We used to do all this with pencils

I had the greatest time meeting up with an old friend the other day – hadn’t seen him in perhaps twenty years – and while we chatted, he gave me a pencil. It’s a gorgeous thing, a company pencil, all sleek and modern and I didn’t know how to switch it on.

Then yesterday I saw a photo of a page from Charles Dickens’s draft of Our Mutual Friend. The man wrote in ink, can you believe that? (Interestingly, he specifically wrote in blue ink because, at the time, that dried faster than black or any other colour available. So he could write and not smudge. There were writers’ lifehack tricks even then.)

So I accept that I may have a problem here. I might be a little software-dependent. I really don’t see myself as a computer kind of person, I’m a writer, but I did once count and discover that I used about twenty applications on the average day. And I use them hard. My entire writing life – and that really means my entire life these days – goes through my office 27in iMac, my iPad Air and my iPhone. And I don’t see any of those machines because they just work, they just stay out of my way and I am instead deep into the job.

Which means deep into software. Inspired by Laura Cousins’s recent list of music apps she relies on and by the latest of Federico Viticci’s annual My Must-Have Mac Apps, I want to tell you what software gets me through the day so well that it all makes me want to tell you about it.

You’ll need a biscuit here.

Writing software

This used to be so easy: I wrote everything in Microsoft Word. It’s easy and even fashionable now to criticise Word, so let’s. I used to find that it was fantastic at recovering documents that it lost. If they’d put just a pixel’s worth of the effort into not losing the documents in the first place, I’d have been happier.

Microsoft has spent more than a billion dollars developing Word over the years but right at its core, its very DNA, there are decisions that were made by people who don’t write. Each paragraph in Word is really its own entity with details in it for where it goes in your document. It’s a remarkably intricate idea but it has exactly no benefits for writers and intricacy is always delicate. Word gets confused very easily and it confuses us even more easily when you’re trying to figure out just why the formatting in this section went so very strange because you sneezed.

Word is powerful. So powerful that there is an online book called Bend Word to Your Will and I used to enjoy using its advice to get things done. Until one day I just thought bugger this, I’d rather be writing my own books. And I’m amused to see when I went to find that link for you that the fella who wrote it appears to have given up. Haven’t we all? Microsoft changed the format of Word documents from .doc to .docx in 2007 and still I find I have to send files to editors in the old version. A significant number of professional publishers, editors and writers whose entire careers depend on this software, have not upgraded it in seven years.

The OS X Mavericks operating system for Macs came out earlier this year – and for comparison ten percent of all Macs in the world upgraded to it within ten days – and when I tried to put it on my MacBook, it found a problem. My hard drive was knackered and the easiest, quickest thing to do was backup everything, get Mavericks to reformat the drive and install itself, then pop back on everything I needed.

A month later, someone emailed me a Word document to work on and I realised that I hadn’t popped Word back on to my MacBook. A month. And I still haven’t: I just edited that document in Pages and sent it back to them in Word format.

So after five paragraphs about Word, that’s my recommendation: use Pages instead.

The newest version of Pages is free, which I think extraordinarily under-values the software but it ain’t half handy when you’re on a budget. That’s Pages for Mac but Pages for iOS is now free too and they all work the same, the Mac, iPhone and iPad versions. Some people don’t like that: the Mac one shed a lot of features as Apple worked to make them all compatible with each other and they have a point but I don’t know what the features were. So they’re not ones that are important to me. And reportedly they’re coming back in fits and starts.

Here’s when I knew I was Pages-dependent. I was on a bus when I had an idea for a book. Because I had my iPad with me, because it had Pages on it, I wrote down some ideas. They turned into the first thousand words of The Blank Screen (UK link, US link).

Some people buy iPads that can email out wherever they are, that are really mobile phones if only for data, and I’ve never done that. I’ve always bought wifi-only ones and spent the money I save on things like getting greater capacity. I liked how I couldn’t go online unless I was at a wifi spot and it was terribly relaxing to be able to read a book on my iPad or watch a film and know that I couldn’t be doing any work. Now, though, with two taps or so I can tether my iPad to my iPhone and have it use the phone’s data connection. My peaceful reading time is no more. But it meant I could email those thousand words to Angela as I stepped off the bus.

And it means she could email back a few minutes later with praise and encouragement that warmed me, that made certain I would write the entire book, and with enough proof-reader’s critique that I believed the praise. If you’ve been on one of my workshops about productivity for creative writers, and if you enjoyed it, you owe it to Pages, iPad, tethering and Angela.

If I start a new piece of writing now, it is likely to be Pages that I use. I’ll still often have to deliver in Word so I do keep a copy of that on my office iMac, but I don’t like thinking about what application to use when, I like thinking of what I’m writing and just reach for the thing that’s nearest.

Weirdly, though, all this year I’ve been finding that this the nearest and natural thing to reach for is not a word processor. It’s Evernote.

It’s just an application for making some notes in. There must be eleventy-billion such apps. And okay, you can also pop PDFs in there. Images. You can make a clipping from a web site and drag that in to Evernote. Okay.

But I was in a meeting, right, and suddenly needed a contract that had nothing to do with that day’s work. “Oh, yeah, that one,” I said and then called it up on my iPad exactly as if I’d been a soothsayer and known to bring it with me.

That worked and made me look very good because whatever you put in Evernote, you can get out of Evernote – wherever you are. I enter a gigantic number of notes in Evernote for iPhone and Evernote for iPad but I also use the Mac one a lot and I’ve used the PC version on occasion. I’ve been waiting in someone’s office and I’ve used their computer to open the Evernote website. And in each case, wherever I am, whatever I’m using, every single note I’ve ever made is right there.

So many ideas start as a quick paragraph and I’ll jot them down into Evernote because it’s there, wherever I am, and because it somehow feels unwieldy to start a whole word processor document for a paragraph. And once I’ve written a paragraph, I tend to write a couple more. Sometimes I find I’ve done the whole thing in Evernote.

Can’t tell you why, can’t tell you when I do that and when I go to Pages, but I can tell you that my Evernote has about three thousand notes in it and the place is a mess. Yet I can find anything instantly. I cook from Nigella’s recipe books sometimes and for speed and handiness I’ve taken a photo of some pages and Evernote finds them. Finds the text in the photo. Type ‘ragu’ and there’s my slightly off-centre blurry photo snap of her page for Rapid Ragu. The photo. It feels crazy.

I’d like to let me then copy out the text, but.

I do most of the cooking for us, by volume, but the quick summary is that if it’s a meal you’d enjoy, Angela made it. I do the steady, yellow and brown, boring stuff that gets you through the day. But I am improving and I’m finding I have more time to improve so I am using Nigella books but I’m now also becoming slowly, steadily, addicted to Paprika for iPad. It’s a recipe manager with the most gorgeous ability to browse to a food website and nab a recipe. Not just take the text or an image or a PDF, but parse the information so that it slots the ingredients into one list, the detailed instructions into another, and here’s the photo too. You can then get it to send the shopping list of ingredients to Apple’s Reminders.

Utilities

I never use Apple’s Reminders.

Except I use it all the time.

Because it lurks there in the background and the To Do software that I do use, that I am obsessed with, nabs anything any app sends to Reminders. I use Siri on my iPhone a lot. Seriously, a lot. Whenever I’m driving, I’ll think of a dozen things I need to do and I will tell Siri to remind me. OmniFocus picks up the lot.

OmniFocus is a To Do app but that’s a bit like saying War and Peace is a stack of paper with some ink on it. I’ve raved about it before and odds to onions I will again. But for now, let me caution you that it solely works on Apple gear so if you’re on a PC, you’re out of luck. Seriously out of luck this time, I think. I just told you that I now have time to cook: it’s because of OmniFocus. I’ve fallen off the wagon with it a few times, but I get back on and I know what I’m doing, I know where everything is and what I can do to move things along. I know when I’m done for the day. That’s an alien feeling. I guiltily like it.

OmniFocus is also more expensive than most To Do apps. The best version of OmniFocus is the iPad one which costs £27.99 ($39.99 US) and once you have that, you will cave and buy the iPhone and the Mac ones. I think I spent about £80 in total but the price today is nearer £100. And I have said many times that I would pay that again and happily and immediately because the three OmniFocuses are so good and so valuable to me. And now I’m going to put my money where my claim is.

Because all three versions are getting updates that will not be your typical free ones.

The iPhone version has already been updated and I did already buy it immediately. In fact, it needs iOS 7 so I installed iOS 7 and then immediately bought OmniFocus 2 for iPhone. As handy and good as the first version was, this one is better and I use it more. I didn’t think that was possible, but I do.

I don’t know when the iPad one will be updated and that makes me hesitate over recommending it to you. But even if The Omni Group updates it an hour after you bought the current version, you’d still have got a superb app, so.

The Mac one is another question. Man, but it’s confusing. It also looks very old. I’ve worked at it and now very much enjoy the power it brings, but it’s a slog. And I realise, saying this to you now, that I’ve forgotten how it works. A beta version of OmniFocus 2 for Mac was released earlier in 2013 and I got on the programme to use the program. It wasn’t finished and it had all the issues that any beta does, but still I liked it enough that I happily carried on using it after the beta trial ended. Unfortunately, the beta ended in part because Apple announced new features for iOS and for OS X and the Omni Group hit pause on the Mac one in order to get the iPhone version done.

Can’t and don’t fault them for that. But it means that when OS X Mavericks came, the beta for OmniFocus 2 for Mac didn’t play nice and isn’t going to be updated – it’s only a beta, after all – so I had to go back to OmniFocus 1. It’s actually a chore to use that now. And I find I don’t. Hardly ever, anyway. So I’m missing out on some features but I live in the iPad and iPhone versions happily.

So let me recommend the iPad one, even though it’s going to be updated soon to soonish, and not recommend the Mac one because it’s going to be updated at some point.

We could actually stop here

Give me Pages, Evernote and OmniFocus and I’m good to go. Throw in Paprika too. Also Dropbox. Couldn’t work without Dropbox. And iTunes, iBooks, iBooks Author, Numbers, Keynote, Excel, Aperture, Adobe InDesign, Calendar, Mail, iMessages, Skype, FaceTime, Reeder, OmniOutliner, 1Password, TextExpander and Pocket. Then I’m good to go.

Let me pick out one of those that’s new to me and that I’m surprised I like so much. OmniOutliner. It is from the same firm that makes OmniFocus and I did look at it solely because of that: I like and rely on OmniFocus so much that I did check out what else the company does. They do a lot. This was about the only one I could afford or at least justify spending the cash on.

And I did that despite a so-far lifelong aversion to outlines. I will write a treatment for a Doctor Who story before doing the script but that’s because if I don’t, I don’t get the commission to write the script. Fair enough.

I’m still the kind of writer who likes exploring on the page and I am fine with the fact that this means I routinely throw away pages of script or thousands upon thousands of words of prose.

But I had a particularly complex book to do and I outlined it in OmniOutliner. Currently I’m pitching ideas to a particular project and it needs a lot of ideas, each needs a lot of detail, and I’m trying to do it quickly in order to fit it in around other work. I’m finding that I can jot down scenes in OmniOutliner and before I really know it, I have the shape of the whole story and can see what’s missing, can see what’s thin. Writing treatments is never easy for me and it’s rarely fun, but there have been a few ideas lately that went so easily from OmniOutliner to full-blown Pages prose treatment that I’ve enjoyed it.

I need to do another of those ideas now. And by god you need more biscuits and tea. Can you slip some whisky in there? Just for medicinal purposes. You’re allowed. You earned it.

I used to do a podcast that had two episodes I especially, especially loved. One was where I’d say my top ten DVDs of the year (sometimes I’d do it in hexadecimal in order to have a top sixteen; what was I saying about not being a computer guy?) and the second was an utterly gorgeous sequel where you did the same. Your top ten DVDs of the year. So much fun.

I’d ask you now for the software that you rely on but, come on, who has time to write and read, say, 2,754 words about software?

It's your fault

Here be spoilers. Well, there be spoilers: down there, a lot of spoilers a bit of the way down the screen. If you haven't seen the 50th anniversary special of Doctor Who, please do. Go watch it. It's very good.
All I ever want from a story is to be caught up in it to the exclusion of anything else. That's all. Analysis and whathaveyou, that can come later if it must. Just scoop me up, please. And Doctor Who: The Day of the Doctor did exactly that. Job done.
Only, I'm surprised that it did because at its core is something that goes against a thing. I was going to say it goes against a drama principle of mine, but nuts to drama principles: if it works, that's your principle right there. But we tend to have issues that colour our writing, things that we come back to because we're trying to find them in ourselves, beacuse we're trying to mine them for others or maybe just because we're good at them.
And I have one thing that is guaranteed to appeal to me, utterly certain to get me obsessed, and which you break at your peril. Yet Doctor Who broke it and worked. I don't know how. Let me tell you that right up front, if you can call this the front when I've already rambled on at you a ways. I want to explore this and see if I can figure it out because it matters to me.
Here's what it is. If you wanted to get all academic about it, drama is about obstacles. I seriously do not know why you would want to get academic if that means boiling down the richness of drama into a checklist with only one thing to check, but it's not unreasonable to say drama equals obstacles. Fine. Someone is faced with something, that is or at least that can be drama.
But for me, it's really only drama when the thing they face is their own fault. Having something done to you, that's awful. It's powerful. Having something done to you and it is entirely your own fault, though, that's wonderful. It's not that I'm especially in to my characters being punished for something and it's only a little bit that I am in to the genuine meaning of tragedy: a tale that ends badly because of something within the lead character. It's specifically the point that if this terrible thing is your own fault, you could have prevented it – and now there is absolutely not one single thing you can do to put it right. You can't undo the past. This is the real reason I am forever coming back to the issue of time in my writing: the regret, the permanent regret for things lost and things done badly. You can't rewrite history, not one line.
Except in Doctor Who. This is where the spoilers start.
The day in The Day of the Doctor is the one where the fella ended the Time War. This was a huge and so far never seen portion of Doctor Who history: immediately before we saw Christopher Eccleston's Doctor, there was this war, right. War between the Daleks and the Time Lords. And it was ended by the Doctor. We slowly came to learn that though he ended it – so far, so Doctor-heroic-like – there was something of a cost. The war was ended only by the complete and total destruction of both sides. Time Lords and Daleks, all killed. All killed by the Doctor.
Cor.
The Day of the Doctor undoes this and if you'd told me that before I saw it, I'd have thought again about going to the cinema. I read an interview with Steven Moffat on DigitalSpy this week that ran in part:

It was about a year ago. I remember thinking, 'What occasion in the Doctor's life is the most important?' Well, it's the day he blew up Gallifrey. Then I tried to imagine what writing that scene would be like and I thought, 'There's kids on Gallifrey and he's going to push the button? He wouldn't!' I don't care what's at stake, he's not going to do it. So that was the story – of course he never did that, he couldn't. He's the Doctor – he's the man who doesn't do that. He's defined by the fact that he doesn't do that. Whatever the cost, he will find another way. So it had to be the story of what really happened, that he's forgotten.

I see his point and he wrote it superbly in the show, but I'm mithered. I detest beyond measure the way that a soap, for instance, will get a character into a dramatic situation and then pull back at the last moment to say it's all right, really. It wasn't him. It isn't her. They're dreaming, whatever. Go away. I'm never watching again. So having this thing in Doctor Who that we know was big and then showing us it being even bigger but then taking it away, it shouldn't have worked for me.
I think it's that bit about 'I don't care what's at stake'. For me, the drama was in how there were these stakes that required him to do this. Now, actually, I have to play this both sides because a huge amount of the drama – can you quantify drama like this? a good 43% was angst, 12% personal torture and so on – was to do with how he had no choice. But if the Doctor has no choice, that is big and huge and enormous but it isn't the same as him having a choice and making the decision anyway. If the Doctor presses the big red button, everyone dies on Gallifrey. If he doesn't press it, everyone dies on Gallifrey anyway because the Daleks are attacking very thoroughly.
There is the fact that they're attacking because presumably they're seriously hacked off at the Doctor so nearly efficiently destroying all their plans, ever, so the whole attack is his fault. I'll have that.
So with this storm of issues going on, it does all come down to the small moment, the huge yet tiny moment where he has to do this or not do it. The fact that he does speaks to me about the stakes of the story but it also completely engages me in this Doctor character. The fact that he doesn't do it, that takes most things away. It reduces the stakes, because somehow he's now got a choice, and that reduces the character for me.
Except, maybe it worked for me, worked in this one story, because Moffat could undo the destruction of Gallifrey, he could rewrite one very big line of history, yet do it in such a way that the Doctor was left with the same burden we thought he had.
Doctor Who often reunites various different Doctors and there is always the issue of why a later one doesn't remember all this from when he was the earlier guy. The Day of the Doctor makes many little nods to this and does explicitly state that the Doctors' time streams are out of sync and that neither David Tennant's Tenth Doctor nor John Hurt's Nth Doctor can possibly retain the memory of what has happened. It's plot convenience and it's what has always happened before, but this time the lack of memory means that John Hurt's Doctor and David Tennant's and up to a point Matt Smith's one all believe they destroyed Gallifrey. They carry that burden for four hundred years.
Four hundred years. That's enough carrying of blame and regret and fault even for me.
Good people doing bad things. That's what chimes with me. Making irrevocable choices. That's me. But I thought it was a rule, an inviolate rule of drama that you do not ever undo a character's bad choices, you do not give them a reprieve, you do not give them an escape. The drama is in living with the things you cannot live with. And The Day of the Doctor says bollocks, William.
Quite right too.

 

Writing the perfect thriller

I once went to a workshop about writing thrillers. I went partly because I like thrillers very much and also, frankly, everything I ever write turns into one eventually –

– wait, what was that noise?

– is someone following us?

See what I mean?

But I did also go because I rate the producer who ran it and I wanted to work with her. That happened: we worked on a project that fizzled away. But I enjoyed it, I hope I work with her again, and today I want to tell you what I should've said to her three years ago. She wanted to know how I could say I like thrillers but I visibly can't cope with blood and gore. She wanted to know how anyone could claim to love thrillers yet be unable to watch The Silence of the Lambs, for instance.

Um, I said.

But today, I have the answer.

I've just watched something that had no gore, no blood and was a primetime US network TV show so there was never going to be a lot of anything. And the scene that made me want to talk to you about this and to track that producer down to go see? there? look! had nothing happening in it. I mean, nothing. Tim Daly starred as this character who was, for this quite long scene, waiting in a room. On his own.

And what made it a thriller was watching how he became ever increasingly sick with fear.

No dialogue, no other characters, no inciting incidents or whatever you could call it. Just a man in a room trying to stay calm. It was riveting.

And it was The Fugitive.

You know the title, you certainly know the Harrison Ford film version from 1993 – oh, my lights, I just looked up the year: I can't believe that this is now the 20th anniversary of that movie. I watched it recently and it's still very good. For writers, it's particularly interesting because it has no rise and fall, light and shade, ups and downs, it is a ramp from start to finish with unrelieved, unreleased tension.

Hopefully you also know that it was originally a TV series in 1963 starring David Janssen and Barry Morse.

The Fugitive was created by Roy Huggins, who also made Maverick and The Rockford Files, and the story goes that one day when he was working at home, he called for his wife to come quick. Take a photograph of me, he said. I want a record of the moment I thought of a perfect TV show.

Roy Huggins:

I thought it was the greatest idea I'd ever come up with and was a cinch sale. And a cinch success.

(Incidentally, I got that quote from the late Huggins' appearance on the astonishing Archive of American Television interviews on YouTube. Hours upon hours of detailed interview with utter legends of US television drama.)

But to give every writer in the world some solace, Huggins says he discussed the idea with friends and colleagues:

Every one of them hated it. Howard Brown said Roy, you've got a great reputation in television, don't tell that to anybody or it'll be gone. My agent's [eyes] glazed over and he changed the subject. Nobody liked it.

The series ran for four years and for a time its finale held the record as the most-watched show ever screened on American television. Then there was the film. And then the one you are less likely to know about, the one I've just been watching: a TV remake made in the year 2000.




I don't think that's a great trailer. And the show itself had a dreadful title sequence. You can only get the first two episodes on DVD, or anywhere, and that shiny disc cost me a whole £1.34 two weeks ago. (Have a look at it on Amazon, though while you're there, you know, if you're in the vicinity, you could also look at my new book. I thank you.)

The 2000 series is by the same production team that made the 1993 movie, more or less, and I bought it in part because I'd just enjoyed watching that film again, because I liked Tim Daly in a detective show called Eyes, and because I wanted to see how they could tell the same story for the third time. Dr Richard Kimble is convicted of the murder of his wife and no one believes his claim that it was a one-armed man who did it. On his way to prison, there is an accident, Kimble escapes and goes on the run.

I think the one-armed man is weak. In all of the versions. If he weren't one-armed, there wouldn't be even the breadcrumbs there are that let Kimble at least begin to track him down.

And that's part of what does make this a perfect TV idea. The story is not that Kimble is innocent, it's that he is hunting the one-armed man. It's that as he does so, Kimble himself is being hunted by the police and specifically the dogged Detective Gerard. Roy Huggins points out on the DVD for this version that this means the show has two chases going on, permanently, and he's right that it's unusual and unusually effective.

Then there was the fact that Kimble is a doctor. Roy Huggins:

I made him a doctor because I wanted him to a have a profession that I could use for good storytelling. Here was a guy who every time he had to behave like a doctor was putting himself in jeopardy. 

Being a doctor means that he has skills but also you can believe the compulsion to help people. So now your lead character has an ability and a need to get involved in new stories every week. He's a bit of a do-gooder type but he's a more believable do-gooder than your usual character in this type of TV show. Plus unlike every other hero who rolls into town in those shows, Kimble can never just call the police.

Two constant chases, one constant requirement to get embroiled in new stories. Huggins was right, it is a brilliant idea and that original version was the most enormous hit. It doesn't half seem ponderously slow now, though. Take a look. This is the opening to most of the early episodes.



Just for completeness, I don't think the trailer for the 1993 film is all that much better:




I can almost see why Huggins's pals didn't like the idea. Three versions, three trailers of a sort, all a bit dull. Then there's the fact that you know in every version that Kimble will prevail in the end and, more immediately, that he can't be caught this week or the show is over. That's no different to any other series and if we are caught up in the tension, it is at least partly our willingness to be.

For all that its format is exceptionally tense, The Fugitive only works if the stories keep us engaged. The film could tell us solely the Richard Kimble tale and that was plenty for two hours. The TV shows absolutely have to keep going and going but they also therefore have to engage us with other stories. They have to do that every week. The original series did it marvellously and the point of it, the power of it, was not that Kimble was always within seconds of being caught but rather that he could be. That anything he did could be the thing that would trip him up. That any person he spoke to could be the one who turns him in.

I'd have liked any of the versions to use the murdered wife as more than a starting point for a tale about her husband. But otherwise The Fugitive is the perfect thriller for me because it creates a world where Dr Kimble is both constantly and naturally in peril.

You can see the movie easily: it's available everywhere and it crops up on the telly regularly. You can get the original series pretty easily as it's all on DVD.

What you'll struggle with is the 2000 remake. It only lasted a single season and – spoiler – it's the sole version of The Fugitive that does not get resolved at the end. There are those two episodes on very cheap shiny disc but then the whole series has been put up on YouTube. You have to question the legality as each episode is up in three 15-minute chunks of pretty low-quality ripped-from-VHS, but at least you can see it.

I didn't give you that link, right? But I did and I do urge you to try at least one version of The Fugitive. I really do think it's the perfect thriller and no more than Veronica Mars, I wish I'd written it.

William

Writer: The Blank Screen, The Beiderbecke Affair, Doctor Who

Never show invisible characters

Exactly as I start writing to you, it pops into my head that 'invisible characters' is a term you get in Microsoft Word. There it means things like the return between paragraphs. Here I mean characters in drama and comedy that you never see but who are forever talked about. I'd like to now make some deeply philosophical connection between these meanings, maybe say that these drama invisible characters are never seen yet without them the rest would be a mess.

Instead, I'm going to say that I need to warn you: there will be spoilers a little ways down the road.

Because it used to be a rule that if you had invisible characters, you never turn that around and show them. As great as Waiting for Godot is, the one thing it doesn't have for me is any tension that Godot will ever appear. After a beat, he was set up as so important that I knew this fella, he ain't coming.

That's usually the thing, that these invisibles are so important that no visible can live up to it. I remember the creators of Frasier saying that they hadn't intended to make Niles's wife Maris be invisible, they were just going to get to her in a few episodes. The first episode of Frasier – The Good Son by David Angell, Peter Casey and David Lee – is perhaps the finest piece of pilot writing on television. Seriously. Watch the episode or, here, read the draft script online, and you'll just enjoy it. But without you being forced to be aware of it, this short script irrevocably changes Frasier Crane from a minor Cheers character to the lead of his own show, introduces four major series-long characters, a dog and two sits: the sitcom setting of a home in Frasier's apartment and the other sitcom setting of a workplace.

Plus, famously, it's the only sitcom pilot that includes a truly dramatic and raw argument between two main characters: usually we're supposed to like everyone so pilots don't risk any rows, but we get one here and it feels true.

If anything, the aired version is better still because it is trimmed back to get the show into its mandated 22-minute running time. Looking at the script now, the opening feels a bit flabby compared to the transmitted version because it is so spare that every syllable does at least two jobs. And what gets it this best-pilot-writing status in my mind is that you simply do not realise that any of it is doing any job at all. It's just a funny show.

But I suspect Maris isn't in it because that would just be one element too far. I don't know, but it's so superbly packed that one more piece would burst the lot.

So we get this:

NILES: I thought you liked Maris.

FRASIER: I do. I like her from a distance. You know, the way you like the sun. Maris is like the sun... except without the warmth.

She gets mentioned a lot in the opening episodes and that seemed to seal her fate: it was surely impossible to cast anyone to fill a part when we had begun to have an extremely detailed and, as it transpires, an increasingly strange mental image of her.

The one thing that makes me question that this happened with Maris is that there was another invisible wife on Frasier's predecessor series, Cheers. Norm Peterson -

Norm!

- was married to Vera and we never quite saw her.

But it happens a lot. There are more invisible characters than I realised. And it's a bit uncomfortable that so many of them are wives: Maris, Vera, Mrs Columbo. But then there is Stan Walker on Will & Grace.

I just looked into this. There's also Enid Kelso on Scrubs. I don't know if she's a wife or not.

Juanita Beasley in The Andy Griffith Show. I've never seen her or The Andy Griffith Show.  Oh! Diane in Twin Peaks: Dale Cooper was forever recording messages to her for dictation about his business travels. Bob Sacamano in Seinfeld. Apparently The Gooch bullied little Arnold in Diff'rent Strokes. A lot.

There was also Ugly Naked Guy in the apartment across the street in Friends and there we did at least see his back, he was played by someone.

Charlie Brown features Miss Othmar but I can't decide if she counts because we hear her speak, or at least we hear her make sounds. If you count her, do you also count Charlie as in Charlie's Angels?

You can see more of these than you expect, and others too, on a Huffington Post video I just found.

That video is how I remember that we did see Vera, albeit with a pie on her face. And it's reminded me that Mrs Columbo was always just out of shot, just in the next room, just coming in a moment in the Columbo episode Troubled Waters.

But Mrs Columbo is sort of proof that you must never show these invisible characters because she sort of got her own series. In 1979, there was a TV show called Mrs Columbo and the idea was that this time Lt Columbo would be the invisible character. It was a cute idea aka a cute business solution to the fact that they couldn't afford to hire Peter Falk.

I think of all this as being only sort-of showing us his wife because the whole show was a series of business decisions. Of course people would tune in to see what his wife looked like: it was a guaranteed hit idea. But it's also guaranteed that viewers like young, beautiful types so fine, Lt Columbo had married someone much younger than himself.  All we really knew about her was that she has a fantastically large family that is forever coming around but that means a big cast. Can't have that. Forget that.

So Mrs Columbo is the wrong age and the show ditches the family. She really is just Mrs Columbo in name only. And she's Kate Mulgrew, later to be better known for being the only good one in Star Trek Voyager. Have a look at her in the role in this fan-made compilation of Mrs Columbo clips.

Guaranteed successes are not guaranteed. Within seconds, the show called Mrs Columbo was being rejigged and renamed to Kate Columbo to see if more viewers liked that any better. No. Within seconds after that, it was renamed to drop the Columbo part entirely and becomes Kate the Detective before finally becoming Kate Loves a Mystery. Even within the show, she stopped being Kate Columbo and became Kate Callahan. Mrs Columbo got divorced? No idea. All that was skated over.

So I think of this as only sort-of showing us Mrs Columbo.

No other invisible character has got her or his own spin-off. No other invisible character has ever been seen except in that kind of pie-over-the-face or camera-over-the-shoulder shot. And the reason is that they cannot, they must not be shown. The Frasier producers were right about how they could never cast anyone to play Maris after they'd built her up so much and not only because what they built up was this barely human figure.

We yearn to see these invisibles but we don't want to see them. The delight of that Troubled Waters is the tantalising thought that Mrs Columbo, the real Mrs Columbo, will walk in any moment but never does.

She cannot, she mustn't, it cannot and it must not ever happen that we see an invisible character.

Except.

Here be spoilers.

If you haven't seen the end of the eighth season of How I Met Your Mother, you're more than smart enough to know where I'm going and so I've already spoilt it for you. Sorry. But the ruining gets much worse so perhaps now is time for the kettle.

A little ways down the road
How I Met Your Mother hasn't been very good for a long time. The first four years are remarkable: very funny, very clever, terribly satisfyingly entertaining. After that, there's the odd good episode but you keep watching because of the characters and their story. You've long given up hope that we'll ever see the Mother of the title, she's plainly a Godot invisible, but what else happens in the lives of this group of New Yorkers is always enough to keep you wanting to know more.

If you don't know the show, it is ostensibly about Ted in the future telling his children the story of how he and their mother met. We get Old Ted narrating, we see younger Ted living this story. The delight for me has not been anything to do with the Mother, it has been in how Old Ted is an unreliable narrator and lies to us all the time. It's delicious.

But over the years, there have been the odd glimpse of the Mother. We once saw her ankle as she walked into a bathroom, just before Ted passed by.

And often enough that it has become a leitmotif, we get to see a yellow umbrella. Because Old Ted is narrating, we know that it belongs to the Mother and it's terribly, warmly satisfying as we see it crop up here and end up there. Ted actually has it for a time, not knowing whose it is, and I have no idea why that works so well.

A friend just mentioned the other week that he'd started watching How I Met Your Mother season 1 and much as he was enjoying it, he had a hunch we wouldn't be seeing the mother for quite some time.

I couldn't tell him. Couldn't. The answer is eight years.

It's the last episode of season eight and, again, it's not been a brilliant year. It's got so that the laugh track distracts me: previously I'd be laughing so much that I wouldn't notice the track. Now I'm disappointed in them for turning up the laughs instead of turning up with better jokes. But, you know, again, there are flashes of brilliance and always all these characters we've come to know so well.

In the last moments of this last episode of the season, each character is beginning a journey. They're going to a wedding weekend and some are driving from New York, some from elsewhere, everybody travelling. Fine. It has that end of season feel and also start of something new one. We know that the next season is going to be significant, we know it'll be the last one ever, and we know that all these characters are heading somewhere significant. We even know where they're heading.

And that's it.

Except.

Here we go, here's another shot of the Mother's ankles.

And the yellow umbrella.

It's funny and it's right, it's what we've seen before and it's enjoyable to see it again.

Except.

There's the Mother's back. For the first time, we see an actual person instead of an umbrella or a body part. That was a jolt. That was an unexpected head-jerk-back surprise. You still know they'll never show her, but wow, this is closer than any other invisible character has got and I was mentally processing this, thinking how well they'd done it -

- and then there she was.

The Mother is in How I Met Your Mother and she's played by Cristin Milioti.

I tell you, I gasped. More than that, it brought a little tear: I'm not especially a soppy sort but when something difficult is done absolutely perfectly, it moves me. The episode was written by Carter Bays and Craig Thomas, the show's creators, and directed by Pamela Fryman.

I knew they shouldn't ever have shown her, I knew the next season couldn't possibly work with her as a new regular character, but that reveal was exquisitely well done. I don't know if this can work for you if you haven't been following the show or if I'm spoiling the season's end because you haven't got there yet. And if you've seen it too, you've already seen it.

But I really want to show it to you so here it is. YouTube slaps an ad over it that's hard to remove but it does go away before the key moment.



And smash out to end titles.

That doesn't look like a four-camera sitcom to me, that looks a feature film. And the first time I ever saw How I Met Your Mother, that's what I thought it was. Flicking channels on the TV in a Lake District B&B, coming across what looked like the end of a movie. Asking newsagents the next day if they still had that week's Radio Times so I could find out what it was. (How did we live before iPhones?) It was a first-season episode called The Limo and I didn't think other episodes could be as good so it took me a long time to watch more.

But – cue the show's own phrase again – a little ways down the road, I got hooked. For four years, it was joyous. For the following four years, it had joyous moments at least.

I'm watching the final season now – it hasn't aired yet in the UK but I have a US iTunes Store account – and, unbelievably, the Mother is the best element of it.

An invisible character has become visible and she has become key. The reason I'm writing this to you today is that there have now been a couple of episodes without her and I'm actually not enjoying them as much.

Never show invisible characters. Not ever. Except when you do.

Let them die

I'm trying to remember the last time a character died in a drama and didn't come back to life. This isn't a new thing – nuts, nuts, nuts, I've got the name of the first time it happened. It's on the tip of my tongue but, Jesus Christ, I can't recall.

But anyway, I think it's happening in dramas more now. Certainly I'm loathing it more.


It's not as if I like a good bloodbath. If something is more violent than my regular benchmark movie, The Muppets Take Manhattan, then I'm not automatically drawn to it. I'm not automatically against it, I'm not recoiling in fear the way I am with even the mildest horror story, but I don't think cor, I must see that.

It's not even as if I'm against a happy ending necessarily or that there isn't a part of my head that knows Captain Kirk will always survive whatever the latest life-or-death crisis is.

But now I don't just know in my heart of hearts that Kirk will survive, I know in my fact of facts that he can't die. Cannot. Nobody can ever be killed again in Star Trek because that was all fixed in the latest film. No more dying.

Therefore no jeopardy.

The only interesting thing now for me is seeing how they cope when one of the cast doesn't want to come back for another sequel.

Writers tell other writers that they must kill their darlings: you must be willing to delete your absolute favourite bits of the book or the script if that will be better for the whole. But we don't listen any more. Or maybe it's producers who think that's a stupid idea: you've got this character who everyone loves, everyone is riveted to, why wouldn't you bring him or her back to life so we can keep on enjoying them?

Because sooner or later, we stop enjoying them and it's over. Forever. We stop enjoying them and we stop watching the show.

Example. A bit of an odd example, but here goes. One of the few times I've watched Coronation Street was when there was a big court case legal story and the kick was that we knew the person on trial was innocent. The nation watched. I watched.

And today I can't tell you which character or what the story was because I switched off and have never gone back.

Because in the week of the big reveal, the big climax to the story, the producers were quoted in newspapers as saying that they would never let an injustice happen in the show. They would never allow an innocent to be convicted.

I do think it was the absolutely most stupid time to tell us that. But, more, it erased Corrie for me. Not just this particular story that I'd been enjoying, but all stories. Ever. I want to say that phrase from Down the Line: "What is point Corrie?"

There is now no story in Corrie that won't work out happily. True, it was never very likely but now it's official. I get very tense in romcoms even though they always end well because there is always a pixel of a possibility that they won't. I give you Lost in Translation. Er. That's about it.

So it's not much of a pixel of a chance of a sad ending. Oh! One Day. There you go.

I will watch and enjoy a series where I know everyone will at least scrape by to next week. I've written Doctor Who and there's not a moment's doubt that's the Doctor will prevail. But I don't kill him and bring him back.

Actually, I did one where a character survives. Originally I had planned for her to die but it was honestly too upsetting. Not for me. But it wasn't going to get made if it were that bleak. And I like the compromise we made, I like where we went instead of her dying. I liked very much what new possibilities it have us in the characters if she didn't die.

But if she had died, she'd have stayed dead. I promise.

I'm fine with: have they died or haven't they? I'm not fine with dying and then coming back. Not even when I'm glad about it. Not even when I loved the character and it is bliss to see them sitting up, coming through the door or stepping out of a shower.

Because all they had and all they were died with them. A reborn character is a new character and we're starting again. We're starting again with a character who has had the most almightily improbable beginning. When you care enough about a character, it's as if they are real. If they come back from the dead, there is now zero reality to them.

I didn't want them to go yet now they have to prove their worth to me anew and they have to get me back to seeing them as real. And it doesn't happen.

It's not like you have to kill characters off. But if you want us engaged, if you want us caring at all, let them die.

Outlining: beat that

I've been using a thing called OmniOutliner to work out a book project that was just so stupidly unwieldy that I couldn't see the words for the trees. With immense regret, I have to tell you that it worked. I've previously been an extremely reluctant outliner, only doing it when mandatory for a contract, and my heart is still not in outlining at all, but my head might be. I realised this yesterday when I needed to figure out something else that I'd ordinarily have just got on with writing and exploring. And instead, I unthinkingly turned to this OmniOutliner.

Here's the thing. Some writers plan out in immense detail, some don't. I fixed Alan Plater's email once when he was having trouble sending attachments and the example document that we batted back and forth happened to be an outline. I didn't need to read it to fix the email, I couldn't read it because it was confidential, but I had to ask him. Why had he written an outline? He told me to read it.

It was a remarkably boring document. About as un-Plater-like as conceivable. But the very last line went something like this: "Now can I just go write the bloody thing?"

Outlines don't kill writers, outlining does. We get the fun and worth of the story sucked out of us. Alan put it better in a memo to a producer – which I've got verbatim because it's in my own book about his show The Beiderbecke Affair – where he explained:

“This kind of story is in part a process of discovery and deduction for the writer as much as for anybody else. I know the A and the Z and have a reasonable knowledge of B to about K… after that it gets complicated and misty.”

As I say, some outline and plan while others don't. My natural inclination is to explore on the page and I think I've been helped or encouraged in that as much by how well it's worked out and because I've written so much in magazines. Once I had the form in my head, once I knew how to write articles, I never planned again. Start at the top, write to the end, deliver. It's rarely quite like that but it can be and the number of changes I make are fairly few. Or they tend to be nuances and key points, they are never gigantic structural chunks being shuffled around.

Some drama writers call some outlines these beat sheets: you're listing the key moments in the piece like the beats in music and you end up with the overall shape of the work.

But I could always see the shape of the piece in my head when it was a 5,000-word computer feature or especially a 70-word Ceefax one. Books have proved to be somewhat harder: Beiderbecke was only 30,000 words or so but it was immensely hard to get everything in to that short limit. One of the books I'm doing now is 150,000 and that defeated me: I could not hold that in my head. Especially not when circumstances of when I could get certain research material, when I could speak to certain people, meant that I wrote about 100,000 of it completely out of sequence. I've asked the copy editor to please watch out for when I may have introduced someone twice because I first wrote them in chapter 6 and only later got them in to chapter 1. I think I've caught all that, but I have lain away at night worrying about it.

That worry was from the sheer weight of words, the sheer volume of the volume. Drama is different. I have a big stage play on the go now and I can smell it, you know? I know the opening pages because I explored them, testing out the idea. And I know the very last line because, I promise, it will choke you up. I even know about eleventy-billion things that will happen, right down to whole exchanges of dialogue between these characters in my head, but the whole eludes me. That's partly because if it works, if I do this right, it will be the most delicate, gauzy writing I've ever done and the faintest breeze will wreck where I'm trying to take you.

That's why drama is different. I was taught that you should write to express, not to impress. That's right and great and useless. Because drama needs to express and move and feel and share and transport. Off you go.

I find I'm noodling around this particular stage idea a lot on the bus. I used to do all my best thinking while I took long drives so I am least a tiny bit greener now. The other week I was thinking about the idea as I rode past the Birmingham Rep so I counted the windows: they sometimes put the title of plays up with one letter in each window across the front. It turns out they have just enough for this one, so. Probably not a deal breaker, but.

I'm going to outline it. I just know I am. Desperately broad strokes, please no more than that. Maybe I can do A and K rather than A to Z. I need to explore it too.

But there is a cost to exploring drama on the page, there is a price. I'd heard a thousand writers say and extol and evangelise outlines and they were rubbish at it. All of them. Until one television writer said something like "You can't have a blank screen on Tuesday night". It's true. You can fight about what makes better drama, structured planning or freeform exploration, but you can't argue that you have to write and produce something. A stunning work of piercing Tuesday night drama is no use if the script is delivered on Wednesday morning. Even if outlining guaranteed you a boring story, at least you'd never type "the end" on a full one-hour drama script and realise you had to throw it away and start a different one.

It wasn't always like this. It wasn't always that you're hired and we're airing it Tuesday, get writing.

John Hopkins was commissioned over a pint at the BBC once in the 1960s and didn't deliver. Not on time. Not anywhere near on time. The story goes that he delivered the next year. He wasn't especially pressed about it, though I understand the BBC did occasionally say, you know, how's it going? And then he turned in Talking to a Stranger, also known as the Hopkins Quartet. Four television plays set over the same weekend and all from the perspective of a different member of a family. I tell you, I read the scripts and when I reached the last one and realised why it was all done like this, why it wasn't just a gimmick, I cried.

If you want to tell me that Hopkins could do that from an outline, fine. If you even want to tell me that he did do it from an outline, fine. I have no idea either way. And that's the way it should be: whether outlines help or throttle a writer, it's the end result that matters, it's the audience that matters.

Oh, stop looking at me like that. You're not an audience, you're you. We're just talking. We could've phoned each other up first and devised the beat sheet for today. We could've decided that our chat should logically go thisaway: "1. What outlines are. 2. Outlines are bad. 3. Except when they're good."

But if we were that boringly efficient, we could've just left it with that and gone to the pub. And then where would we be? Exactly. I'll make us some tea.

1. Find kettle
2. Fill kettle with water
3. Switch on kettle...

Truth hurts

I wrote a script once called Wasps. It did very well for me: opened lots of doors, got me some of the attention you need and it was also very validating. I wrote that, it was received so well, I thought yes, maybe I can do this.

But one thing that kept being said of it was that it showed so clearly that I had done my research. On a Doctor Who once I was told I shouldn't be afraid of showing my library card. You've learnt all this stuff, use it and show us. Wasps was a police drama in a new setting (yes, there really is one) and was quite apparent that I had spent months with this unit.

In truth, I hadn't gone farther than my kitchen. It was a spec script, I'm always more interested in characters than anything else, I wrote real people in a setting that I'd research if we ever went to series.

But it did read as if it were true and I'm not saying this to boast to you. Well, I suppose I am, but it's a pretty feeble boast and if I came in thinking I was great for fooling producers then I'm now uncomfortably embarrassed that I didn't put the work in and even pick up the phone to the police.

What I think I got right was authenticity. The characters were people. There was also a lot of jargon and I don't mind jargon, I think having a short techy word for something long and complex is essential in certain conversations and really handy in drama. It's rare that as a viewer or reader you actually need to know what a spindizzy is and how it physically works. It is the opposite of rare, it is mandatory that you know the character knows. And that it means something, both literally in the sense of the definition of the jargon term and more importantly in that it matters to them.

I'm good with dialogue and I've been around enough jargon that I can hear it both as the rhythms of someone's speech and as the technical words. So for a placeholder, I made up some terms for these police characters. It was a helicopter unit and I've flown helicopters – now, doesn't that sound like a boast? It wouldn't if you knew how little I'd done. Man, the cost. Rotor time is the easiest way to burn cash outside of an Apple Store.

But did you see what I did there? I admitted an interest, an effort, a failing and gave you a glimpse into my financial state – and I used the term 'rotor time'. Odds to onions, you hadn't heard that before. Doubtlessly you can work out what it means but you didn't bother, you read it and accepted it. It sounded real, it sounded authentic.

It was. It is. I knew all the helicopter stuff so all my characters knew it too. Whereas I have not one possible clue where the phrase 'odds to onions' just came from but I accepted it, didn't you?

(Quick aside? Jargon's jargon, fine, but sometimes it is gorgeous. The rotors on a helicopter spin 600 times per minute and they are attached to what's called a mast. You can imagine the forces going on there as that machinery spins. It's as likely to wrench the whole helicopter around one way as it is to spin the blades the other. That's why you have tail rotors: they fight the machine being spun. And two-rotor choppers like Chinooks don't need tail rotors because their two main rotors are spun in opposite directions.

Still, imagine that torture on the helicopter. Pounding, pounding stresses.

And there is a nut and bolt that keep the rotors attached to the mast. Pilots and engineers call it the Jesus Nut – because if it ever fails on you, the next person you'll see is Jesus Christ in heaven.

Isn't that wonderful? That's what you get from real research. So I'm not knocking real research at all and therefore I really am not boasting that I fooled a few people by making up onions.)

What I am saying is that Wasps was authentic.

Authenticity: if you can fake that, you've got it made.

This is all on my mind and I wanted to talk it through with you because I was in a conversation last night with a friend who had a play on at the Rep Foundry, a night organised by the Birmingham Rep theatre. His piece is a true story and, wow, you can tell. It really takes you somewhere new – new to me anyway – and into a slice of recent history that is teeming with drama. But in chatting afterwards, he was arguing that writers have to be true.

I completely agree.

What I couldn't quite articulate with him last night, because I don't think I realised I thought it, was that there's no reason you can't lie about being true.

There's truth and there's reality. A key reason I prefer drama to journalism is that in journalism you try to make things simple: this person did that for this reason at that time. In drama, you embrace the fact that there are no facts. That this person or that person may or may not have done this or that. And if they did it, they may not know why. The world is an utterly delicious mess and drama gets that.

I was watching an episode of the US legal drama Suits this week and something bad happens to a key character. I don't know if Suits is technically and legally accurate, I do know that it feels authentic, but this bad thing – I don't want to spoil it, sorry to be vague – cut into me. Lawyers in New York, it cut me even though it could not be a more alien world if it were Star Trek.

Though, that's a thought. There was a gimmicky Star Trek once where Scotty came back and guest-starred in The Next Generation. Fine, whatever. Gimmick. Only, here was this starship engineer recalled to life through transporter technobabble and facing intergalactic peril yet it was moving. Nuts to all the Starfleet uniforms, all everything did in that setting was get us to where the story really was. This Scotty had been the ace engineer – "the engines canna take it, Captain!" – and here he was decades in the future where his skills have been superseded. Where he is a curiosity at best and a danger at worst.

He wants to help save the day in whatever the story of the week science fiction threat was against the USS Enterprise. That was the plot but the drama was that he couldn't. This science fiction trope of a character was suddenly an old man burning to recapture glory days that had ended so soon and before he'd noticed. He was worker who could no longer work. Everything this character was and needed now wasn't.

It was desperately moving. I think it had a Starfleet-happy ending and naturally the Enterprise survived whatever it was. Can't remember. Don't care. But twenty years since I've seen it, I remember the feeling.

Because it wasn't real, but it was true.

Star Trek: Don't Give Away the Goods Too Soon

There's a contrived, gratuitous underwear scene in Star Trek Into Darkness and I didn't notice. I saw the film on a giant screen and in 3D and I am male but I did not register a scene with Alice Eve as Dr Carol Marcus wearing considerably less than a Starfleet-issue uniform. I keep hearing references to it now but it was only when some review included a still from it that I remembered it was there at all.

I obviously saw it, I have zero doubt that I shook my head at the whole thing when it happened. And you can bet that one reason it all left my head instantly was that we see so many women characters wearing so little in so many films. It's just because full costumes are expensive. That's the reason. Austerity.

But the other reason that it left my head a frame later is that Carol Marcus is just not a character. There's nothing there. She ultimately provides a plot point but what's then meant to be deeply emotional is just a bit of a shrug because after most of the film is done, I still have no interest in her. I do remember having that brief kind of half squint, half blink you get when you're trying to work something out: I remember thinking 'why are they doing this?' during her introduction scene. I'll accept anything in a film, anything at all, unless it throws me out of the story and I was a little thrown.

Part of me doesn't want to tell you why because I'm reluctant to spoil a film, but that's silly of me as I'm about to wreck it. And I'm wrecking it because by the end, I wasn't thrown, I was drop-kicked out of the movie. Star Trek Into Darkness has myriad problems and they are all well reported online, but there is one writing issue that I think is a knife and I'm not seeing that mentioned anywhere.

So I'm mentioning it. Alongside mixed metaphors about drop-kicked knives.

Here's an amusing list of the film's head-scratching moments: you'll laugh more if you read it after seeing the movie, but you'll save money if you read it before.

And here's Star Trek writer David Mack exploding about the failed science in the movie. For all that I think science should always be correct in a story, I'm really against the science in this one because it makes so little sense that it damages the tale. You know that Star Trek is all about these spaceships flying around where nobody's yet got to and you know it's all about whether Captain Kirk can save the day against impossible odds and whether he can even live to fight another day though you suspect he just might. By the end of Star Trek Into Darkness, there is no need for any spaceship ever again and nobody can ever die ever again. Ever. And you will swear that the filmmakers didn't notice they'd done that.

I noticed it. I also noticed the time a lot. The 3D process makes films considerably darker and that was a problem because it made checking my watch really difficult.

I didn't initially see this writing issue that now so bothers me but that was because it came at the end. Up until then I was just getting progressively more irritated in general. I really enjoyed 2009's Star Trek and hadn't expected to: it made me a Trek convert and I came to this one very enthusiastically. But there's a bit early on that's a nice little nod to something in the old Star Trek movies and TV shows.

And then there's another nod.

And another.

Then there's a contorted speech that I could hear went down really well with the fans sitting behind me because it referenced a popular episode I do remember seeing some time. Okay.

Only, then there was another.

And if there is one reason that next time I'll wait for the reviews before seeing a Star Trek movie, it's because these references and homages built and built until whole scenes, whole sequences of scenes were remakes of famous moments from old ones. It gets so bad I was thinking "And… cue Spock…" just as he did precisely what you expect him to do. With the very dialogue you expect him to have.

It's a giant emotional scene toward the climax and it is stunningly irritating and empty because all you can think of is that you've seen this before somewhere and it was alright then. The sequence revolves around the death of a major character and death has no impact in Star Trek anyway: I'm sure a real fan could tell me when a character has died and not come back to life next week but I don't know of one. This time it is especially empty because of this pastiche sequence but also because it comes after a risible scene where Kirk abruptly and insanely interrupts an interrogation to ask Dr McCoy "What are you working on that will save my life later?"

He doesn't quite say that but it's only a pixel more subtle. I laughed and the wall of fans behind me growled. I like to think they were growling with me, not at me.

So anyway, we're into the final parts of the film and I am no longer in the story, I am also completely out of Maltesers and having a rotten time, and then they do this. They have a very exciting end sequence and it is completely destroyed because of what happened in the film's very exciting opening sequence.

Follow. When the film begins and we're on some planet or other, the USS Enterprise has been hiding under the ocean. You know in your heart that this doesn't make sense somehow but it's still very exciting as the ship rises up from the sea and flies off across the sky before heading out into space. It's very well done, it looks real, you could clap.

Only, then the end sequence is all about the USS Enterprise starting off in space and, damaged, now falling toward Earth. It's going to hit atmosphere, this spaceship is going to be flying through the sky.

Yes? And? So?

We've seen that, we know the ship can fly really realistically across the sky, it's great. But now we have to buy that this is suddenly a Calamitous Bad Thing when it was Perfectly Fine Before.

Writers Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman try to turn this into a devastatingly, heart-stoppingly thrilling moment by having some character or other actually say: "This bit's exciting, I know we did this earlier but now it's completely different and we're in such danger, I can't tell you, man, we could even die and everything".

There's a writing maxim that you should show rather than tell and I don't agree 100% – there's a fantastic example in Battlestar Galactica where the telling of a tale is riveting and the later showing of it it is a bit boring – but I think I agree 98%. Star Trek Into Darkness has what should have been and really could have been, actually was, a huge finish with little emotion but buckets of spectacle. Telling us that it's exciting is like trying to put a bandaid on when you really know you should've thrown away that opening sequence.

In television, if the start doesn't grab or seduce you into the story enough, you've changed channels. In films, you're there to the end and it's the end that's in your mind and heart when you leave the cinema. I don't know, maybe I would've walked out of there thinking the film had problems but was exciting. But instead I just walked out of there irritated.

The opening sequence unquestionably cost more millions of dollars than I can imagine, and I can imagine quite a bit, but the film was hurt by it. And if they'd cut it at the script stage, the cost would've been no more than wear and tear on the delete key.

I don't go to films to get writing lessons, I go to be in the story but when you're not, you take what you can. And I've taken away a writing lesson: don't give the goods away too soon.

INT. DESCRIPTIONS – OVERUSED

Alan Plater used to read my scripts and you know that he was tremendously useful, you know he was kind. But let me say it anyway: he was terrifically useful and he was really kind, most especially on the very first one. The Strawberry Thief – I still like the title – got the full Plater treatment in the 1990s and I've remembered every word he wrote me.

The key part, I think, was what you'd now call a praise sandwich or at least a criticism with a bit of a praise topping. He told me that my stage directions had regularly made him laugh aloud, but that my job was to get that life and humour into the dialogue instead. Because, after all, the audience never sees the stage descriptions.

I also remember that when I next did a script, his key comment was that I'd done this, I'd got the energy into where it could be seen. He said it was "a great step for writer-kind".

I've only recently realised quite how much he shaped me in how I write descriptions in scripts. I'm a dialogue man, I'm a dialogue fan, that's where I would've said I put my attention and effort and – however much it is – my talent. No, I'm hesitating over that word. Can I go again? I'm a dialogue fan, that's where I would've said I put my attention and effort and – however fast it is – my typing.

But I wrote a book about Alan's The Beiderbecke Affair and he has great descriptions in there. What's more, he wrote them with a very canny eye toward getting cast and crew to read them where usually they, well, don't.

"That’s right, actors don’t," said James Bolam in my book. "You go yeah, yeah, but his you read. I mean, his stage directions are worth a read in themselves. They’re so funny, some of them, and they’re so evocative. They create the mood that he wants, that he feels, that he thinks. They’re all done in the same way, not sort of stuck in there but part of the narrative."

He also had a way of writing just the right amount. He'd conjure that mood in a very short line and sometimes they'd be funny, always they'd be efficient: you'd get his point immediately and you'd enjoy getting it. So – again, I'm ripping off my own book here, but – take this for an example of apparently simple, short, description. It's from The Beiderbecke Affair:

SC. 11 EXT. TREVOR'S FLAT – NIGHT

Establishing shot of Trevor's flat. The cityscape of Leeds, lights shining like it was LA.

(You can see it for yourself in episode 1, What I Don't Understand is This... which is on a really good Beiderbecke DVD set from Network DVD.)

But can you believe that description was one reason I wanted to write about the show? There were myriad reasons but I knew that if I included that scene description, I could also include one of my favourite Alan Plater passages: the equivalent description from his Beiderbecke Affair novel. The story is that an editor from Methuen was on location, had read the Affair script and specifically because of those descriptions asked Alan if he'd like to try writing a novel. He did and this is what he did with that same moment, translated to a novel:

A panoramic sweep across the urban landscape of the mighty Leeds conurbation at night could easily lead to confusion with San Francisco, if there were a bridge, Rome, if there were a Vatican, or Athens, given an Acropolis and a whiff of lapsed glory. In the blackness, the sub-standard housing and empty factories disappear, and the lights shining out, from street lamps and buses, public houses and filling-stations, police cars and off-licences, seem like beacons of hope in a hostile world. They are not, but they look like it.

I love that because of its way of getting you to picture a beautiful camera move, because of its Plateresque wry way of appearing to say very little and to say it with humour while it's really undercut with a vivid example of his worldview. That last "They are not, but they look like it" seems to me to be final, closed, decisive and firmly bleak yet still open and hopeful. It's someone who sees the world as it is but also as it could be, as perhaps it should be and is neither ashamed of being cynical nor makes any effort to hide idealism. If you want to get really, really, pixel-picky, it's the comma. The entire description has stayed in my mind for three decades in part because of that rolling series of city names but mostly because of that comma in the last line. It's a beat, a breath, a voice.

Tell me I'm not detail-orientated.

But listen, this is all on my mind because the other day I co-presented a talk on descriptions at South & City College here in Birmingham. Novelist Robin Sidwell is writer in residence there and runs a regular writing group session. I talked at one about scriptwriting and rejections, and judged a short contest with him. It was a script contest but we both separately remarked that it was unusual how long the descriptions were. He's a novelist, I thought he'd like longer, richer, fuller scene descriptions but we talked about this and turned out to agree on everything. I mean, everything. He had this idea that we could present a talk on descriptions in script versus those in novels and part of me leapt to the Plater example, part of me enjoyed the idea that Robin and I could presumably spar: he'd be the real lecturer, he'd be the good cop championing novel-like long descriptions, I'd be the bad copy.

It didn't work out like that. Apart from the, you know, small issue that he knows novels infinitely better than I do, we could've given each other's side of the talk. We did do one swap: he gave me a novel to dramatise in script and I gave him a script to novelise. The bastard improved my story.

So I really wanted to spar.

But he had another reason for this talk. He's got some students who are unsure whether they want to write novels or scripts so they're really doing both. At the same time. In the same piece. I think this is common. I read a script once that had got someone a 2:1 degree in screenwriting and I would've handed it back to them after page 1 because, I believe, it was unreadable. Because of the descriptions. There were technical issues to do with the scene slugs, but it was just stuff that made it really slow to read and I maintain that if a script is slow to read, it doesn't get read.

You can argue that producers and script editors should read on whether something is slow and hard or not. You can also argue that I'm in no position to talk about going on at length.

But working with Robin and remembering Alan, I realised that you can summarise my entire view on script description with that note that the audience never sees the stage directions.

So if you find yourself writing something like, I don't know:

EXT. CENTRAL PARK – AROUND DUSK, THE CITY LIGHTS JUST COMING ON, THIEVES AND MUGGERS JUST STARTING TO SET UP STALL

Brad Chap sits on a park bench. He's 20s, a little the worse for wear, maybe still carrying some scars from when Take That broke up, maybe the wounds of disappointment are still bleeding from when Take That reunited, and if he were a car, he'd be a Renault Megane with hatchback and a decent sound system that he routinely connects his iPhone to with Bluetooth. Brad could have been a lawyer, he could've been doctor, but instead he's an international jewel thief and sometimes – usually when another woman has broken up with him because of his nervous, twitchy behaviour whenever police go by – he regrets his life choices. But not today. Today he's just heard a good joke and it's lifted him, it's made him think that perhaps, just perhaps, life is actually worth living and if it's raining now, it will clear up later and there's a chance of sunshine. Not much of a chance, but enough for Brad. He is the world's greatest optimist. He doesn't look like it, but he is.

What will the audience actually see? If you think they'll just see a man in his twenties sitting on a bench then, no, sorry, you're wrong. They won't even see that much. Because no producer would've read to the end, no producer would buy that script.

Nor would you. Because that description of Brad might as well be a description of the writer: not that the writer is a little worse for wear and all that, but descriptions can describe more than they appear to and in this case what I'd take away from reading this is that the writer is an amateur. It tells me that the writer doesn't understand film. It's not as if there are rules and it's not as if we aren't all amateurs until we've been blooded, but a writer doing that description will not have written an interesting drama.

I keep saying that the audience doesn't see a word of your stage description but actually that's only true of your ultimate audience. Your first one is the producer, the director, the cast and they do. They all see every single word.

They just don't read any of it.

But when something is described the way Brad Chap was, there is no need to read it. Simply registering the length and the type of description it is, you know to reject the whole script.

There's another difference with this first type of audience. The ultimate audience turns up to enjoy the movie, the first audience of these cast and crew are turning up to make the film with you. They are your collaborators. So your script is a working tool for you and them to work together, it is a blueprint for a drama that you will all make.

I put all this effort and energy into dialogue but I will also be as quick and precise and straightforward as I can be with stage directions. So if I were really writing the adventures of Brad Chap, that scene would run:

EXT. CENTRAL PARK – EVENING

BRAD CHAP (20s, optimist in a bad world) waits on a park bench.

That's it. Do you need anything else? If you do, put it in the dialogue. It's harder to put it in dialogue because that's not dramatic, it's just telling people the plot or the backstory or the description but that's why dialogue is wonderful. It carries all this exposition, it propels all of the action, it is the characters. You do it so that nobody notices that the dialogue is even written, you do it so that it is as if these characters had just thought of these words. And you do it so that what they actually say is nowhere near what they really mean and yet the audience gets it. God, dialogue is a reason to live.

Description isn't, not for me. If you want to write descriptions, write a novel. Or a blog. Cough.

To sell me a script, make it quick to read the descriptions and make the dialogue wonderful. I want to enjoy reading the script. I want scripts to get me engrossed and involved and I want them to regularly make me laugh aloud.

And I consider it a great step for writer-kind when they do.