Category: work

I can’t remember where I picked this tin cup up. I presume an airport somewhere in Canada. “Exit, pursued by a bear” being the famous stage direction from Shakespeare’s THE WINTER’S TALE. ( Here’s David Tennant absolutely killing Just A Minute on his first attempt, talking for sixty seconds about it.) For the writer’s wandering mind, this joke cup is in fact a writer’s cup.

I like having a few tin cups around because I don’t want to take wine glasses into the garden. I am clumsy. And working.

I haven’t done anything to this garden in probably six or seven years. Honestly, I’m quite fond of the wildness of it. But the edges are closing in, and I can’t grow food out here. So, Thursday morning, I kitted up and came out here with tools, determined to at least clear the round patio area by the east fence, which had turned into a mysterious dark glade. Now, I like a mysterious dark glade as much as the next person, probably more, but this isn’t a big garden and I need that space. As I write this, my hands and the soles of my feet are covered in hotspots and I have a full-body ache, but the round patio is clear. Once I put the PVC mini-greenhouse (bought six or seven years ago) in place, I poured myself a tin cup of red wine, sat in the shade and thought about writing.

Three or four years ago, George RR Martin had this to say about writing:

I think there are two types of writers, the architects and the gardeners. The architects plan everything ahead of time, like an architect building a house. They know how many rooms are going to be in the house, what kind of roof they’re going to have, where the wires are going to run, what kind of plumbing there’s going to be. They have the whole thing designed and blueprinted out before they even nail the first board up. The gardeners dig a hole, drop in a seed and water it. They kind of know what seed it is, they know if planted a fantasy seed or mystery seed or whatever. But as the plant comes up and they water it, they don’t know how many branches it’s going to have, they find out as it grows.

Most of my idols were architects, I think. Alan Moore had a famous “big piece of paper” for BIG NUMBERS that had every action for every character in every issue of the planned series. Here’s a photo of a photo:

Here’s a curiosity – in the early 80s, Alan visited New York, and wrote (was this in ESCAPE magazine?) about meeting Howard Chaykin and learning that Chaykin painstakingly worked out AMERICAN FLAGG’s structure in advance. There were no more details than that, but at the end of that decade Alan was structuring a book on a vast graph. I always strongly suspected that Chaykin influenced Alan to be an architect. One of Alan’s earlier touchstones was Thomas Pynchon, whom I conceive of as more a gardener. I start to see James Joyce in some of Alan’s latter work, and ULYSSES is a work of architecture.

I wanted to be an architect, deep down. When Jonathan Hickman appeared, his ability to visualise and fling these huge structures up into the air was a fascination to me. (PAX ROMANA, perhaps his least-loved work, is one I revisit every couple of years – in my head, it links to Matt Wagner & Tim Sale’s wonderful “Devil’s Reign” sequence, and back to Delany & Chaykin’s EMPIRE.)

It was a shock to me when William Gibson turned out to be a gardener. I remember him talking about SPOOK COUNTRY, starting with a compelling image that stuck with him, and just… writing. Discovering what the book was about as he wrote it.

As a writer, I am, I think, a bad architect. I make myself start with an outline, and then I wander. I plough the fields and scatter. A case in point is CASTLEVANIA Season 3. I knew pretty much where I needed every character to be by the end of the season in order to achieve the strict requirements of the fourth and final season. Everybody had to be in place for the last act of the story. I ploughed the field in straight lines. But the field was way over there, and I just went over there in any way that felt right. And, frankly, I think I ended up kind of next to the field in question, rather than at its gate.

I’m bad at plans. I try, but I always end up winging it.

But I grew a lot of stuff along the way – the Flyseyes monologue, which I think was one of the most successful pieces of writing in the whole season, just kind of happened. Grew out of the dirt I’d tilled. Structurally, it was probably one of the worst things I could have done. But stories are not structure. Structure is a set of signposts, and only in the most austere modernist nouvelle roman would you find a set of signposts presented as a story. It’s your story. You can touch each signpost by any route you choose, and decide to skip one or two if they’re not necessary to the journey. Or even if not necessary to the journey that pleases you. And you can pause to raise a plant or two along the way.

Sitting out here in the garden, it may be, at this late stage, that I have to accept that I’m not a great architect, and perhaps it’s okay to be a bad gardener. Build the raised bed, score the lines with a trowel, scatter the seed and accept that the wind and the rain will cover the lines and that I won’t know what grows out of it all until it happens.

Read enough tv reviews, and you’ll start to see the same observation pop up – have they left enough space to wrap everything up in the final episode? This usually follows observations about how slow the story is, or how it’s taking its time, you know the kind of thing.

Reviews are, of course, not the best yardstick of a successful piece of art. Fundamental misunderstandings of how stories work are standard for the field. But if enough different people tell you it’s noon all at the same time, it might be worth looking up at the sky.

Thing is: the final episode doesn’t have to be where all the work gets done.

Instead, consider the possibility that your big climax should be planned for the episode before last.

Outwardly, this achieves a couple of things. The big bang happens where it is possibly least expected, which is often good. It also allows you to spend the final episode “wrapping everything up” by getting to spend extra time with the surviving characters, sitting with the aftermath and closing the arcs of their journeys.

It also makes you look a lot harder at the episodes that precede it. You may find you have to let some air out of the story in order to achieve that confluence of events in the penultimate chapter. This is the “killing your darlings” that writers talk about — losing the moments and conversations and grace notes that may enchant you but do nothing to retain attention, maintain focus and drive the story forward. You may find that you suddenly have some pace and attack back in the story.

And if you can’t achieve the whole of that big confluence in the penultimate chapter after all? You do still have a whole other episode to accommodate the overspill.

Speaking personally, it was important for me to establish early in the process that the penultimate episode of CASTLEVANIA Season 4 was the one where I was going to bring the hammer down, so that I had the whole last episode to deal with its reverberations.

On Sunday 10 April 2022, I dropped a 10,000 word short story, WATCHTOWER, here. This is the link.

I was in the mood to try some pop-sci Andy Weir style good time writing, a mood that was responding to the preponderance of Sad Astronaut stories in tv and film. It has a jumpcut sort of structure, because I also was thinking about the idea of the condensed novel, in JG Ballard’s conception, and connecting that with a certain style of film editing – Christopher Rouse with Paul Greengrass on THE BOURNE ULTIMATUM, for example. It kind of took a turn during the writing, which I personally ascribe to watching two seasons of Ed Stafford’s FIRST MAN OUT.

Anyway. I wrote it. And 10,000 words is worse than a novella. I don’t think Kindle Singles are a thing any more, and it had no other utility other than having amused me to write it and get it out of my system.

I dunno how I’d describe it. Indiana Holmes And The Case Of Elon Musk’s Rendezvous With Rama? It’s a bit of fun, but it’s also about human damage, exploration and colonising. It probably makes no sense at all. If you decide to read it, I hope it at least amuses you.

As with most work notes, just a log for myself: I just finished writing and filed issue nine of THE BATMAN’S GRAVE. Here’s a picture from issue 8, which I proofed the other day. Three issues to go. Unemployment beckons. So does sleep, and not doing a damn thing tomorrow other than sleep some more.

As with most work notes, just a log for myself: just filed the first draft of HEAVEN’S FOREST 108, the final episode of the season. So there’s nothing left but a rewrite and a polish of episode 1 because I thought of a tweak to add there. But, basically, all the heavy lifting is done, it’s off the board, the hard part is all over, and it’s in the hands of my poor co-directors to make sense of and turn into something worth watching.

I’m off for a whisky.

According to this preview I found on the internet.

Revised pandemic-adjusted schedule to follow.