Dramatic setting

A producer once told me that the most important thing in drama is the setting. I lied my agreement, as I wanted to work with her, but I knew the truth: drama is character. I happen to believe that dialogue is character, but we're talking people, not places.

Only…

Well, I'm still not persuaded. And while she was talking about television drama in general, the conversation was dipping mostly into soaps. It's funny that I can remember this part of the conversation so well yet I can't fathom how we got onto it, but the topic included how a soap needs to provide a setting that very many characters can thrive in. And specifically a setting that can outlast its characters. I can see that. I can see that more than this maxim that setting is always more important than character or anything else.

Yet I'm pondering it. This is like sales: if you can get the customer to consider the product, you're halfway there. If you can just get them to say yes or engage in the conversation, you've got them. It's why all those tedious cold calls begin with "Hello, how are you today?" (I'm okay with that. I tend to say that I'm good, thank you, and then ask them how they are. Nine times out of ten, that throws them completely. One in the ten will reply and I'll carry on listening. The rest will lurch on to the next line of the script, and I won't. Actually, just to carry this aside way off, I've had a right spate of cold callers coming to my door lately. These ones always begin with "Don't worry, I'm not selling anything." To which the only reply is: "Goodbye, then.")

Where were we?

I'm pondering. Thanks.

The reason I should really ponder is because it happens to be true that each time I've found a particular setting for a Doctor Who story, the idea, the pitch, the treatment and then even eventually the script have flown far and fast and I think quite high.

But I'm actually pondering because of Deep Space Nine.

I'm going away on holiday shortly and intend to stock up my iPad with some reading so I checked out the Kindle and iBooks stores. (If you don't know, you can read Kindle books on iPad. And the Kindle Store has more books than Apple's own iBooks Store. But the iBooks application on iPad is sufficiently more pleasant to read that I buy more from there than I do Amazon. The differences are small and decreasing over time, but they're still there. The iBooks application has better typography, to my mind, and it matters.)

Deep Space Nine.

This was a Star Trek television series many years ago and now it is a long, unending series of Star Trek novels. I like Star Trek novels: I think they work better than the TV shows and over the years I have particularly enjoyed many linked DS9 novels. Not enough that I read all of them, but plenty enough that I look out for ones I fancy.

And it turns out that there is a new Star Trek book whose description begins:

WELCOME TO THE NEW DEEP SPACE 9

After the destruction of the original space station by a rogue faction of the Typhon Pact –

– what? Destruction of what?

The fictional station Deep Space Nine has been destroyed and my first thought was that they can't do that, I lived there.

And then just to make certain I pondered setting, this week saw the opening of the new Library of Birmingham. I was already excited by this: I gabbled at you about it not long ago. But now going there, it was… overwhelming. Everybody had cameras and was photographing this rather extraordinarily marvellous new building yet I couldn't. Needed to see it without a lens in front of me. Needed to absorb it, somehow.

You know and I know that sometime quite soon, we're going to be used to the new library. I do want to know my way around it, I do want to work there, but I love how just at the moment, just at this moment, it is a barrage, a torrent of options and possibilities.

And it is so exciting to see people being so excited about a library.

I bubbled at one of the staff who bubbled right back: she's been working on the library project for five years. Can you imagine how she must feel now it's done?

Well, okay, yes, you're a cynic. She feels unemployed. But apart from that.

She showed me the room I'm going to be doing a workshop in. (And that reminds me, I am delighted to say that tickets are selling briskly but now I've seen the room I also have to tell you to get a move on as it's going to be a quite contained small event. A workshop on The Blank Screen or rather how to fill it, how to get on with writing. Have a look at the official brochure listing for the Birmingham Literature Festival. But, unofficially, a colleague just described it as being "about getting off your arse and writing". I like that. That's a poster quote, that is. I'm not 100% sure he'd like having that used or I'd tell you his name, but he's a smart guy. We'll leave it at that.)

I went back a day later to explore more, to finally take some photographs – and to join Angela at the newly reopened Birmingham Rep to see a play. The Rep's been closed for years while all of this has been going on so it is fantastic to be able to go back inside.

Into that gorgeous setting.

Booking my space in the new Library of Birmingham

For many years I used to have this gig I particularly relished. I wrote a thing called On This Day in Radio Times magazine: in with the listings for each morning in the week, I'd have a little spot to write about broadcasting history. It was filler - literally. The pages had to have a spot where regional differences in TV schedules would be listed and only some Radio Times regions had those. Everyone else got On This Day.

It was bliss.

I can't remember what I was paid now but, always the professional, I worked out how long it meant I should spend on the job each week – and then completely ignored that. Always and forever, I'd spend vastly too much time on it and sometimes I would just go off on one having a blast researching old issues of Radio Times for the fun of it.

But I used to do this in Birmingham Central Library. It was for a few years, too, so while I knew the library before then, I really do now. I can close my eyes and take a little trip through every nook and cranny.

One day around March 2007, though, I was deep into the job and was reading features published in Radio Times on this day decades before. Actually, precisely 49 years before. I was writing copy that would be published in April 2007 and I devoted the entry to a show called My Word! which was airing in April 1958. It was a quiz show, very popular in its day but not especially remembered now. Yet it gave me a shiver and I quoted the start of the feature in On This Day:

"Drop in at Birmingham Reference Library almost any Friday and you will see a thick-set, bearded man poring over dictionaries and volumes of poetry."

Flash forward fifty years, substitute Radio Times for the poetry, shed the beard and a few pounds please, and some traditions continue: Birmingham Central Library’s cherished collection of RT is pored over by me for On This Day.

In 1958, though, the man was Edward J Mason, who devised the radio show My Word!, “a cross between a quiz and a riot” which began a new series tonight on the BBC Home service.

I wrote that in RT and I blogged about it here at the time because it gave me a good shiver. A nice one.The kind of shiver when you realise what you've just done. Because as I sat there on the fourth floor of Birmingham Central Library, I registered those words and I actually looked up. I looked up from my desk over to where Edward J Mason said he was sitting.

Not only wasn't he there but nor was the seat. Or the desk. Or, in fact, the library. Because the whole library had moved in the 1970s and that's why I'm telling you about this again today. Because the whole library is moving once more.

As of next week, the new Library of Birmingham opens and as much as I will miss the old one, there is a real thrill in the city. I have a meeting on Monday night and a colleague just sent his apologies: he's going to the opening event. I am green.

When I had this shiver back in 2007, it was to do with my being part of a long tradition. The idea that, sure, my work that matters so much to me won't matter a pixel to anyone when I'm gone but maybe there'll be someone else researching in the Library of Birmingham and coming across something I'd written. It'd be a message just between the two of us and I'd like to think that if it can't be useful or interesting, at least it'll say hello.

But the shiver I get today in 2013 is anticipation.

For not only is the new Library of Birmingham finally opening, but the Birmingham Rep is being recalled to life after years tucked away in various venues. The two are bonded together now and I expect to spend a considerable amount of time in these twin, bonded buildings in the very near future.

The really near future. Really near.

Because I'm booked to present at an event there.

On October 10, 2013, I will be presenting The Blank Screen: a workshop on productivity for creative writers. It's 18:00-20:30 in Room 103, Library of Birmingham and is part of the Birmingham Literary Festival. (Have a look here for details. It's presented in association with the Writers' Guild, it's £28 or £23 concessions. Bring pen and paper, okay? Not for notes. I've written a book just to save you needing to take notes. But you're going to work.)

We have a new library. And as much as I deeply loved the old one, that was where I used to do research for other people and by chance of when it's come, the new library is when I've moved on to doing more work for myself. My own research, my own books, my own yapping with you. I'm ready for the new place.

Yet I will miss the old one and I hope that I'll continue to imagine the long history of Birmingham writers all somehow breathing anew in the space.

But Room 103, eh? I don't know the room yet. Haven't a clue about it. I don't know the building yet. But I will.

Damn right I will.

Fantastic.