Milestones

August 1982

Pine trees, sand dunes, heat. I was sweltering in a tent near the beach at Soulac sur Mer in South West France. I'd hitchhiked down there at the end of June, and been there for weeks, swimming, hanging out with the campsite workers, enjoying the sense of nothing to do and a big wide world before my first year at university. But the evening before I'd heard three people had died swimming off that same coast that same summer. I felt a strange mix of emotions. I had loved the beach, being out in the world for the first time, and I had especially loved swimming in the sea. That three people had drowned nearby at practically the same time seemed bizarre. Eerie even. No idea why, but I tried writing down what I felt. A strange image came to mind: a man walking across a field of maize. The maize was high, blotted out the horizon as it waved in the wind. The man seemed to be walking in a bubble, alone, against a big sky. I couldn't make sense of it all, or what I was trying to do. I stopped writing, went for another swim, forgot about it all.

December 1985

My mother bought our family a strange present for Christmas. An Amstrad PCW8256 word processor. No-one knew what it was, or what it was for. After experimenting I realised this strange device made rewriting seem like playing video games. I liked video games so I took out all my notebooks; the one I'd kept from Soulac, and lots more. Three days later I finished my first short story, and the man in the cornfield was in there. I called it "Indian Summer" and I sent it off to a competition that the publisher Victor Gollancz was running in conjunction with the Sunday Times. I got shortlisted, and was eventually published in the book of the competition. That lit the fire alright.

November 1995

I sat in a lecture theatre in London, desperately trying to write down every word the irascible man on stage was barking at the audience. In the 10 years since the Amstrad I'd written a ton of short stories since Indian Summer, and sold about two more. I'd started, and not finished, three novels. I'd spent an awful amount of time, and money, and life, on writing fiction, but I was clearly missing something crucial. As a desperate last fling I turned one of the short stories into a screenplay. A friend who was working in the BBC Drama department read the script and angled it so that I was called in for interview. I ended up with a 6 month, non-renewable contract as a trainee script editor. At that time the first thing the BBC Drama Dept did to you was send you on the Robert McKee Story course. Where he shouted at you. For three whole days. But McKee showed me there was such a thing as story structure, and explained how it might be achieved, and in doing so closed the gap that had been sparking fitfully for the last 13 years. Suddenly I understood how I could transform clouds of emotions and thoughts into a shape that would have meaning to someone else.

June 1999

I was literally hiding out in my office in a warehouse called Bosun House in South London. This was the headquarters of a UK police show called The Bill, where I had a job as a script editor. I also had a big problem. A script I had been editing hadn't made the grade. I had picked the wrong writer, and although the cameras had to turn over less than a week, all I had to offer the director was a pile of parts. This was a terrible situation - there was no way on earth they could not shoot, the system was far too inflexible. I was far too experienced a script editor by then to have let this happen. But luckily the situation was too far gone for recrimination: the only thing left was to make it work. For the next two days I sat with the director, the series script editor, and the supercharged ace in the hole, the producer - a man with thirty years of experience of television drama. Between us we batted that story round and round, up and down, never writing more than the odd note. At the end of those two days we had our story. The series editor and I scribbled down a bullet point summary, took half each and started writing scenes and dialogue. Two days later we had a script, and it worked, and after one more polish it got filmed and made a great episode. That producer taught me something priceless - a story doesn't live on paper, it lives best in the air between people.

And that was it - the final piece of the machine. No looking back...