Doctor Who - “The Daleks”
Posted By Iain Coleman on January 26, 2009
The next Doctor Who serial review is now available: The Daleks.
Doctor Who - From the Beginning
Posted By Iain Coleman on January 11, 2009
Inspired - or should I say led astray? - by Piers, I’m watching (or, where necessary, listening to) every Doctor Who story in broadcast order, until I get to the end, or I give up, or I fall under a bus. I’m writing up my thoughts as I go along, and I’ll be archiving them on this site.
My reaction to the very first serial, “An Unearthly Child”, is here.
Strengths and Weaknesses
Posted By Iain Coleman on January 9, 2009
Via Danny Stack, a simple but far-reaching meme: what are your strengths and weaknesses as a writer?
The first things that come to my mind are linked. I think I have a strength in writing real characters, people with the foibles and obsessions of actual human beings rather than puppets who merely operate the plot and pass on exposition. But the other side of the coin is that drama generally demands active, sympathetic protagonists, and that’s something I need to consciously work on.
Writing this, it occurs to me that one project that has got rather bogged down is probably struggling because the protagonist is too passive and unsympathetic - with the former being the worse of the two sins. However, his wife is both more active and more sympathetic. Perhaps she should be the protagonist? Hmm…
Agendas
Posted By Iain Coleman on December 18, 2008
Agendas - they’re not just for committee meetings. Though, ironcally, it was while writing a committee meeting scene that I realised what I had to do do bring it alive.
Every character in a scene should come into it with their own agenda. It might be central to the plot or a peripheral piece of colour, but there should be something they want to achieve by being in that place at that time, and they should try to achieve it as far as circumstances and their own abilities allow.
It’s a simple enough point, but all too easy to overlook when you’re trying to fit a story together. But it’s the difference between a story populated by real people with real lives, and one inhabited by cardboard cutouts being pushed around by authorial fiat. I know I’ve never said to myself “I must pop down the pub with Steve because he may wish to unfold to me a vital piece of exposition”, and it’s vital to ensure that you don’t fall into the trap of having characters behave like this. The driver of the screenplay, as Todd Alcott constantly reminds us, is “What does the protagonist want” - but that shouldn’t blind us to the fact that everyone else in the world wants something as well.
(V.O.)
Posted By Iain Coleman on November 17, 2008
I’ve just read NIcholas Pileggi’s screenplay for Casino, and it’s masterly in its use of voiceover. Which is just as well, since the majority of the text is delivered in this form. One of his techniques, which I hadn’t consciously noticed when I watched the film, but which jumps right out of the page, is that he starts an element of voiceover slightly - a word or two - before the scene to which it pertains. This serves to keep this long, talky film moving, never losing its momentum. It also makes the screenplay a bit awkward to read, especially at a hefty 331 script pages - but then, a screenplay does exist in a curiously undefined region between artisitc text and technical document. Some screenwriters - Russell T Davies, say - write such fluent, flowing scripts that you quite forget they are not a finished production in themselves, but Pileggi is willing to sacrifice some readibility on the page in order to achieve flow and drive on the screen.
Still, reading such a voiceover-dominated script raises two questions: when should you use voiceover, and how should you employ it? It’s an easy technique to overuse. Let’s face it, one of the big challenges of screenwriting is that we don’t have access to the characters’ internal states, and must find ways to depict these through action. How tempting, to short-circuit all that hard work, and just have the characters talk to the audience directly!
How tempting, and how lazy. Voiceovers are usually dull because we came to the cinema or turned on the telly to see drama. If we’d wanted a voiceover, we could have litened to the radio, or a talking book. Audiences know when they’re being cheated.
The big exception is when the film takes the audience behind the scenes, showing them the secret reality behind a familiar facade, such as when Casino shows us the corruption and violence that underpins the glitz of Las Vegas. Here, the voiceover becomes conspiratorial. “Listen,” it seems to say, “and I’ll tell you a secret”.
The same principles apply to breaking the fourth wall. Lazily employed, it can be a tedious device. But when a character turns to us and tells us a secret, not just about him or herself but about the way things really work in the world, it makes us feel as if we are being accorded a privileged glimpse into an enticing, hidden reality. Ian McKellen uses this to great effect in his version of Richard III, and Francis Urquhart beguiled audiences in the same way in Andrew Davies’ House of Cards.
So I guess the lesson is, use voiceover or break the fourth wall if you want, but make sure you’re telling the audience a secret, so that they know more than most of the people on screen. And make sure the story keeps going while you do it.
Forbidden Openings
Posted By Iain Coleman on November 7, 2008
As a science writer, there are certain words and phrases you must never use when beginning an article.
“Scientists…”
“Researchers…”
…and any reference to the number of international researchers who came to your workshop.
No one cares.
Your job, as a science writer, is to make people care. That doesn’t mean you have to pander to some imagined audience of selfish mediocrities. That’s even more insulting than being boring. Your audience consists of intelligent people, and they want to be engaged in intelligent argument.
Tell them why this work is being done at all. What motivates the scientists? They’re doing this work because they think its interesting, or important, or both. In the course of their research, they tend to bury that motivation, and their discussions are all about abstruse and technical matters. You have to rediscover that motivation, situate the work in a wider intellectual context. Only then can you tell your readers about the technicalities.
Always start with the why.
The Doom We Must Deem
Posted By Iain Coleman on October 31, 2008
Just for fun, a friend and I were batting around some ideas on how to adapt The Lord of the Rings as a TV series. A futile exercise, I know: it would actually be easier to take the Ring of Power to Mount Doom yourself and film it than to get the rights for an adaptation. Still, I idly had some ideas about how to adapt a few of the scenes, and instead of just forgetting about them I wrote them out as first-draft scripts of a few pages each.
This turned out to be a really interesting exercise, in two ways. First, as an exercise in writing, it made me think hard about how to compress ideas, making each line of dialogue do as much work as possible in the smallest space and setting up information for the viewer at just the right time. Secondly, it also turned out to be an exercise in reading. I’ve read the book countless times, but writing an adaptation forced me to read the text more closely than ever, making me notice all sorts of details that had never stuck in my mind on any previous reading.
I was born the same year Tolkien died, which means I’ll be 70 by the time the text comes out of copyright. At 3½ pages per month, I could have all three eight-episode series drafted by the time the big day comes around. Or… I could get back to my spec script. Yes, that seems more sensible
Not a mother-in-law gag
Posted By Iain Coleman on October 31, 2008
There’s a character in the current spec script who gave me a real problem when it came to writing her dialogue. She’s the mother-in-law of the principal character, and every time I started writing one of ther lines I would hear the voice of Jackie Tyler. Now Jackie has a pretty overbearing voice, and I had to write pages and pages before I could get that voice out of my head. The process involved a lot of work in developing my character’s priorities, obsessions and attitudes, distinguishing her from Jackie Tyler by her petit-bourgeois preoccupations, her polite circle of lady friends and her concern for the appearance of propriety.
The result is that the character became strongly delineated in her own right, and has been very positively received by people who’ve read the drafts - none of whom spotted anything of Jackie on the page. She might well have been much less vividly drawn if I hadn’t been trying to furiously write myself away from Mrs Tyler. I guess it goes to show the virtue of writing your way through a problem instead of fretting about it.
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