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...

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.

Apple's iPad for writers

This is the kind of thing I wanted to know before I bought an iPad and it's what I've found after about a week's moderate use of it. So it's about the keyboard, it's about the apps and it's also about disappointments and the odd surprise.

You zoomed in on that word "disappointments", didn't you? Let's start there then.

Disappointments with the iPad

There have been two. First, I unthinkingly expected the box to include the wee little dock, the iPad equivalent of what comes with the iPhone. Apple's quite clear that it doesn't and I'm fine with how it doesn't come with headphones, so I shouldn't have been disappointed but I was. (You get a mains plug and a cable that attaches either to that or to your computer for docking.)

More seriously, the keyboard. This is an odd one because on the whole I'm so pleased with it as to be relieved, surprised and delighted. I will not be buying an external keyboard for it - though I think I've got a kludgy old keyboard somewhere that will connect wirelessly to it, maybe I'll give it a try some time.

Yet there were disappointments with the keyboard and it is what you, as a writer, spend most of your time on. I found the size and shape of the keys good, but the layout, not so much. It appears firstly, for instance, that there is no apostrophe on the main keyboard: you have to press a button marked .?123 which changes the QWERTY letters to 1234... numbers and includes punctuation. There is a secondly, though, which makes this better. Press and hold the comma button for an instant and the apostrophe appears.

So that's good. Except that I now find it easier to go to that numbers screen for it rather than hold up my writing for even that brief instant you have to wait. Plus, the iPad is even better at inserting apostrophes for you as you type than the iPhone is. That's great and and I did just type "thats", letting it correct me. But I type well, I like typing, so I'm having to train myself to let it have its way.

This kind of intelligent interference causes me problems with capitals. The iPad, especially in the excellent Pages app (£5.99 UK, $10 US) assumes quite rightly that every sentence begins with a capital letter. I hold this to be self-evident but that means I go to do it too: I tap the shift key, thinking I need it. Since Pages has already pressed shift, so to speak, I find I'm really un-pressing it and my sentences begin with a lowercase letter.

For some reason my fingers can't get used to where the wee little shift keys are either, so I find I'm pausing to find them and then pausing to go back to correct this uppercase/lowercase issue.

But that said, the automatic correction is rather impressive. I loathe predictive text on phones but here it's more what-you-really-meant. Very nicely, the iPad is good at spotting when the mistake is that you've left out a space: it's smart at recognising when one mistyped word is really two correctly-typed ones run together.

And the whole feel of typing on glass is very, very good. I should say I am in the minority who likes the iPhone keyboard even for protracted typing so maybe your mileage will vary. I also wonder if it will be as good for women or anyone who doesn't have a nervous fingernail issue.

Last, you do need to prop the iPad up to type on. Well, you don't. It's flat in front of me now but that means your hands tend to hide some of what you're typing. I bought Apple's iPad case (£30 from Apple Stores) and it's mixed, leaning toward good, and works very well as a stand that tilts the iPad to a good angle for typing. Also for reading: I've found I leave it propped up at that angle even when I'm actually using another computer. I tend to refer to the iPad for my calendar, for Twitter, for reading books in stolen moments.

Apps for writers

Buy Pages. I bought it before I bought the iPad. It's a good, strong word processor and is preposterously cheap. I thought the desktop Mac version was preposterously cheap but this is under a tenner.

Pages will read and write Microsoft Word documents though I expect not very complex ones. Getting documents in and out of Pages is not great: you end up emailing them around and thereby getting a bit in a tangle over which is the latest version of what document. You can copy your documents to and from your computer using iTunes but I've yet to even try, it's sufficiently inelegant. You can share your documents over iWork.com but I've not even looked at that.

If you can think of Word as just the thing you need to send documents to people, if you don't think of Pages as trying to be a Word clone, you will like Apple's word processor. More: you'll be impressed. And when you go back to Word on your Mac or PC, you'll find yourself poking a finger at the screen.

That's how good Pages is and also how good the iPad's touch screen is. Using a mouse and proper keyboard do very quickly feel archaic, even wrong.

I did find it hard to see how to name the documents you create in Pages: turns out when you have the list of documents open (it looks a little like Cover Flow) then pressing and holding on the name lets you set it.

Once you've bought Pages

There are writing tools on the iPad app store, some of which are exactly the worthless distraction we seek but a few are close to essential.

For most writers, I'd say that in includes Evernote (free). The app lets you jot down anything, stray lines, ideas, images even and then later examine them right there in the app or on any computer that you can point at Evernote.com. I have a problem with some of the graphics, just aesthetically, and they happen to be one of the few bits you can't customise. So I recommend Evernote but am still looking around

Reading

I thought I wanted an iPad for iBooks, for being able to read a lot.

Damn right.

For all that I write on the iPad, watch a lot of TV and video on it, listen to a lot of music and radio programmes, and spend far too much time on Twitter with it, by far the thing that has given me most pleasure is reading.

What I didn't expect was that iBooks isn't the only game in town.

There are three.

By far the best to use for straight reading and for buying books too, Apple's iBooks could be all you need. But there aren't that many books yet on the iBooks Store. Whereas there are many, many times more books downloadable from Amazon for its Kindle and Barnes and Noble for its Nook device.

Fortunately, both companies make free iPad and iPhone apps. Both are fine, leaning toward very good, though iBooks wins because buying books is much more obviously easy and simple in that. Dangerously so.

You may be thinking that I've sequed away from the topic of iPad for writers. But you can't write if you don't also read and reading on the iPad is a joy.

Plus, it's possible if a little tricky to get your own books into your copy of iTunes and iBooks. I did a pitch recently that reworked 10,000 words and reading it again on the iPad was a bit of a treat.

I'm not certain I'll write the next 10,000 words on it. But I've written all of this blog entry on my iPad: I think I've done it more slowly than I would've done on a full keyboard but I also think part of that is how I still need to get used to the keyboard layout differences.

Apple's iPad is available from online and real Apple Stores. Other tablet computers are available - apparently - but if they were any good, you'd not have read this far about iPads.