorbing the author's work and then getting into the author's shoes and then doing the job anew. And all your moment-by-moment decisions have to be made in the light of the new and radically different medium that you're now serving. You can't blame the book if you go wrong. You're the captain, now.

Your assets? Cineliteracy, for one. Believe it or not, film history did not begin with George Lucas or A Nightmare on Elm Street. Conciseness, for another. The best story points are the ones that the viewers pick up without being told directly, the implications they see in some well-chosen piece of dramatic business. Some writers never get this. Few things can make a viewer lose the will to live more than a scene with two people in a room, sitting there and explaining the plot to each other.

A sense of pace won't go amiss, either. Film pacing is all about compression and omission. Goldman again: get into a scene late, get out of it early. The beauty of film narrative is that you can run parallel streams of action and, by cutting between them, maintain the illusion of real time without actually sticking to it. Get that dynamic into your head, and the 'secret' of screenwriting moves to within your reach.

And lastly, never admit to this, but a little sense of poetry does no harm either. Kong on top of the Empire State Building is not just a monkey on a roof. Claude Rains and Humphrey Bogart walking off into the fog are not just there to show you what the weather's like in Casablanca.

Adaptation is not an easy option, although I have to say that it does spare you the agony and brow-sweat of dragging something out of thin air where there was nothing before. Back in 1994 I had great fun adapting Peter James' Prophecy for Yorkshire TV. Peter had done all the work of the imagination; I took all his work on board and then applied invention to render it as film. On one level I changed everything, but it a more important sense I changed nothing at all... I was conscious of the responsibility to show you what was already there, but in a different way.

Peter still talks to me, so I must have done something right. There's another discussion to be had, about adaptations that plunder and then wilfully misrepresent their source material in order to serve someone else's creative agenda… but, what do you know? I've used up all my space.

Johnny Hollywood Explains It All

Last year I gave an e-mail interview to a journalist preparing an article for a US magazine. Turned out to be one of those pieces where a dozen of you oblige and the writer cherrypicks a quote or two from each.

I never saw the piece so I've no idea of what may have been used and what discarded. But here's some cherrypicking of my own.

On Adapting for the Screen

I'm slightly unusual in that I've had parallel careers in screenwriting and prose fiction, and the two have been scrambled together sometimes when I've adapted my own work. And I started in radio, which is a good grounding for both. When I've adapted other people's stuff, I've tried to treat it as the screen story that author would have written if they'd made that choice of medium right at the beginning. With my own material I feel I can be less respectful. That may not always be a good thing.

Novels vs Screenplays

You develop a novel on your own, unsupervised, and you go whatever distance it takes. It's like your own private R&D lab where you can feel your way through this massively complex enterprise without any distractions, and come out at the end of it with something unique and new.

In screen work you start from a pitch and then right away you get notes. From everyone. At every stage. And ignoring them is never an option. You can still do good work if you're hooked up with people who understand the material and don't mistake micro-management for collaboration. But here's the thing about writing for the screen. All kinds of people can make changes to your work, but you don't get to change what anyone else does.

The money can be good and the work can be exciting, but it can also beat you down. You can only stand that for so long. You need to have somewhere you can go to reconnect with your own vision.

More on Adaptation

I've changed my attitude over the years. I used to assume that the step from book to movie meant bigger, better, somehow more important. I don't think that any more. I think there can be good books, good movies, and good movies-from-books. But good movie from good book is by no means a given. Most adaptations tend to plunder their sources for ideas, rather than set about finding their essence.

You don't have to be slavish or faithful to capture essence. Every kid in a schoolyard does it when they hold their friends spellbound with a blow-by-blow retelling of some forbidden movie that they've managed to see. The trick is to bring it to life with the resources that you have.

I once had to field a query from someone who wanted to know the best way to scan the text of a novel into his screenwriting software, in order to save himself all that typing. I couldn't even find a place to begin explaining.

Interview

I've been away on Crusoe business - two good days with the incoming writers followed by three equally productive days scouting locations for the UK scenes - and I find on my return that the WGGB site now carries the interview that Tom Green conducted with me back in January.

(No word of Crusoe in there, by the way - the Eleventh Hour 13-episode order was public knowledge by then, so that gets a mention. But at that stage I hadn't even had the Crusoe call.)

It was for the Spring issue of UK Writer, the Guild's own magazine. But if so inclined, the whole world can now read it here.

Someone must have ticked me off the day we did the questions. I don't know how else to explain a response like,

"There’s a lot we can learn from the American approach to running a series. They don’t just buy stories; they hire writers, and instead of being pieceworkers defending their one story to the hilt, those writers come together and make the show. They’re all part of an efficient production structure and they're credited accordingly. I can initiate a £4m drama and I don't even get a pass to let me into the building – I have to be led to the meetings like a chimpanzee in a nappy."

Even more disturbing is the hint of a developing chimpanzee theme in my thinking. It's beginning to surface in the most unlikely places...