Pageturners: Perseverance

Welcome to Pageturners, a book I’m writing in which I share what I’ve learnt – and am still learning – about comic writing, film writing, novel writing and how new writers can sell their stories. I publish a chapter or a section per week, for free here on Iconoblast. And I welcome your feedback or questions, so do leave a comment below!

Missed the Pageturners intro? Read it here.

Last week I talked about writing and editing comics.

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Illustration by David Broughton

Robert McKee’s thoughts on perseverance are well worth quoting:

‘Beyond imagination and insight, the most important component of talent is perseverance – the will to write and rewrite in pursuit of perfection.’

However, McKee omits to say that perfection is generally not possible unless you’ve had some kind of training in-house or at college or found yourself a mentor. Otherwise you don’t quite know what you’re doing. I tried various writing courses in my twenties to add to my in-house experience as a trainee journalist at D.C. Thomson, but found them uninspiring.  

Today, I’m sure there are some great writing courses out there and I certainly hope so. Internships were once an option, but these days it’s only the children of the rich who are likely to get an internship at a London publishers because of the high cost of living in the city. Consequently, the middle-class tone of publishing is further boosted, certainly in England. Based on my own experience, I have a feeling it’s more egalitarian and open in Scotland. 

Even a writer’s weekend workshop can be invaluable. I felt very bruised after my Doctor Who rejection, so I attended such a workshop run by a couple of BBC radio script editors. I remember a well known novelist was there and she told me her hair had turned white because of her traumatic experiences with the BBC, so I didn’t feel alone. I started explaining to our hosts why I thought my script had been rejected. I felt it was because the Doctor Who script editor, Eric Saward, didn’t like the authentic working-class characters I’d featured as castaways in the space whale. I’d made sure their dialogue was spicy and funny (it was later the basis of the wonderful Mrs. Mallon in the first Marshal Law story), and I felt Eric disliked them for their ‘salt of the earth’ personalities, but couldn’t actually admit it. Especially as he previously had insisted that the captain of the foul space abattoir had to be middle class.

The host cut me short. ‘Stop! Was Eric Saward the commissioning editor?’ ‘No, that was Chris Bidmead.’ ‘Ah, well, then you were fucked. There’s no way you’d have got it through.’ Wise words. If your editor changes, then there’s a real danger the new editor won’t have the enthusiasm of the commissioning editor. He or she may even resent having their predecessor’s work ‘dumped’ on them.

A writer’s guide is another way to help you perfect your craft. It’s taken me a lifetime to find one I value and that’s Robert McKee’s Story. I turned to McKee and attended one of his fantastic seminars because I suspected a film script editor I was working for was talking absolute shit. So I needed to fully understand just where they were leading me astray. McKee showed me how. But – whatever you do – please don’t quote McKee to any editor, they will hate you for it! I can think of at least two who were vitriolic in their condemnation of McKee (‘too many diagrams, too analytical’). There can only be one script God and that is your editor. So do keep your secret guru to yourself!

But as a teenager, I couldn’t find a guide I liked, and I couldn’t afford a writing course. So I had to be my own mentor. Aged seventeen, armed only with the Writers and Artists Year Book, borrowed from the library, I started submitting manuscripts to publishers. Surprisingly, I came close to being green-lit. Perhaps they were easier times. Miles Kington, the assistant editor of Punch, was most encouraging and said that with ‘considerable polishing’ a dark comedy article I’d written would be suitable for his magazine. Of course I didn’t understand how to give it the polish needed as I lacked formal training. Similarly, I sent some comedy sketches to the David Frost show. Ian Davidson, his talented script editor, wrote back to me at length, giving me several examples of exactly what he was looking for. Once again, I hadn’t developed the skills to analyse and replicate what he was after. So Ian fell silent after my second submissions.

But I realised I had to write stories based on people I knew. At that time, I worked as an office clerk in a small, one-man-band furniture factory that was close to bankruptcy. My boss, Mr Harry, was hilarious, so I decided to write a play about him entitled ‘The Hobby’. He went home to East London at weekends, but during the week he slept in a Portacabin he had constructed in the middle of his factory, from which he could look out and oversee his employees. He’d emerge from his lair to roar at his  teenage workers’ efforts and reduce them to tears. ‘Look at this work.  What is it? Shall I tell you? I’ll tell you. It’s Rubbish! Rubbish! Rubbish! I can’t keep you, son. They won’t let me. I’ll have to let you go. I can’t have dead wood.’  

Mr Harry had an elderly, female spinster bookkeeper who looked like the Giles cartoonist’s granny and she would always scuttle in late, laden with shopping bags. My orders were to summon Mr Harry immediately with two blasts on the factory hooter.

That was his call signal. His face purple with rage, he’d burst into the office and rebuke her.

‘You’re late, Miss. You’re late. Go home, Miss. Go home.’ 

She would explain she had some job she had to finish for the Church and this was why she was late.

‘Not interested. Go home, Miss.’

‘Oh, I can’t take any notice of you, Mr. Harry, I’ve got work to do,’ she’d chuckle as she scurried to her desk.

‘I told you to go home, Miss,’ he would insist, pursuing her. Then he’d lean over her desk and shout right in her face, ‘You’re a wicked, wicked, WICKED woman!’

She’d just cackle and ignore him as he persisted: ‘I want those figures, Miss, and I want them NOW!’

‘Oh, I’m too busy,’ she would reply dismissively. ‘Get The Boy to do them.’

I was ‘The Boy’. 

They were a great comedy duo, with similar tragicomic personas to Steptoe and Son and Till Death Us Do Part – both of which were being screened at that time. Two dysfunctional people, locked together by fate, and unable to escape each other. I’d be killing myself laughing, scribbling it all down and then fashioning it into a script at night. 

I called it ‘The Hobby’ because I sensed he was only playing at being the boss, living in the shadow of his successful older brothers who would bail him out financially from time to time. His eccentricities had no limits. He was a gift to writers that just went on giving. He had a vending machine installed and got me to wash up his workers’ plastic tea cups after use and put them back in the machine. My play was an affectionate portrayal. I liked Mr Harry a lot and I think the feeling was mutual. I still have fond memories of him, even though he eventually sacked me because I refused to use torn-open envelopes for scrap paper to write on. It seems incredibly petty now on both sides, but neither of us knew how to back down. I said it was ridiculous to save pennies in this way. He said I had a superiority complex. And so we parted company. This was before I went to D. C. Thomson, where they had special metal holders into which the stub of a pencil could be inserted to get a few extra day’s use out of it.

I sent ‘The Hobby’ to Granada TV, who said they thought it was very funny, but it was ‘too short’. It was around twenty minutes and I had no idea how to time it.  Maybe that was their way of letting me down gently, because it’s relatively easy to fix a play by adding extra scenes. However, they said they were keen to read whatever I wrote next. Sadly, my next effort didn’t have the same comedy elements or such tight plotting and so they lost interest.

But the play was not entirely wasted because I used some fragments from it for the Terminator Head Torturer in Nemesis Book One. He is complaining to his apprentice that he’s doing a really shoddy job of torturing an Alien. ‘I can’t keep you, son. Torquemada won’t let me. I’ll have to let you go.’ Eventually the Alien is so fed-up with the delay, he offers to torture himself.

And all this time I was endlessly writing, trying different ways to open publishing doors. I think I’d read somewhere that it was a good idea to send submissions to well-known celebrities who might just help to open those doors. I might even find myself a badly-needed mentor! So I duly wrote a number of articles and sent them to such a TV star. One of the articles was about how prospective writers see their futures. He rejected them all with a curt, neatly handwritten note. It read:

‘I don’t see any future here.’ His put-down was uniquely sharp and negative. I remember thinking at the time. ‘I’ll prove you wrong, you c***.’

Of course it’s remarkable that he at least took the trouble to write back. That was common courtesy in that far off era. Today, no one would be bothered.

So perseverance is definitely the name of the game because, three years later, I was working for publishers D.C. Thomson.  

And that famous TV star? It was Clement Freud.