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Go on, say hello.

I’m off to Cheltenham next week for the Screenwriters’ Festival. You can find my thoughts on previous years by checking out this handy-dandy magic blogspot tag thing.

Executive summary: it’s excellent, and well worth the money. You can still get tickets from the festival website.

If you’re going to be coming along too and it’s your first time at the festival, you might be a little nervous about meeting people, especially if you’re going on your own.

Fortunately, we have a solution.

The lovely and talented Michelle Lipton, Jason Arnopp, Phill Barron, and myself will be holding our now-traditional go-on-say-hello-what’s-the-worst-that-can-happen networking do on the Sunday night.

By which I mean:

We’ll be down the pub, and we’d love for you to join us.

You’ll be able to find us in the bar of the Queen’s Hotel on the evening of Sunday 25th October from about six o’clock onwards.

It’ll be a chance to put names to faces and get to know people before everything kicks off in earnest on the Monday.

Hope to see you there!

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Letters From America: Jobs for the boy

originally posted 2nd May 2004
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Well, my second spec script is finished.

As with the first one, we’re having a table read in my apartment block next Sunday. A bunch of actors and writers will come over, sit around our ping-pong table, and read my words aloud.

During this, I get to see where it sucks most, and fix it.

I’m pretty happy with the two scripts that I have now, so after the read-through and a final dialogue pass to remove any words that the actors have problems with, it’s time to go into phase three of the plan.

For the next two months I’m going to be job-hunting.

This will basically involve calling and/or writing letters to a) agents and b) producers which basically say this:

I write. I’m very good. I’m professional enough to know that I need to show you two specs, and to be working on another now. Would you like to read my stuff?

If they do (oh, and that’s a big if), and they like it, then I get either a) representation or b) a meeting.

Meetings are good. Meetings let you put a face to people so that you can interact properly when you call them up next and try to sell them stuff.

I need to get meetings.

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The other writing secrets

Danny Stack did a brilliant series of posts last year called Professional Screenwriter. It’s ten blogsworth of advice about how to succeed as a writer and it is, as the kids say, full of win.

If you haven’t read them already, you can get ’em here:

Reading
Writing
Networking
Industry Insider
Get an Agent
Discipline
Attitude
Choosing Work
In the Know
Doing the Do

In addition to that, James Moran has revealed the big secret of how to be a writer. It’s four words long, and it’s answered in the very first question of his enormous writing FAQ.

So, there you go. Those eleven posts are all you need to read about how to become a writer.

But there’s a whole bunch of other useful stuff, too. Things that you can do to make your life easier, that aren’t exactly about writing itself, or how to make a career of it, but will come in really useful over the years ahead.

So, in no particular order, here are the other writing secrets.

Learn Proofing Marks

When you’re working on a draft, you need to mark it up with your notes: delete this, move that to there, add in a whole bunch of stuff here.

The typesetting industry has a standard set of marks, which are easy to read and which anyone in the print industry can understand – once you learn them then you’ll be able to mark up changes to your own drafts quickly and clearly.

This page introduces the basic marks and links to a two-page PDF which you can print out and keep next to your desk.

Learn to touch type – preferably using a Dvorak keyboard

Touch typing is faster than pick-and-peck, which means you can get the words out faster when you’re drafting, and change them faster when you’re revising. There’s nothing more annoying than having the right words in your head and simply not being able to get them written quickly enough.

There is one problem with learning to type, though, and it’s that the QWERTY keyboard is not a good design for touch-typists.

The Dvorak keyboard was created in 1932, and was specifically designed to make touch-typing easier. As well as increasing your typing speed, it’s easier to learn. And as your fingers don’t move so much across the keyboard (because the keys are in sensible places), many writers (myself included) have also found that it reduces symptoms of RSI.

It takes less than five minutes to switch your computer to a Dvorak layout, and you can find Dvorak typing tutors here.

Buy a laser printer

You might have had a printer thrown in when you bought your computer. Probably a colour one, these days.

But scripts aren’t printed in colour. And you’re going to be printing an awful lot of scripts.

You can buy a laser printer for less than a hundred quid, and it’ll save you money in the long run.

A laser printer cartridge is more expensive than an inkjet one, but it lasts longer. A lot longer. And over the life of the printer, that means it’s actually cheaper to have a laser printer.

Get a sensible email address

While I’m certain that cat_lover573@yahoo.co.uk is indeed a lovely email address that expresses your personality perfectly, it doesn’t exactly scream Scriptwriting Professional.

firstname.lastname is a good bet. It’s also easy to remember.

In an ideal world, you’d have your own domain (the .com thing) and maybe even put a website there saying who you are. Failing that, the largest free email providers are Gmail, Yahoo, and Hotmail.

Act

As a screenwriter, actors are going to have to read your words and perform your actions at some point.

Taking an acting class or performing in some amateur theatre productions will give you an excellent grounding in some of the joys and problems of that.

A little bit of acting experience will not only help you to understand how an actor constructs their performance around the text, it’ll help you to provide character and, yes, even motivation.

Stand up

If you’re a comedy writer, do a couple of sets of stand-up. Many comedy clubs have open mic nights where you can get up on stage and perform for five or ten minutes. (Five minutes is more than long enough for your first set.) Performing your own material is an excellent way to hone your skills on seeing where the laughs are, and getting more.

You’re not going to be as good a standup or actor as anyone who does it for a living. But what you will get is new tools for your writing toolbox.

Learn basic typographical design

The Non-Designer’s Design Book is a book which teaches the basics – and just the basics – of print design.

We’re not talking about anything fussy or fancy-schmancy here. Just some easy ways of laying out your text on a page to make it look nicer.

It won’t help you with scripts – they have a standard layout for a very good reason – but for things like covering letters, show bibles, or pitch documents, being able to lay them out in a sensible, beautiful, easy-to-read way will set you ahead of the pack.

So there you have it. Seven useful writing tips that have nothing to do with writing.

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Letters from America: Words, words, words.

originally posted 11th April 2004
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So I attended the Game Developers Conference in San Jose a couple of weeks ago.

We know a lot about engendering emotion through novels and films. While telling a story in a game uses different methods of presentation (via cut-scenes and in-game dialogue, for example), we don’t need new theories to talk about how to make characters and story affect people.

Most of the writing presentations at the conference were concerned with emotion through story and character, but one looked at the emotions you can experience through gameplay itself.

The speaker was Nicole Lazzaro, President of User Experience Research company XEODesign. If any of you are thinking of developing games any time soon, I highly recommend you get in touch with her.

A large portion of the talk covered the emotions that you probably know about already: anger, frustration, wonder, awe, excitement, relief, amusement, and schadenfreude. All can be brought in via gameplay or design rather than story or character.

In a way, she’s proved that it’s simply not necessary to have a compelling story to have an emotionally involving game. But I guess those of you who’ve played Tetris or Solitaire already know that.

The most important things I took away, though, were two words.

Fiero and Naches.

Fiero is an Italian word. It’s the emotion you experience when you finally overcome adversity, or solve a problem. It’s the thrill you get from filling in a clue in a crossword puzzle, or beating the end-of-level boss. It’s the moment when you clench your fist and say: “Yes!”, or throw your arms above your head.

Naches (the ch is pronounced as in chutzpah, or reich) is from the Yiddish. It’s the emotion of pleasure or pride at the accomplishment of someone you’ve helped or trained. It’s the feeling you get as a parent, teacher, or mentor, when someone is able to succeed because of what you’ve shown them.

Now the point is, we’ve all experienced these two emotions.

But before now, I had no way to talk about them. I had no way of defining these emotions, or discussing them with other people. I had no way to consider how to analyse or engender these emotions, no way to understand or discuss them.

Without these words to define the concepts, I had no way to even *think* about them.

Today I can do things that I couldn’t do before, have thoughts and experiences that I simply couldn’t have a fortnight ago, just because I know two new words.

And now you can too.

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Splendid!

Hoorah!

The Splendid trailer is now available for your viewing pleasure.

Do the clicky thing with the arrow. You know you want to.

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A serious flaw with the standard SIZR model of zombie infection.

While the recent publication of When Zombies Attack! Mathematical modelling of an outbreak of Zombie Infection [1] represents a great step forward in our scientific understanding of the process of a zombie outbreak, their model posesses a flaw which must be addressed before we can truly say we understand the process of infection.

Their model assumes that ζR represents the number of Removed who subsequently become resurrected. Any undergraduate student of Zombie Virology would realise that there is a further state T from which the Removed may become Truly dead, viz. when their brains are destroyed.

As this T state would remove a certain number of individuals from the R state, the transmission rate for the virus would necessarily proceed at a lower rate. This would inevitably lead to a slowed increase in the number of active zombies, thus increasing the length of human survival to a period of time longer than the standard SIZR model would predict.

In addition, in the SIZR-Q model, zombies and the infected would almost certainly be moved to the T category within the length of any serious outbreak as those quarantined are killed permanently by brain-destruction.

Surely this is something that peer-review should have caught.

1: Munz, Hudea, Imad, Smith? 2007

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Running with the Bulls

I went running with the bulls in Pamplona this year.

If you’re not aware of this particular pastime, it’s like this:

Six bulls run through the streets of the town.
You run in front of them, until they catch up.
Then you run alongside them and let them pass.
That’s it.

It’s known in Spain as the encierro, and the original purpose of it was to move the bulls from their overnight holding pen to the bullring for the day’s bullfighting.

My girlfriend was born in Pamplona, the site of the largest encierro in Spain during the festival of San Fermín. (He’s the patron saint of the town.) The Sanfirmines encierro is broadcast live across Spain throughout the festival.

So I thought it would be nice to run with the bulls one year.

Why not? It looks like fun, it’s something that brings me closer to Loli’s culture and, let’s face it, bullfighting will probably be outlawed within my lifetime. Might as well experience this while I still can.

I’m only planning to do it the once. It’s a young man’s game, and I’m not getting any younger.

There are generally about two or three hundred injuries per year, and a death every four or five years. Unfortunately this year was one of the ones when someone was gored to death by a bull.

Anyone can run with the bulls provided that they’re

  1. Over the age of 18
  2. Not drunk or otherwise incapacitated
  3. On-site before 7:30am

As Laurence Olivier famously asked Dustin Hoffman, is it safe?

Well, provided you take a few simple precautions like knowing where not to run (the outside of the bends – the bulls can’t turn very fast, and might run into you) and what to do if you fall over (stay still – if you move they’ll try and gore you, but if you stay still they’ll ignore you), then it’s actually fine.

The run takes about four minutes. You choose your spot to wait for the bulls to come by, start running before they get to you, and finish when they pass. Don’t wave anything at them, give them room, and don’t touch the buggers. They get riled.

Personally I’d recommend Estafeta. It’s a nice street, quite wide, and there are various shop doorways to duck into should you have to. That’s provided they’re not full of cowering people, of course. It’s actually more difficult to run safely at the edge of the street, as there are more people there for you to stumble into. Took me a while to figure that out.

Through the duration of the festival, it’s traditional to wear a white shirt and trousers, a red neckscarf, and a red sash used as a belt.

When I say “traditional” I mean “practically everyone is wearing this”. You’d better too, if you don’t want to look weird.

So, would I recommend it to you?

Well, yes. There’s a small amount of danger, but not much provided you do a little bit of research beforehand and don’t do anything obviously stupid. And it’s an experience I can carry with me for the rest of my life.

And I think you should try something different, too. Something that you’ve never tried before.

It might be running with the bulls, or skydiving, or rock-climbing, or living in another country for a few months. Each of these has risks – but every day you risk death or injury crossing the road. Life is risk. And all of these risks are manageable.

New experiences make us better people.

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Letters From America: Rubber, Drugs, and PVC

originally posted 26th March 2004
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So, here I am in San Jose for the rest of the week.

The day before yesterday, I read a post on a screenwriting message board. It said “I have free tickets for the Game Designers Conference. Who wants some?”

So I said yes, emailed Susannah to check that I could crash at hers, and jumped in the car.

About an hour down the freeway, there was a loud bang and the car started shuddering. I made it to the side of the road safely, and started checking to see what had happened. Turned out my left rear tyre was shredded.

At this time a Highway Patrol officer pulled up and, after telling me to take my hands out of my pockets and return to my vehicle, asked me who I was and if I was transporting drugs from Los Angeles to San Francisco.

Fortunately, he seemed satisfied when I told him I wasn’t.

After limping on three wheels to the nearest garage I found an entrepeneurial member of the rescue services who offered to take my tyre away and have it fixed for the bargain price of $200 (down from $260). Having a rough idea of what a tyre costs, I drove slowly and carefully for another 14 miles and got it fixed for $40.

It’s an interesting environment at the conference. There are about 9,000 games developers here: programmers, designers, artists, suits, and even a few writers.

The general opinion of the writers is that writing in games gets no respect and Something Must Be Done. That’s about as far as they’ve got, though.

So there I was in the hotel bar speaking to the representative from the BBC (turns out I know him) when a little man came up and said:

“You don’t want to be drinking here. Why not come across the road to the PlayStation party, where all the booze is free? Use this to get in.”

So we did.

It turns out that a party sponsored by PlayStation is – well, just about exactly how you’d imagine.

Huge paper sculptures, coloured lights flashing all over the place, delicious food, free bars all over, and a fashionable band.

The band was called “Crystal Meth”, or perhaps “The Crystal Method”. An orbital-a-like. I know they were good because a) I liked them and b) Young People around me kept calling friends on their mobile phones and saying “Dude! You won’t believe this, but Crystal Meth are on stage, like, *fifty feet away*!”

But my favourite part of the evening had to be the fact that when the band weren’t on stage, there were Asian girls in short PVC dresses, fishnets, boots, and chokers dancing in cages for no good reason.

Fair made my evening, that did.