Knocking One Out

How to Write Drama for British Television Part 37b of 83 by Derek Duggan

It’s becoming ever more difficult to make money out of writing books. If there is one thing that we’ve learned from the self-publishing revolution it’s that there are a lot of people out there who feel the need to justify the expense of buying a laptop by writing a novel and slapping it onto Amazon. In fact, according to recent market research carried out by the University of Market Research most new laptops come with a fucking terrible novel pre-installed, with a one click to publish option. This leaves the serious writer with a very simple problem which is this – How are people going to notice your not-shit novel among all the other shit novels? And is there enough of a shit novel audience to go around anyway? Probably not, is the sad but realistic answer to that. And that means many of you will be kissing your hard earned £130 a year from Amazon goodbye. So, how are you going to pay the mortgage?

Fear not. There is a solution – television drama. It might seem daunting, but really it’s the exact same as writing a book except that you don’t have to do all the boring description bits about how the characters are feeling as that’s what actors get paid to make up. And that’s one of the best parts – if your drama is shit you can just blame the cast and the director. Anyway, as with every type of writing there are a few basic rules and once you follow these you’ll be laughing all the way to the BAFTAs.

1. The very first thing you have to do, even before you write a single word, is to decide what part Olivia Coleman is going to play. According to statistics obtained under the Freedom of Information Act a staggering 73% of all scripts are rejected instantly because there is no obvious role for Ms Coleman and so almost no chance of the program winning an award as she is going to win it for something.

2. Don’t spend ages worrying about coming up with an original idea – that’s what Scandinavian writers are for. All you have to do is watch stuff with subtitles on BBC 3 and then change it into English and set it in Bournemouth and you’ll be onto a winner. Of course, you’ll have to make it a bit gritty, but a lot of this is easy to achieve as many British actors are naturally quite ugly – or what they call in the business ‘Character Actors’ – so everything seems that much more grim to begin with. This can be accentuated by getting an actor like the good looking Doctor Who to be in it too and have him look sad a lot and be upset about things which he can articulate by showing his bottom teeth and squinting his eyes a bit. Remember to put that into the stage directions –

EXT. DAY.

THE GOOD LOOKING DOCTOR WHO SITS ON A BENCH IN BOURNEMOUTH LOOKING AT THE SEA. HE IS UPSET ABOUT PEOPLE HAVING AFFAIRS OR BEING MURDERED AND STUFF SO HE STICKS HIS BOTTOM TEETH OUT AND SQUINTS HIS EYES A BIT.

Then you just need to throw in a modest amount of swearing and you’re sorted.

3. Another option to consider is reworking a classic. You have two options here. The first is where you can modernise something like in that one where Alan Turing and Bilbo Baggins solve crimes with the occasional help of Aunt Sally. That show has changed from the original classic mostly by being set in the modern era instead of ancient London. These updates have been so cleverly woven into the very fabric of the show that they are never directly referenced by the lines the characters speak. Instead, the writer has used costume.

EXT. DAY. 22B BAKER STREET.

ENTER BILBO BAGGINS WEARING A MODERN BINMAN JACKET

And you can see how easily the era was set there.

The second option is where you rework an old swashbuckling classic and have actors wear flouncy shirts while standing outside a castle in former Czechoslovakia and pretend that they’re not freezing their bangers off while they lock horns with Old Man Doctor Who.

4. You could also try your hand at a period piece. The main drawback with this is that you will have to do some research. For example, all the people in olden days were quite boring which is why the average life expectancy was so much shorter in the past as many people actually died of boredom and why a one hour drama about them feels like it’s been going on for fifteen fucking years. That’s the kind of painstaking detail you’ll have to include if you don’t want history pedants writing in to complain about the inaccuracy of your show.

So what are you waiting for? Get writing.

Glad I could help.

Dr Ivan’s Guide to Writing Like a Real Writer: Part Four: How to Write a Column

by Derek Duggan

Everybody does lots of writing every day. We post on social media sites to let people know that we have something to sell, or that we’ve just seen a cute cat by the road in Winterbourne, or that we caused a huge pile up on the M32 while typing that last post. LOL. Then there are the recipes we jot down, the notes to teachers and the ‘Sorry I Caused a Crash that Left You in Traction For Six Months’ cards that are such a feature of modern life (and which we looked at extensively in Dr Ivan’s Guide to Writing Like a Real Writer: Part Three: Keeping it Light When Apologising for Causing a Massive Motorway Pile Up Near Winterbourne – which I’m sure we’ll all agree was hilarious).

Now that we’ve mastered these skills it’s time to look at writing for magazines, and in particular, that most difficult of pieces, the column. Before we get into the mechanics of it let’s take a moment to think about research. One of the main mistakes that newbies make is that they spend an awful lot of time doing research. You don’t have to do any. At all. Seriously. You’d be surprised at just how easy it is to get people to believe shit that is completely unsubstantiated. In fact, people actively don’t want to read about facts as it just gets in the way of them being wrong. For example - The Paleo Diet – it makes you live much longer as is evidenced by all the cavemen still around and despite what actual research or logic might show up, nobody wants to know. So don’t waste your time.

You may have written some articles already, but you could be doing it wrong. Here is the timeline you absolutely have to follow if you want to write like a real writer and not just be pretentious. We’ll be using the bi-monthly magazine model.

1. Two months before deadline and immediately after you have written the previous article

No sooner will you have hit the send button on the email with your article for the previous edition than five amazing ideas will pop into your head – not just ideas, but pretty much complete articles. So complete are they that you could probably type all five of them into your computer in an hour. The idea that you should actually write them down will cross your mind, but you must never do this. That is not the way of Real Writers. You must instead convince yourself that you’ll be able to improve on these ideas greatly by mulling them over for the next few weeks before writing a single word. If you write even one word at this point I’m sorry, but it means you’re a bit of a dick. Them’s the rules.

2. Three weeks before deadline

At this point you will receive an email from your editor reminding you that it is three weeks to the deadline. You remember that you had five ideas that were essentially ready to go and at this point you may even have a vague recollection of what one of them was. You might think it would be prudent to write the article then and there before the memory of it fades completely, but the mantra of the Real Writer is – Fuck Prudence. Fuck it up its stupid ass.

3. Three days before deadline

You receive another email from your editor to remind you that the article is due in three days. You can’t remember what your idea for an article was, but it’s OK because you have a full three days to play with. You can resist the temptation to sit down and make a few notes and maybe even do a couple of drafts as you will be fully confident that one of the five absolutely brilliant ideas will come back at any moment. Nothing can go wrong.

4.  Deadline

Sit down at your computer and open a blank word document. Then, just to save a bit of time, open the internet. You should definitely have a quick look at Facebook at this point, just to get it out of the way and maybe, just to get the juices flowing, you should find someone who has posted something mental about how drinking three bottles of wine a day is good for you or something. The right thing to do here is to spend the next three or four hours looking up all the research you can find which disproves this and post it on their wall. You’ll be tired after that and will need a rest and there’s always something good on the telly on Deadline Day and it’s not going to watch itself. Anyway, it might give you a good idea for your article. Watch it. Watch the fuck out of it.

5. Two days after deadline

You receive a polite email from your editor inquiring as to the whereabouts of your piece. The Real Writer will say they're just doing a bit of editing and then gik their kaks as they realise they don’t have a fucking clue what they’re going to write about. Open a new word document and spend twenty minutes looking at the blank screen. Amuse yourself during this period by seeing if you can synchronise saying things like Holy-fucking-wankbasket-but-I-haven’t-got-a-fucking-notion-what-I’m-going-to-write-about with the flashing cursor. After this loses its charm you realise that it’s time to bring out the big writery guns: the custard creams. Eat the full packet at breakneck speed which will, obviously, make you lose consciousness, but in a good way. And when you open your eyes there it is! A complete article has magically appeared and you’re safe.

Send it off immediately and then have five brilliant ideas… See step 1.

And that’s it – there’s nothing mysterious about it at all.

Glad I could help.

Christmas Fun. Fun, Fun or How to turn your fabulous imagination into big Christmas bucks by Derek Duggan

The one thing all writers have in common is the ability to use their imagination. Authors use this on a daily basis to imagine characters, stories and, mostly, what it would be like to make a living out of writing. Most people in the street would never have imagined that little boys like to be penguin pimps at Christmas and that the general public would find it cute, but a writer did. And then the shop the writer imagined this for went on to sell millions of cuddly little penguin sex workers.

Christmas sees massive book sales, of course, because there are so many people out there who are too lazy to buy a real present for friends and family. The market becomes flooded with celebrity titles making it difficult for the everyday author to break through. But maybe it’s an opportunity. Perhaps we should employ all that imagination laterally. There are other areas we could move into.

There’s nothing that people enjoy more at Christmas than sitting down after the disappointing meal and falling out over a game of Trivial Pursuit. Why not cash in on this tradition by inventing your own game? You could bring in familiar elements, like celebrities or well known TV shows.

For example, make some cards up with the names of random ex-footballers, ex-politicians and people who’ve slept with Hugh Heffner and shuffle them before dinner. Everyone picks a card and the ones who get Ant and Dec get to laugh at the rest of the guests while they try to force down the boiled to fucking mush sprouts and the dry as monkey jizz bird meat. During this round the person with the Slept with Heff card has to scream before every bite and the person with the Got voted off another reality show in the first round card has to try and get off with the person who has the Girl from Ireland nobody’s ever heard of card. The winner of the round is the one who compliments the food in the most sincere manner when it’s all gone. After dinner whoever’s got the Ex-model card has to go around in a bikini. Another rule is that if anyone needs a shit they have to do it in a lean-to at the bottom of the garden (except for those with the Ant and Dec cards, of course, who can shit in comfort). Endless hours of Christmas fun there.

Depending on your family, another game you might like to try is The Jeremy Kyle Game. This game requires a minimum of nine players – seven male and six female – a high horse and two Christmases – and it guarantees two Christmases you’ll never forget. On the first Christmas you draw cards. The person with the Jeremy Kyle card must go home at this point. Everyone else has to get absolutely hammered, switch the lights off, put on blindfolds and then shag the first person they stumble into. On the second Christmas, the person with the Jeremy Kyle card sits on the high horse and reads out the results of all the paternity tests and then the rest of the players kick the shit out of each other. Think of all the money someone like Hasboro would pay you for that.

Perhaps you’d prefer something a little more sedate, so why not invent something like The Jeremy Clarkson game? This could be good if you’ve got a Nan that makes taxi drivers look liberal. There could be lightning rounds where you have to see how many ethnic minorities you can insult in one minute or how many racist nursery rhymes you can recite. The winner is the person who goes on the news the next day and gives the most contrite apology.

If you’d like to try your hand at crafting a board game you could do something like The Kim Kardashian Road to Happiness game. Divide a board into one hundred squares and put a task on every second one. When the players land on a square they must do whatever is written there. For example, if they get the Make a reality TV show about absolutely nothing square the other players have to follow them around with their phones filming everything they do for six months. If a player completes a task successfully they get a small bottle of refined human fat which they can inject into their posterior. The winner is the person with the biggest arse at the end.

But these are just starting points. Don’t let your fabulous imagination rust away to nothing over the festive season – make your own games up, and who knows? Maybe next year everyone will be playing your game and you’ll be raking in the cash.

Merry Christmas everyone. Glad I could help.

A Shower of Golden Rules – or How to make social media work for you by Derek Duggan

There are a lot of pressures on writers these days. Not only do you have to write books and stuff but now, with the demands of an ever present public, you have to write about other things across several platforms.

This can seem a little daunting to the novice, but there are some simple rules and once you follow them you’ll be laughing all the way to the bank (and then, as a writer, crying all the way home again). First, and most conspicuously, you will have to make regular posts on social media sites. This can be a little bit tricky as you have to show people that you, as a writer, are better than everyone else while making yourself seem like a regular Joe Soap at the same time. It doesn’t matter which platform you choose, the rules are the same.

1. Wine/alcoholic beverages. You have to mention wine in at least every other post or people will think you’re not an alcoholic and therefore not a real writer. It doesn’t matter if you’re really a teetotaler, you still have to post things like – Hey, is it wine o’ clock yet? – or – It must be beer thirty – or – It must be time to down a bottle of whiskey and shit the bed by now! Nobody will buy your work if you don’t do this. In a recent study at the British University of Made up Studies it was found that the amount of times wine was mentioned on a writer’s time line was directly proportional to the amount of sales achieved. And that’s a fact. If you can’t think of any wine related thing to say why not simply post a link to some online article that says drinking lots of wine makes you really good at doing everything and makes you really healthy and people who live under bridges and shout at traffic are just doing it wrong. This will help you to connect with regular alcoholics and convince them to buy your stuff.

2. Work in progress. You have to mention this from time to time or people might forget that you’re not just someone who lives under a bridge and shouts at traffic. Don’t go into details – just say something about drafts and word counts and that should keep everyone happy. In this way you can connect with regular people by pretending that you do some work too and don’t actually spend the whole day farting about on the internet.

3. Stuff about dogs/cats. It’s a well-known fact that people who are interested in buying books are much more interested in photos of your dog than they are in your reviews. Think about it - How many times have you come across a novel that has all five star reviews on Amazon only to be put off buying the book when, on inspection of the author’s Facebook page, it turns out they haven’t posted twenty five pictures of their dog sitting on the couch in the last half an hour? I think you can see the logic in this. It will help to show that you have as little in your life as ordinary people and thus connect with them.

4. Wine. See number 1.

5. Links to grammar tests. You need to post one of these a month to show how good you are at doing English and to remind other people that they are shit at it. This will show people that you’re dead clever and that because you got ten out of ten on this online test your book is obviously a work of genius and is definitely worth reading. People don’t want to think that the book they’re reading is stupid as they feel it might reflect badly on them and people will think they’re a thicko. Dan Brown probably got ten out of ten on several online grammar tests. I rest my case.

6. Food stuff. In case all the animal pictures haven’t convinced the general readers out there that you are at least as boring as them there is always room for the occasional food post. Just stick up a photo of your dinner and watch your book sales soar. Everyone loves a good picture of someone else’s dinner. A recent study done by a University somewhere found that when normal people sit down with their families at night after being at work all day all they want to do is pick up their tablets and look at pictures of other people’s dinner. They can’t get enough of it. And the study found that when people see a picture of some potatoes and random meat and boiled-to-fuck vegetables on Facebook, the first thing they do is to go to Amazon and buy a book. It’s in a scientific study so it must be absolutely true.

7. Links to a good review you just got. There’s nothing that excites common people more than knowing that a writer they know has just received a five star review on Amazon or somewhere. Most ordinary folk can’t wait to read how LoveCats169 couldn’t put your book down and they’ll be delighted that she’s managed to spell most of the words correctly in her review. This shows how normal people, just like the other people you know on Facebook, would like your book if they read it.

8. Wine. See number 1.

And that’s it for social media. See? It’s nothing to be worried about.

Glad I could help.

The Secret to Writing a Series – Part 14 – or the real trick behind avoiding writer’s block by Derek Duggan

These days it is almost inconceivable to write a novel that isn’t going to be part of a series. Readers, apparently, can’t get enough of the same characters doing the same things endlessly. In fact, they cling to contrivances like, say, a magic baddie trying to kill a magic goodie only really while he’s at school and making sure to draw out his attempts to cover an entire school year so that the magic baddie can be defeated in a way that will allow the magic goodie and his friends to get an extra few points to ensure they win the house cup.

First let us take a look at the history of the series. The modern series was invented in 1955 by Ian Fleming when he released the third in the James Bond series of books, Moonraker. There had been many attempts at the series before, but they’d never quite made it past the sequel stage and most of these books disappeared into obscurity almost immediately after they were launched. How many of you have read Oliver UnTwisted,  1985, or Tolstoy’s massive flop A Bit of Arguing and then Everyone Getting Along?

Tolkien had a shot at this too, but ran out of steam at three, also in 1955, with the release of the ultimate volume of The Lord of the Rings, the prophetically titled Peter Jackson’s Pension. So Fleming was left to develop the format alone. He wrote fourteen books in all, many of them quite good, as nobody had realized at that time that there was no need to keep up any semblance of quality with a series. Since then, of course, there have been about 31 Bond books, including the rather good Young Bond series by Charlie Higson and the shatteringly awful Devil May Care by Sebastian Faulks.

Writing a series is not for the faint of heart – Early attempter Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote a ton of short stories featuring Benedict Cumberbatch, but when he tried to convert these into novels it sent him so mental in the face that he started trying to talk to ghosts and things until, in the end, the only person he spoke to was Bruce Willis.

Fleming avoided going bananas by being a bit of a subtle misogynist (allegedly).  You have to look in his books carefully to spot this, but if you think about it, calling a character Pussy Galore  (Goldfinger, 1959) could be interpreted as an example of this tendency. However, recently uncovered correspondence between him and his publisher that I’ve just made up shows that he had originally been much more even handed with his choice of character names and the title character of that particular novel, Auric Goldfinger, had originally been called Cock Uptheringpiece, so maybe we shouldn’t be too quick to judge. But finally the pressure of  keeping the quality up got to him and made him die.

So, how could he have avoided this early grave? Well, he could have taken a leaf out of Erle Stanley Gardner’s books about paint drying, or, as they are more commonly known, the Perry Mason series. This began in 1933 when Gardner realized that there was no Bargain Hunt on the telly in the afternoon and pensioners had nothing to do with their time other than smell faintly of wee. There were over eighty novels featuring lovable Perry and his pals and at the time of Gardner’s death there were 135 million copies of the books in print, which is, coincidently, exactly how many words there are in the bit of The Deathly Hallows where they just hang about doing a bit of camping while waiting for the big showdown at the end of the school year. The difference between Gardner and Fleming is that Gardner realized that in order to avoid a relatively hasty descent into madness and/or dying what he needed to do was to just stick to the formula and write each new book as if the previous ones never happened. And this simple system can really play into the hands of the lazy writer – you still have to actually sit down and type out eighty books, but you never have to worry about writer’s block or anything.

Of course, you need to come up with a simple hook. In Gardner’s case it is that someone is accused of a murder and then, despite what seems like overwhelming evidence at the start, it turns out they didn’t do it and after a bit of cross examination by Perry the real murderer fesses up, just like in real life.

A recent series that has taken this approach is Alexander McCall Smith’s The No 1 Ladies Detective Agency in which some people drink bush tea and some don’t and some people talk to their shoes. And some cars get fixed. This may seem pedestrian, but the hook, the clever bit, is that it all happens in Botswana, so people have funny names which is absolutely hilarious.

And that’s it. That’s all you need to write a series. Just pick a random place and have some people with funny names prove that someone didn’t kill someone else and you’re on your way to your first (of many) bestseller. Here’s a title you can have for free – Hamish Mc Floogenhat and his Outer Hebridian Key Cutting Shop. There’s no end to the possibilities with that one.

What are you waiting for?

Glad I could help.

Are You Made of the Write Stuff?

Or How to let people know you’re a real writer By Derek Duggan

While it’s obvious that a big part of being a writer is actually doing the writing, there are several other things that the modern day author needs to become. A salesman, for one. An entrepreneur, for another. And a lot has been written about these things. However, one thing that is often ignored is this simple question – How pretentious do you actually need to be?

It may seem abhorrent, but being pretentious is a vital part of being an author. And don’t make the mistake of thinking that this is the preserve of the high end literary set. No – these days it is expected of even the most ordinary of writers. Even if you’ve just written a book about army people going around doing shooting and stuff, you will still be expected to be such a pretentious twat that you will do interviews on the telly wearing a balaclava. And that’s a fact.

But you don’t need to jump to this level of bellendedness straightaway. It’s very difficult to carry this kind of thing off from a standing start, so ease yourself into it. Start simply.

Step one is to listen exclusively to BBC Radio 4. Even Gardeners Question Time. This will teach you the vernacular. After a month or so of solid listening you’ll be ready to begin.

The first thing you can do is to stop calling yourself a writer. If you want to be taken seriously you must always refer to yourself as a wordsmith. If you introduce yourself to people thus you can rest assured that they will remember you.

Next, you’ll need to let people know how clever you are without actually saying anything. This seems tricky, but actually it’s very simple. Merely buy a copy of Ulysses by James Joyce and carry it around with you everywhere. Make sure you crease it up a bit and dog ear the pages so it looks like you’ve actually read it and then just leave it on the table when you go to meet friends for coffee. Don’t worry; you won’t have to actually read it. Nobody will ever question you about it or want to discuss it because despite selling millions of copies worldwide the only person who’s ever actually read it is Mrs Joyce and the chances of her showing up to have coffee with you is pretty slim. Once you’ve become comfortable with the book you can learn off a couple of random quotes from it and slip these into conversation. For example, if someone tells you they’re going on holiday to Ibiza or something, why not say – Won’t that be nice? Or, as Joyce might have said - The sea, the snotgreen sea, the scrotumtightening sea. This will make your coffee partner realize that you are indeed a right wordsmith.

After this you might want to have a shot at doing some literary jokes. Perhaps take some friends to the Zoo. When you get to the bear enclosure indicate one of the animals with the corner of your copy of Ulysses and say – I think that one is a Samuel Beckett bear. Your friends may look at you quizzically. Then say – Yes, you can tell because of the big paws! Guaranteed hilarity will ensue and everyone will marvel at how bloody brainy you are.

The next thing you might think about is wearing a hat or some roundy glasses or if you want to go the whole hog, both. Nothing says I’m a brilliant writer like wearing a Panama hat while it’s pissing down in Croydon. And would anyone have gone to see Waiting for Godot if the author responsible hadn’t been an ardent roundy glasses wearer? I think not.

Next you’ll have to start producing something yourself. As a wordsmith you will be used to getting inside the heads of your characters, so use this skill to your advantage and think your way into the head of a teenage girl so you can write some horrendous poetry. Once you’ve done this you’ll be able to whip out your notebook at social gatherings and subject strangers and friends alike to an impromptu recital of your latest poem – Polite Smiles. You will be amazed at how well people will relate to your theme.

Once you’ve mastered this the sky’s the limit. You really can do what you want. George Orwell got so good at it that he pretended to be a tramp for a couple of years. Ernest Hemingway was such a master that he regularly got drunk, punched people in the face and joined in random wars. And John Irving talked about how important he was endlessly.

So what are you waiting for? Dress up like Doctor Who and get out there.

Glad I could help.

Things People Get Wrong Every Day

Number 12: The Book is always better than the film, by Derek Duggan

So, you know how it is – you’re at a party listening to someone who is justifying your misanthropy. Your fake smile is hurting your teeth. Your partner said she was just going to the bathroom for a moment, but that was half an hour ago. You haven’t said a single word in all that time, but your new best bud hasn’t noticed. You imagine being able to open your mouth wide enough to just lean forward and swallow them whole and the tremendous pleasure you’d take in shitting them out the following morning. Somewhere along the line they’ve gleaned you’re a writer and they’ve been telling you all about the sort of book you should be writing and how they only read quality stuff like Danielle Steel or Jackie Collins and then, out of the blue they’ll say – Books are always way better than films. They’ll back this up by telling you how the film of The DaVinci Code wasn’t a patch on the book without ever considering that while the film was so bad it could only have been made worse if Jeremy Clarkson had been in it, it was certainly no worse than the scuttering pile of arse gravy of a book it was based on. Eventually you just think Fuck this and kick them in the banjos/flange before making your excuses and leaving.

There are so many cases where the film is at worst on a par with the book it’s based on and in several cases vastly better. This year, for example, sees the big screen release of Noah. Seriously, Noah, for fuck sake. (The tag line is – I’m the father of a soaking son and the husband of a drenched wife and I will have my big boat full of animals in this life or the next!). Now, no matter how bad that film is - and I’d rather let Christopher Dean do a triple axle spin thing on my knackers than see it - it will still be better than the book it’s based on – Genesis (which is about how God made Phil Collins and Peter Gabriel and stuff).

And what about The Hunger Games? The films manage to skirt over some of the frankly staggeringly awful plot holes in the book (although not the biggest one about the selection process – please see prior rant in a previous issue) and it had that fantastic laugh out loud moment when all those people watching the screens did the really corny salute thing. Add this to the fact that despite the film being a whopping 142 minutes long, it’s still a lot quicker than having to sit down and actually wade through the books.

Next year we are to be treated to the big screen version of Fifty Shades of Grey. I struggle to imagine a way in which the film could be any worse than the book. Again, possibly if Jeremy Clarkson was cast as Grey - Do it to me, do it to me like you’re shooting a badger while setting fire to a gypsy camp.

Sometimes you can see a film that is so tremendously bad and yet inexplicably popular that you think the book must have been very good and they’ve just made an orangutan’s anus of the film. But don’t be tricked. This sort of thinking can lead you to do terrible things like reading Twilight, or Eragon. These are perfect examples of instances where the reader’s imagination is so strong that they actually imagine the book they’re reading isn’t cock cheese.

There are times where, although the book and the film are different in many ways, the director has managed to capture the atmosphere of the book so successfully that you don’t notice the changes. Lasse Halstrom did a superb job of making his 2000 film Chocolat exactly as boring as the book it was based on by Joanne Harris.

Of course, there are many books where both the book and the movie are good, even if in some cases they’re quite different. A case in point is Phillip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? which was filmed as Bladerunner. One of the main reasons I wanted to mention this particular writer here is so I could tell you that in all truthfulness I am a massive Dick fan. The movie doesn’t stick strictly to the book, but it’s equally successful. And this is also the case with Pierre Boulle’s Planet of the Apes. I’m also quite a big Boulles fan. Between Dick and Boulle my weekends are always exciting and I can often be seen with a Dick in one hand and, well, you get the idea with that one.

So, to sum up, what are the main ways in which many films are better than books?

1. They cut out all the shit bits (although sometimes leave lots of shit bits in – all camping stuff in Harry Potter for example).

2. They’re not as long – all descriptions of each individual fucking rock that Frodo and the gang passed on the way to Mordor have been thankfully left out of the 150 hour movie, for instance.

3. Some films of books have Liv Tyler in them whereas no books actually feature her.

I hope that clears up any misunderstandings.

Glad I could help.

The Emperors New Franchise – Is there even any point in attempting to be original?

By Derek Duggan

Here’s a fact – not everyone looks sexy in a thong. Just saying. Here’s another one – eight out of the top ten grossing movies last year were franchise movies, sequels, or based on existing properties. And none of them wore thongs.

So, that means if you’re thinking of writing an original screenplay with a view to selling it for millions you are already at a disadvantage. There’s not really any point in slaving away, developing characters and carefully crafting your plot, if in the end the only films that anyone goes to see are ones where  muscly men and women in lycra (also not something everyone looks sexy in) knock seven bells of shit out of each other, or out of robots or something.

Just how important it is to attach a franchise to one of these movies to trick people into thinking it’s in any way good only becomes obvious when they use precisely the same formula as the big box office winners and come up with a dreadful flop. Nowhere was this clearer than in that film last year where Nelson Mandella fought the big monster things while wearing the giant robot suit. It was called Pacific Rim Job or something and it bombed, despite Mr Mandella’s appearance. If it had been called Godzilla (slated for release this coming summer) Versus the Transformers (also slated for a summer release) then people would have been falling over themselves to see it.

And the quality of the writing has nothing to do with box office success – Star Trek into Darkness was recently voted by fans at a Trek Convention in LA to be the worst Trek Movie of the entire series which takes some fucking doing – and it was beaten by Galaxy Quest which isn’t even a Trek movie. It still made a lot of money. We’ve also had The Amazing Spiderman which had a good cast, decent special effects, but a story that was thinner than William Shatner’s actual hair (allegedly). We’ve got the next installment of The Amazing Spiderman to look forward to this summer along with another X-Men, Captain America, Robocop, Frankenstein etc etc etc.

Indeed, it’s beginning to look like Hollywood is trying to get rid of writers altogether. Even Joss Wheedon, well known for such nicely written pieces as Buffy and in particular Firefly, recently was much lauded for the script of Avengers Assemble which might have read for large parts –

EXT DAY NEW YORK

People in lycra and some aliens and Norse Gods beat the shit out of each other and smash the place to fucking bits for the next hour. Someone in the background wears a thong.

(Note to producers – that will be ten million dollars, please. Thanks, Joss)

This trend is not restricted to movies. Take something like Dexter, for example. It’s based on a book, and that’s fine. The first series was clever and tense with good characters, a great idea and some nice story telling. The second was OK. The third had the same actors in it, but may as well have been a different show altogether for all the resemblance it bore to the original series. But it didn’t end there – it went on for a further five or six seasons. And this is where the difficulty enters – you begin to feel as if you’re in the Twilight Zone (which is surely due for a reboot) as you seem to be the only person who notices the massive drop in the quality of the writing. You begin to think you’re going crazy and feel the need to wrap your head in a sanity towel (you may even feel the need to crowbar really dodgy word-play gags into articles). It seems as if you’ve been sucked into a parallel universe where critical thought causes your toilet parts to fall off or something because everyone is falling over themselves to say how good this thing is despite the fact that it clearly isn’t and has more holes than a week in Vegas with Tiger Woods (probably).

Of course it’s easy to laugh at Hollywood, but before anyone gets on their high horse let’s have a look at some of the recent big hit franchises on British TV. There are currently three Sherlock Holmes things on the go – An American TV thing with Lucy Lu as Watson, a film series starring Tony Stark and directed by Guy ‘Fa faaack sake’ Richie and Sherlock from the BBC which stars Benedict Cumberbatch (excellent as Holmes, but coincidentally one of the stars of the worst Star Trek film ever made, apparently).

What was interesting about the first two seasons of Sherlock was the way the script was cleverly put together to show us the workings of the great detective’s mind. We got to see him making the connections we mortals would never spot unaided, and we delighted at how the only thing he seemed to enjoy was showing us how brilliantly brainy he was. And then we got the third season which everyone seemed to think was superb, but which was, in fact, tremendously disappointing. It may as well have begun with him in the shower with Bobby Ewing. Wearing a thong. Every move was telegraphed to the viewer hours before it happened. There was no satisfactory explanation of how he managed to survive his apparent suicide at the end of the previous season which is precisely the sort of thing the character would have loved. It just looked like the writers couldn’t be arsed to think up anything. A couple of really lame ideas were offered, but nothing that went anyway towards being as clever as the previous series.

And all of this is reminiscent of that moment in Catcher in the Rye, when Holden remarks that Old Ernie, the piano player that everyone adores, is so used to listening to the applause of his fans that he no longer knows what’s good any more. Read the bit yourself on page 84.

So, let’s get our heads down and write something truly original. And let it involve thongs.

Glad I could help.

Getting the most out of the Internet – a basic guide for everyone and God by Derek Duggan

Surely there is no better tool in the aspiring writer’s arsenal than the internet. It makes you wonder how anybody ever wrote anything at all before it was invented by Mr T in the eighties. One of its most basic uses is, of course, simply to check facts, but that’s not much good to us writers. It’s always preferable for the fiction author to just make things up as we go along and then try to apply a plan retrospectively to our story at the end. And writers are in good company there – where would we be if God had checked his facts when he was writing the Bible?

No, there are much better ways to use the internet as a writer. For a start it gives us a great opportunity to see inside the minds of the characters we want to people our stories with without having to actually go out into the real world and do any tedious mucking about with actually talking to people or anything. For example, you may have a story that involves a character who works in the customer service department of an office. You may never have experienced this for yourself and so you could be at a loss as to how to truly inhabit the skin of this person. In the old days you might have had to actually take a job in a real office and spent a year or so working there, befriending people, asking them questions, making endless notes, before you could really understand what it is that office workers do all day. Now, thanks to the internet, that sort of research is a thing of the past. Simply fuck about on facebook all day instead of doing any work and hey presto you’ll know exactly what it’s like to work in customer service. Job done.

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. There are thousands of blogs out there to tell you how useful having a blog is. So, why not write your own blog! You could invite other bloggers on to do a guest blog where they can tell you and your readers all about how useful their blog has been and maybe you could do a guest spot on theirs saying that yours is also useful. This is also the very place for talking about the plan you have retrospectively applied to your new bit of writing in case anyone that has read your stuff has the wrong idea about it. Not only that, but you can fill your blog with other very useful information like how many cups of tea you had while writing your book, what biscuits you prefer, and most importantly, what music you were listening to at the time and how that influenced you. Nothing interests people more than reading about what music someone else has been listening to. If only God would do a blog –

           

Extract from God Blog @yesitsreallyme.com, Bloginus, verses 1-4

Verse 1. And lo, I had hit a wall and wasn’t sure how to continue. In truth I thought I might have to abandon my ambitious project altogether for no baddie had presented himself to hasten my tale onwards.

Verse 2. Thenceforth did I proceed to my mp3 collection and make great declarations that it was to play my favourite song at the time – The Number of the Beast by Iron Maiden.

Verse 3. And then did I fall to my knees and declare Alleluia! As like a bright star in the East the notion did present itself and come fully formed into what would be my head if I had one and thence did the story flow like the Rivers of Babylon (also on my playlist, as is Rasputin – I mean, thou can’st beat a bit of Boney M).

Verse 4. And truly I did give great thanks to Iron Maiden, for I would have been verily bolloxed without them.

Of course, one of the greatest things a writer can do on the internet is to develop a strong social media presence. When you submit your manuscripts this is one of the first things a prospective publisher will look at because it’s much more important to be able to make virtual friends with people than it is to be able to write. The correlation between how many friends you have and how good a writer you are is well documented, but how are you supposed to garner all these friends and followers in the first place? The simple way is to keep asking your existing friends to continuously share links to your blog (and to your friend’s blog that you’ve just done a guest spot on) and to your good review on Amazon. You can occasionally throw in a photo of your dinner (which isn’t a mental-in-the-face thing to do at all) and the odd one of a kitten or dog. This must work and definitely isn’t boring at all as is evidenced by the amount of writers who do just this. You must also throw in constant status updates on how your current work in progress is going. Here’s one I spotted from a while ago on God’s facebook page –

Verily hast I finished my fourth rewrite of the sequel to The Old Testament which is called The New Testament – This time they’re coming back from the dead! (In truth I’m still working on the by-line, maybe I’ll drop it? My publishers simply want to go with – The Gospel, but I think that makes it sound a bit like a West End Musical. What do you think?). I’m not sure which version to go with – perhaps I’ll release all four and let the readers make up their own minds.

And you get the idea with that.

So, that’s just a couple of ways for you to use the internet to great effect. Glad I could help.

Who Are You? (The Dr Who Quiz)

It’s been a hundred and fifty years since Doctor Who started on the BBC and so we thought we’d capitalise on this by having a fun quiz designed to see which Doctor you are most like. Have fun!

Question 1 of 1

Look in the mirror. Examine yourself closely. Do you see –

a) An old grumpy man in a long white wig that looks like it has been bought out of the bargain bin in the joke shop? And are you in black and white?

b) A man in a fur coat with a terrible Beatles wig? Are you still in black and white?

c) Worzel Gummidge?

d) Someone who goes around offering sweets to strangers?

e) A TV vet?

f) Someone who is going to be a lot heavier when they are older?

g) That bloke out of top 1970’s kids art show Vision On? (Not Morph).

h) Someone out of an episode that no one has ever seen?

i) Someone who’ll never talk about it again?

j) A man wearing a coat that’s too big for him?

k) Someone with a chin that begins below your bottom lip and ends slightly above your navel?

Criers, Criers Everywhere, but Not a Drop to Drink – How to deal with those pesky one star reviews by Derek Duggan

You’ve spent the last year writing your novel. You went on to peer review sites and discussed it with other writers. They pointed out some minor flaws so you’ve fixed them. They gave you support when your manuscript was rejected by all the major publishing houses and they even went as far to say that it was their [the publishing houses] loss and that they would rue the day they rejected you and your masterpiece. You have been equally supportive to those writers and you’re beginning to suspect that commissioning editors must spend the vast majority of their time ruing all the rejections they send out when they see self-published novel after self-published novel top the Amazon charts and make millions for their authors. You think that they [the commissioning editors] must all be double jointed at both the hip and the knee because such a large part of their job is kicking themselves.

And so, with the full support of your online writers’ community, you decide to go for it and publish the fantastic book yourself. Everything goes well – the cover looks great – or, if you’re a Frosties fan, it looks grrrrrreat. You pause only to wonder what happened to Tony the Tiger’s television career and then you publish.

All your mates from the site are quick to stick up reviews saying how wonderful your book is and as the five star review count hits seven you can almost hear those commissioning editors lacing up their extra heavy boots. A couple of people you know from real life also buy the book and you’ve asked them, if they wouldn’t mind terribly, to post a review (if they’ve enjoyed it – ha-ha). These people, who have to look you in the eye every day, do so and your five star review count reaches double figures.

And then it happens. Someone you don’t know has put up a one star. You go back to your peer group and everyone agrees – this reviewer is either a troll or just plain rude. Apart from anything else they haven’t even given a detailed analysis of the book saying where they thought it fell down. They’ve said things like – ‘All those five star reviews must be from the author’s family…’ How bloody dare he/she say something like that? Everyone knows that if you review a book on a site you must spend at least a week writing and rewriting it so that you can explain in detail what you thought. And, to point out just how stupid the person is that wrote this review, there are two spelling mistakes in their thirty word critique, and they’ve left out some commas (the calling card of the ignorant wanker).

You feel victimised and annoyed and everyone agrees with you.

But hang on – here’s the thing. This person is not a writer. They are simply a customer. They have just bought the book to read. They don’t care that you spent a year writing it and going on to peer review sites etc. They just know that they spent their money on something they didn’t enjoy and they feel like telling people about it. That’s fair enough, right? But, you cry, they shouldn’t be rude. They should explain in beautiful prose what exactly it was that upset them and take some time through close reference and indeed cross reference with other works to explain how the author would have been able to please them. They really should, shouldn’t they? (Boo-hoo).

Uhmmmm, no. They can if they want, but they’re under no obligation to do so. As for being rude, well, that’s just the way people are. People double park, throw litter in the street, answer their mobile phones while talking to you, eat with their mouths open – I mean, the list is endless. These are the same people that buy things.

Think of it like this – your boiler packs in. You call a plumber out. You’re not very impressed with him and although he does the job you’re not satisfied. You decide to leave a review of his services on a plumber review website.  Compare these two -

1.       Piping Plumbers Ltd

Our boiler ceased to function correctly recently so I looked online for a good plumber to come in and fix it for us. I found Piping Plumbers. They had twelve five star reviews so I thought I’d give them a go.

Unfortunately I was not as impressed with the service as the other reviewers. I have long been an admirer of good pipe work, as in the masterful work in the local Garden Centre where the exposed section of the copper piping has been beautifully soldered and aligned perfectly to give a sense of confidence in the functionality of the system. Piping Plumbers soldering left a lot to be desired as the globules of solder were clearly visible on the joints and this drew my attention away from the hot water that I needed to do the washing-up. I always feel, that to truly lose yourself in the hot water coming from the tap you have to make sure that your attention isn’t continually drawn to those small globes of silver, beaded around the joint. His pipe alignment was also slightly off so as the intake pipe and the outflow pipe were not exactly parallel, (out by three full millimetres according to my tape measure) meaning that the sense of continuity was disrupted throughout and I could never truly relax into the water usage.

There was also a lot of detritus left region of the boiler after he vacated the premises which I felt could have been tidied up somewhat as this made me feel like he hadn’t really thought about how the hot water user would respond to this.

The tune he whistled relentlessly while doing the job seemed out of place and, far from sounding cheerful, actually put me on edge the entire time he was there. He was streets away from the tuneful whistlings of the forest workers of Norway who have spent a long time honing their craft before whistling on the job.

I understand that this is the plumber’s first attempt at boiler instillation on his own and so I suggest he might like to take a look at the pipes in the public toilets in Cheswick or the public swimming baths in Ealing and I think he’ll find some useful pointers.

-versus-

2.       Piping Plumbers Ltd

Rough as fuck. Left the place in a mess. Never stopped fucking whistling. All those five star reviews must be from family. Don’t waste your money.

Which one seems more likely?

So, if you get a one star, suck it up.

Glad I could help.

How to get a bum like Kylie’s

The poetry method (and other stuff about peer review) by Derek Duggan

We’ve all been there. You’re at a party and you’ve been introduced to someone and everything seems to be going along nicely. Then they suddenly say – I had this dream last night… You do a little bit of sick into your mouth, swallow it back, and fix your wide eyed polite smile on your face as they begin to tell you about it. The only thing that could have made it worse was if they had offered to tell you about the dream in the form of interpretive dance. Or worse again, in verse.

Kylie Minogue stated in an interview in 2008 that how she kept her award winning bum in shape was by inviting people around to her house to recite poems at her. The involuntary bum clenches that accompanied her embarrassment were so strong that no other form of exercise was necessary. And all she had to do to insure they would keep coming back was to tell them how good she thought their poem was. This was apparently the trickiest part, but award winning bums don’t clench themselves into shape, so needs must.

What is it that stops us from simply running away when confronted with these situations? Well, many of us will have been put into stomach ulcer inducing embarrassing situations by friends or family when they get their kids to do a little show of some sort while you’re over visiting. Little Mary will be marched out to murder some song or other and you sit there and listen while willing your head not to catch fire. The torture comes to an end and that’s when the truly mental part starts – other friends and relatives burst into what sounds like genuine applause and then go on to gush enthusiastically about how amazing the child is. Several things go through your head – you wonder if the other people in the room have witnessed the same tuneless shouting as you just have. You wonder if perhaps the rest of the guests have shoveled a shed load of drugs into their faces pre-party in anticipation of this very event. But mostly you just hope that the wealth of encouragement won’t spur them on to do another fucking song.

Everyone takes a turn at heaping praise on the child and eventually all eyes rest on you. You have your chance to give an honest appraisal, but do you? Do you fuck! You say it was fantastic and hope you won’t be asked to elaborate. And it’s at that exact moment you realize where all the deluded nutters come from in the audition phase of The X Factor, and that you’re partly responsible.

Over time you can develop this ability to always stack positive praise on people no matter what the actuality of the situation is and if you get good enough at it you can go on to writing forums and do crits for people. Remember, people may ask for your honest opinion, but just like little Mary, they only mean that if what you’ve got to say is for the most part positive to the point of gushing. Any attempt to point out, even in a nice way, that the story, characters or premise don’t hold water will have you branded a troll faster than a vindaloo and eight pints of lager can pass through your body. The result of being branded a troll is that you will have few, if any, people who will crit your work for you and many of those that do will be operating on a level of spite normally reserved for people who post positive messages about being single on facebook.

Of course, if you play by the rules and say how wonderful everyone else is then you can reasonably expect equally nice things to be said about you. Not only that, but in return for posting a link to someone’s terrible book on facebook or twitter they will have no problem posting a link to your terrible book. And don’t forget, anyone who says that your book is anything short of excellent is a troll and their opinion is not worth a rub of one of Jordan’s knockers.

Does this mean that all those lovely crits you get from your virtual friends on your writers site are worthless in any kind of literary critique sense of the word? The short answer – Yes. The slightly longer answer – Yes, they are. The real question is – Does it matter? It’s not doing anyone any harm and it makes you feel good about yourself and at the end of the day whether your book is good or not will have absolutely no bearing on how it does in the market place. So long as you don’t believe the hype everything will be fine. Remember, you don’t want to end up being the undiscovered writer equivalent of one of the deluded people off the X Factor, who ends up being absolutely stunned when their manuscript is rejected even though they’ve been told by friends that it’s a masterpiece.

OK. Is everyone clear on that now? Good. Glad I could help.

I love me, what’s your hobby?

Writing your biographical note By Derek Duggan

There comes a point in every writer’s career where you will have to write a biography about yourself to stick on the fly leaf of your book. Simple, you might think, I can knock one out faster than a UKIP voter can say ‘I’m not a racist.’ But is it really that easy?

As anyone who has ever seen The Apprentice knows, when people talk themselves up they simply sound like the kind of person you’d like to see being made to lick up some dog sick. It’s a tricky thing and no matter how good you think you are at it you will always walk the fine line between coming over as a massive cock and coming over as a slightly less massive cock. This is further compounded for authors by the fact that you have to write the piece in the third person, the massive cockest of all the persons.

You might think that an easy way out of this is simply to get someone else to write it for you, but be advised – this won’t work as the reader is going to assume you wrote it yourself (unless you’re Katie Price in which case the reader will assume that you didn’t even write this bit).

So, what should you do? First it’s important to consider the genre of book you’ve written. More than anything else this has a giant bearing on what you need to include.

The most basic of all biographies is reserved for works of fiction. When asked to provide one of these here is an example of what to do –

Jessica Writer is the author of three novels including the critically acclaimed I’m a Writer. She lives in Holland with her husband and two daughters.

And that’s it. Many authors get this right, but there are an alarming number of people out there who take this opportunity to write a two thousand word essay about themselves. If you’ve won a relevant award, like the Booker or something, this will already be included on your cover, so there’s no need to put it in again. The full list of your other works will already be included and you can stick in a few quotes from various reviews on a separate page so you don’t have to include them again in your biography.

However, if you’re writing non-fiction you might like to include your qualifications and any relevant experience and so on.

Doctor Jessica Writer is a doctor and has done a lot of doctor things to do with medicine. This book is all about medicine so she knows what she’s talking about. She lives in Brazil with her Doctor husband and her children who are healthy because she’s a good doctor with mediciny knowledge. She qualified at being a doctor in a university and she works in a hospital.

This sort of thing is absolutely necessary because otherwise people might think you don’t know what you’re talking about. Many an excellent non-fiction tome has been let down in this way.

Books about food are divided into two categories, that of How to Cook It and Go on a Diet and this means that the biographies and especially the photos that go with it have to be very carefully chosen indeed. The photo in these cases is actually far more important than the words which accompany them. If you have written a How to Cook It book then you will need a very glossy shot of you looking happy and a bit unfit. Nigella Lawson, for example, often includes a photo of herself which has been mercilessly Photoshopped so that it resembles a person who has had their skin stretched around three hundred kilos of butter which coincidently is eighty per cent of the ingredients you will need to cook any of the recipes contained within. A short paragraph about yourself will do.

Jessica Writer has been eating food ever since she can remember. She eats, sleeps and drinks food. She loves food so much that she once ate the hind leg off the lamb of God. She lives in France with her husband and two cherubby children.

On the other hand, if you have written a Go on a Diet book, ideally you will need to have a picture of yourself looking extremely fit and wearing yoga gear with your midriff bare. If this worries you simply photoshop your head onto a picture of Jessica Ennis and Bob’s your mother’s brother. The words which accompany this should be similar to that of the Cook Book writer’s with just a few subtle yet important differences.

Jessica writer has been eating healthy food ever since she decided to lose weight. She eats well, sleeps soundly and drinks anything she can liquidize. She feels as fresh as a lamb. She lives in California with her husband, two dogs and a cat.

The authors who walk the finest line of all are those whose books fall into the self-help/esoteric category. Research has shown that the amount of units you shift is in direct proportion to how mental you make yourself sound in your biography. However, it’s not as simple as just starting out by saying you feel at one with the world because you drink a litre of goat spunk every morning. You have to lead into it, make yourself sound relatively normal and like you know all about the real world and then through a short series of seemingly logical steps work up to the goat jizz consumption.

Jessica Writer worked in the city for twelve years. Although extremely financially successful she felt her personal life was unfulfilling and out of control. She was surrounded by people and yet always felt alone. She tried many thing – yoga, meditation, a healthy diet, but none of these seemed to be doing the trick. And that’s when she found that ingesting a litre of man goat muck every day made her truly happy. And now she wants to share the secret with you.

And there you have it. Simply pick the relevant template for your book and success is practically guaranteed (disclaimer – success is not actually guaranteed).

Glad I could help.