New Beginning

In March 2020 I said goodbye to my career

I decided to turn my back on my work as a TV dramatist and begin to write novels.

On the surface the decision was mystifying. I had 25 years behind me in TV, and I had done OK, so why would I want to abandon all that and put myself back at the very beginning of a new form of story-telling? Working in TV is one of the best-paid jobs you can get as a writer in the UK. Novels famously make no money. Self-publishing my own novels was going to be even more risky. This decision made no sense.

Except that it did.

The hard stop that came to the world in the Spring of 2020 was the final piece in a change that had been building in me for a while.

Quite to my surprise, in the summer of 2017, after quite a rackety life, I had become a Christian. The slow process of working that change into every corner of my life had left me with a new sense of purpose, and a renewed drive.

In late 2019, after three years mentoring other writers, I had decided to return to writing. I had found myself a new agent, and I was booked to write an episode of one of the most popular British soaps in late Spring 2020.

It was a show I’d never actually worked on before, and I was looking forward to the challenge.

Then a certain virus entered the news cycle and everything changed.

It was an interesting time, and gave me lots of room to think.

Which I soon realised I needed.

A choice or a crisis?

I had loved my time writing and editing and teaching TV drama, but the landscape had changed, and for a few years I had been feeling I no longer fitted.

Writing for a TV soap was a great, well-paid job, and I should have been grateful, but the more I thought about it, the more uneasy I got.

If I’m honest, I felt that TV drama’s Golden Period was in the early 2000s, and the last heyday had been around 2014-16.

What’s more, I was feeling more and more like a dinosaur. I knew that the stories I personally needed to tell at that time were never going to get to screen, and I was feeling less and less satisfied by the shows I was watching.

This reached a head when I lockdown-binge-watched an entire eight-part Netflix drama with my daughter, and three weeks later neither of us could remember a thing about it.

The show was so well-crafted it had flowed along without either of us needing to switch it off, but it had contained precisely nothing of value.

I started watching TV more critically, and acknowledged a new superficiality to the whole field.

Everything, even the so-called ‘gritty’ ‘grown-up’ dramas, just seemed bland. Shallow. Fake.

There was also a great emphasis on behaviour that I felt wasn’t good for our society.

It sometimes even felt as there was a controlling voice, a controlling narrative, behind the whole landscape that I simply couldn’t agree with.

I won’t go into detail on that, as I don’t want to be any more negative, but if you know, you know.

That brought me up sharp. What was I doing, spending all my creative energy writing for such a medium?

I have never been one of the world’s super-prolific writers, but there, in my late fifties, I really had to face the fact that I no longer had the years left to waste on projects that were bland. Shallow. Fake.

Books in the age of screens?

Over that spring of the first lockdown I wrote my first novel, and it turned out pretty well. It was a story that would never have made it to a TV screen, but I loved it more than any script I’d worked on for years.

Most of all, it felt like a proper reflection of something that only I, with my particular life experiences and imagination, could create.

I also thought it had real value for the world.

I’ve been writing since I was 16, and the desire to write fiction had been at the back of everything I’d ever done since then.

If I had any kind of valuable contribution to the world, then it had to be made through writing.

In TV you have to get used that every script you write is passed through (at least) a script-editor, a producer, an executive producer, a head of department, and a director. Possibly a couple of researchers and technical advisors. Maybe a trainee editor too.

Each one of them lobs in armfuls of notes, and page after page of their own thoughts. Each one of these notes is more or less useful, but each needs addressing by the writer.

On each episode, from beginning to end, you will probably go through ten or fifteen versions of pitches, story treatments, scene-by-scenes, and draft scripts.

There’s no wonder that what you end up seeing on screen is very often nothing like the way you imagined, or wanted, it to be.

Now, there’s no denying how that collaborative process has been known to produce works of genius. Some of the great shows of the last thirty years have been made exactly in this way (though you can usually find a super-creative lone voice fiercely defending a singular vision at the heart of them all).

More often than not these days, this group process, coupled with the vicious commercial realities of the modern TV industry and the constant fight for survival, leads to a compromise.

It tends to produce slick, efficient, entertainment that glances off anything that matters and slides past your heart with absolutely no impact.

That’s no good for any writer.

When you are younger you can take the disappointment for a while, but I had no time to spend on work like that any more. I had to take charge of the entire process.

Choose books

When I write books and have them self-published, for better or worse, it’s all down to me.

The characters, the story, the themes, the ownership of the entire process, the success and the failure of the whole process, it’s all down to me.

If a self-published book fails there is no-one else to blame.

If it succeeds, ditto.

Irresistible.

The books that I write are still full-on entertainment, because I don’t like books that ‘have a message’ or are ‘good for you’.

My background is mass-market, popular drama, TV shows like Casualty, Holby, The Bill, but even back then, in every episode I wrote I tried to find something never before seen; something very human and fresh.

Something that ran deeper. Something true.

Now I’m at this point in my life, that depth is more important to me than ever.

I always believed that there was no reason why the most entertaining TV shows couldn’t also be really good.

I’m aiming to write fiction like that. I hope you like it.