Mark Chadbourn's Blog: Jack of Ravens, page 14

It’s Not Actually About The Writing

A manuscript flopped on to an editor’s desk.  The prose was absolutely captivating, every word honed to perfection.  A joy to read.  It was about a boy wizard, attending a school for magic while battling a rising evil linked to his past.  Only this novel was written by…let’s call them ‘Dave’.  From Droitwich.  Dave had done his market research and had accurately discovered that there was a great public hunger for stories about boy wizards so he’d set out to write the best boy wizard story he possibly could.  He laboured over that pristine prose for three years.  Every diamond word.

You should be able to find that book self-published on Amazon, for 99p.  Download it.  Worth a punt at that price, surely.  Luxuriate in that great writing, for a couple of pages at least.  Then it’ll sit on your Kindle until you delete it.

Want to see a grown person cry?  Corner an editor at a convention and ask them about the manuscripts they’ve received for secondary world quest novels with a group of plucky heroes fighting…I don’t know…Horcs?…and…no, not a magic ring…maybe a magic…goblet?  Or about serial killers taking trophies from their victims.  Or zombies battling a dwindling band of surviving humans.  Many of them absolutely beautifully crafted.

I’ve seen aspiring writers draft and re-draft and re-re-re-re-draft their opus, making sure every single sentence sings while draining away the days of their lives.  And all for nothing.  Because the seed they originally pushed into that fertile earth was already dead.

Dan Brown takes a lot of flak for his novels.  Yes, some of the prose may lack elegance.  But the readers keep buying his work in enormous numbers, despite the critics’ views.  After the huge success of The Da Vinci Code, his publisher – my publisher – did extensive market research to find out why readers loved that novel so much.  The overwhelming response?  They didn’t care about the writing.  They were excited because Dan Brown was telling them something they didn’t know.

Readers, and TV and film viewers, desperately want to be told something new (even when they think they don’t), or to experience new feelings, or to be prompted into new thoughts.

RULE # 5: It’s not about the writing.  It’s about the ideas.

Received knowledge says writers are in the writing business.  They’re not.  They’re in the ideas business.  Editors and TV and film commissioners buy the idea.  They buy the person creating it, the sum total of their thoughts and feelings and analysis and life which will be poured into the project.  They expect the work to be beautifully crafted too, of course they do.  That’s the job.  But it’s not the essential part.

Ideas.  New ideas, that get the brain fizzing and the heart pumping.

Every year I get invited to the BBC Writers Festival, which is open to any screenwriter who has had work produced and screened on TV.  You get to hear from the top people in the industry about what they’re looking for, to commission, and to garner all the insider knowledge.  Those still slaving over their unsold scripts no doubt think it’s the media equivalent of the Bilderberg Group, where the elite swill champagne and plot to ruin the next year’s TV schedules.  (It’s actually a place where writers can get passionate about the craft and bitch and moan.  Writers are writers wherever they are.)

This year a very senior TV executive who dishes out millions of pounds to creatives said: “We’re only really interested in the premise and the characters.  Everything else is fixable.”

In his must-read screenwriting manual, Story, Robert McKee exhorts that you should never put fingers to keyboard until eighty per cent of the work has already been done.  It’s a natural human instinct to launch straight into writing once you get that creative rush of a new idea.  But if you talk to agents and editors and producers you’ll find that what is new to you is not necessarily new.  They’ve usually seen your fantastic new idea six times *that week*.

McKee advises caution because you need to be brutally hard on yourself and ensure you have the right idea, formulated in the right way, with the right characters.  If you don’t, any writing, however brilliant, is wasted effort and time.

Many people think creative writing courses will get you published or produced.  That’s a misconception.  All they can ever do is teach you to recognise good writing.  They can show you how to change the spark plugs and how to tune the carb, but they can’t show you how to win the Grand Prix.  That bit is inside you.

The writing is how you communicate those ideas and it has to be perfect to carry the thing at its heart.  But in the end it’s just a wireless signal rolling out into the great void.  The idea comes first.

Ideas are your currency.  Good ones are in very short supply, and they will buy you riches beyond imagination and that gilded future you dream about.  But you need to know how to mine them, and how to recognise them when you turn them up in the soil.  In the coming weeks we’ll talk about how you find those answers.

And yes, I hear you cry that people don’t *really* want new ideas.  Aren’t books and TV filled with familiar tropes?  Well, yes.  And no.  We’ll get to that too.

But for now, find those ideas.  And, remember, as a general rule of thumb, the first twenty are the ones most people have.  The next ten or so some people have.  It’s only after that that you get to the really unique ones, that only you could produce.

Yes, it’s extremely hard work.  It’s much easier simply to start writing and sink into the words.  But that’s why there are so many writers and so few who make a living from it.  Teach yourself to sweat and labour.

 

The First Rule Of Writing For A Living

It’s a fantastic time to be a writer.  And that’s the problem.

There are opportunities everywhere – in self-publishing, particularly, via Kindle, or in this golden age of TV.  Sometimes it seems like every single person you encounter is publishing their novel on Amazon.  (A friend, an acclaimed UK screenwriter, was chatting to a street cleaner in his local town.  When he found out what my friend did, the sweep mentioned he was working on his first screenplay.)

Everybody.  Billions of potential writers, competing for attention.

It’s easy to get disillusioned.  How are you going to get noticed by that traditional publisher, or that TV commissioner when you’re just a face in that seething crowd?

You might as well ask, with all those men hoofing a ball around a park on Sunday morning, how does anyone get to play in the premiership?  Or with all the people slapping paint on canvas in the spare room, what chance of getting an exhibition at Tate Modern?

RULE # 1: It’s not a numbers game.  It’s a talent game.

Nearly all that competition is going to fall by the wayside.  Why?  Wanting is not enough.  Once you grasp the deeper meaning of that rule above, you’ll realise that the way to get into this business, and make a living from it, is by maximising your talent.

That doesn’t mean learning your craft.  That’s taken for granted.  It’s about taking what skill you have and supercharging it so you surge past all those other people scribbling away.  And you do that by learning every aspect of your chosen business.

Throw away all the received knowledge of how publishing works, or TV or film.  It will kill you.  You’ll make choices based on that knowledge which will lead you into mean streets.  Everybody who works in those industries knows that on the inside they look nothing like they seem on the outside.

Find out why publishing with a small publisher – and some that are not so small – could get you nowhere.  Discover why finding an agent who’ll take you on may, in some circumstances, not be a good move.  Learn the first threshold you need to cross to get taken on by a publisher (it’s actually quite simple).  Realise why having the most amazing idea in the world and a fantastic script probably won’t get you a TV series commission.  Why your story isn’t being optioned by the film industry.  Why you can make just enough cash to keep you hoping, but never enough to get escape velocity into a writing career.*

Writers are a weird and often useless bunch, I’ve discovered over the years.  Some are so vehement that it’s “all about the writing” that they see learning about the business as selling out.  “The art will out.”  And by doing that, they end up killing their chance to write.  You only seem to get this kind of thinking among writers (maybe musicians too).  You won’t find many plumbers saying they’re not going to learn about the business – it’s all about the taps.

Others refuse to shake their imagined view of publishing, TV and film for the usually much more messy and hard reality. It’s a comfort zone thing – they’d rather have the fantasy.  That kills them too.  I’ve seen authors get a good publishing deal and end their days stacking shelves in a bookshop because they’ve refused to engage with the less rarified, less creatively-stimulating side of what they do.

Don’t make that mistake.

(* I’ll get to all these things in the coming weeks.)

2018 – The Year When Everything Changes

For a while there, I was thinking of changing the name of this blog to The View From The Bunker.  On a personal and professional level, 2017 was all-round great, if not one of the best for a while.  But…you know…out there in the world…

Now, stuffed full of turkey and mince pies and brimming with martini and champagne, I feel a bit more optimistic.  Still, whichever way you look at it, this year is going to be another one where Big Things Happen.  No point trying to ignore it.

Everything is connected.  Outside/inside.

On that theme, I plan to be writing a lot more here.  For a while, I’ve wanted to pass on what I’ve learned about the writing world.  How to go about making a living from novels and TV and film and journalism, say.  Because when momentous events are occurring out there, it’s also a good time to shake up your own life.  If you’ve ever wanted to walk away from the mundane world of 9-to-5, to carve out the existence you’ve always dreamed for yourself, now’s the time.

One thing the current Age of Upheaval has taught us is that time is running fast, life is short, and there’s no point counting on the status quo to see you through.  The people who win big are those who take calculated risks.  There won’t be a better time to reimagine who you are and what you do.

I’ll be talking about all that here.  Maybe you’ll pick up something that might help you.

My own work-front is looking pretty crammed.  I have three TV series in various stages of development with major broadcasters, and a movie script underway.  Can’t say any more about any of those right now.

There’s a new book out from my pseudonym, James Wilde, in July:

The paperback edition of Pendragon is out in March:

And various foreign editions all hit the shelves across the globe.  For a while, I’ve kept the “Mark Chadbourn” name just for screenwriting, but this year I’ll be publishing something under that moniker which will appeal to Age of Misrule fans.

And in the summer, I’m being inflicted on the poor students and conference visitors at the University of Oxford, talking about fantasy, Tolkien, writing and more.

Hold on tight. 2018 is going to be epic in all the right ways, if you decide to make it so.

Best TV Drama 2017

I’ve watched a lot this year, for both work – because you need to keep up with what’s out there when you’re a screenwriter – and for enjoyment. There’s plenty I haven’t seen (not got round to Dark yet, or the final season of Bloodline) – there’s so much good TV at the moment, which is great because film has been pretty dire.  But this is what got me excited in 2017.

8. SENSE8

We’ve become inured to great TV in the modern age, but the sheer scale of the Wachowskis’ series is breathtaking.  Shot on location around the globe, it looks fantastic.  The downside is that makes it phenomenally expensive, and they just couldn’t maintain the viewing figures necessary for that level of spending.  It’s been cancelled, but there’s a two-hour wrap-up out in the spring.  The plot here about warring telepathically-linked ‘clusters’ isn’t really the point.  It’s all about the characters, and the really great actors behind them.  And, of course, the underpinning philosophy of interconnectedness and love.  Not one for the cynical.

7. THE OA

Another divisive show.  Part gritty drama about suburban malaise, isolation and mental illness, part-fairytale. this is a truly unique vision from writer/actress Brit Marling and Zal Batmanglij.  It combines elements of the supernatural, fantasy, SF and mystery and psychological crime, and keeps the viewer continually wrong-footed.  Oh yes, and it also shows how evil can be defeated by contemporary dance.

6. GAME OF THRONES

HBO’s juggernaut winds to its close.  The measured developments and subtle character turns are all in the past.  Now it’s all about the spectacle.  And that bombast is extremely effective.  It’s become a fantasy WWE with everyone rooting for their favourite characters in the ultimate battle.  And what’s wrong with that?  Lavishly shot, well-acted, it’s such a confident production it can even shoehorn in an Ed Sheeran cameo.

5. MINDHUNTER

Okay, I’ve already had to rewrite this once because I forgot this one (thanks, Stephen Volk) – that’s how much good TV there is out there. David Fincher directs a measured examination of the fringes of psychology, slowly unfolding to reveal the darkness at the heart of the human condition. Coolly paced, with great performances, this shows what can be done when you’re not constrained by the structures of network TV.  Take your time pulling back the curtain and the result is far more affecting.

4. BILLIONS

The first season detailing the Shakespearean battle between Billionaire hedge fund manager Bobby Axelrod (Damian Lewis) and NY attorney Chuck Rhoades (Paul Giamatti) was great, but the second season takes it to an entirely new level. One episode in particular – no spoilers – will blow your mind.  Brian Koppelman, David Levien and Andrew Ross Sorkin have taken a potentially dry subject – finance – and turned it into a battle as gripping as anything in GoT. The magnetic performances by Lewis and Giamatti only drive the spike home.  I couldn’t decide if this was number three or four, so if you like feel free to switch it with…

3. OZARK

A pretty good opening episode develops into something special and endlessly surprising in Netflix’s crime drama.  Jason Bateman, acting against type in a serious role, is a cipher, as is his wife, played by Laura Linney.  It gets into some interesting areas when financial advisor Marty Byrde relocates his family to the Ozarks in backwoods Missouri to pay off a debt to a drug cartel.  There’s a touch of Deliverance and Southern Comfort as smart, sophisticated city folk find themselves playing a wholly different game with the less-educated but far more cunning and brutal rural rednecks.

2. THE DEUCE

The Wire‘s David Simon and his regular collaborator George Pelecanos take a look at the beginning of the porn industry in 1970s New York, their cameras sharking among the pimps and prostitutes and police on 42nd Street like Scorsese in Taxi Driver.  it’s all about character here, and every single one, from those on centre stage to the incidentals, is drawn perfectly.  Maggie Gyllenhall is brilliant as an independent, no-pimp hooker with more brains than anyone else in the show.  And James Franco gives a career-best performance as twins – and, yes, that works.  Insightful, shocking, heart-warming and surprising, it takes us into an area we haven’t been before.  And a nod to the set design – it looks like it could have been made in the era when it’s set.

1. TWIN PEAKS – THE RETURN

If you go in expecting the third season of some 90s TV show, you’re going to be disappointed.  This is something completely new, which just happens to have some of the same characters.  I’ve written about it before, and I’ll probably write about it many times again because there are just so many levels.  David Lynch and Mark Frost have made an 18-hour art movie, a meditation on reality, and the connective tissue for Lynch’s films Mulholland Drive, Lost Highway, the original Twin Peaks series and Eraserhead.  Yes, he’s been telling the same story all along, just from different angles.  Episode eight may well be the single best hour of TV ever.  The series is heavily laden with Lynch’s personal philosophy, and gets into the nature of reality.  But if you’re not interested in the heavy stuff, go for the emotional ride which takes you from terror to humour, often in adjoining scenes.

Honourable mentions: The Get Down, House of Cards, Love, and Halt and Catch Fire.

 

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Hereward – New Cover

And yet more art from you, this time from Hereward, which begins its German publication next year, courtesy of Bastel Lubbe.

You can pre-order the book here.

Pendragon – New Cover

Want to see the cover for the Italian version of Pendragon, out from Newton Compton in a few short days? Of course you do.

New Cover – Dark Age

Been radio silence here for a while as I’ve been knee-deep in the new book.  In case you don’t check the site of the ‘other me’, James Wilde, here’s a look at the cover for Dark Age, the sequel to Pendragon, which will be out in June.

More on the story to come.  But you can preorder it here.

#TwinPeaks – What Does It All Mean?

“We’re like the dreamer who dreams and lives inside the dream. But who is the dreamer?” we are asked in David Lynch and Mark Frost’s TV masterpiece, Twin Peaks The Return. And waking from that mesmerizing, baffling, inspiring, terrifying, amusing, irritating dream of a series, we understand that is the key question. For the series. For life.

When the finale aired, in the US on Sunday and in the UK on Monday, the internet was awash with outrage and bewilderment: “He didn’t explain ANYTHING.” I think Lynch and Frost gave us plenty to find understanding, and I’m going to put down some of my thoughts here. It shouldn’t need to be said that there are SPOILERS aplenty beyond, not just for Twin Peaks but many other things too.

The lazy analysis of most of Lynch’s works is that his films “are like dreams”, with the unspoken opinion that they make no sense and are not supposed to make sense, a swirl of symbolism that you can only give yourself up to. But like all great art – and Twin Peaks The Return is art, make no mistake, just like the anguished paintings and sketches and sculptures Lynch labours over in his LA studio, and bearing much of a resemblance to them – his work makes perfect sense. All you need is The Key.

In past works, Lynch has always placed something – a line of dialogue, an image or collection of images – that unlocks the whole puzzle of his art and reveals meaning and structure and the hidden narrative.

At its heart, Twin Peaks – and nearly all Lynch’s work – has been about trauma. How it shapes and breaks lives. How it infects the world around us. If there is any hope for redemption, personal or societal. The devastating sexual abuse of Laura Palmer by her father, and her subsequent murder at his hand, rippled out to alter an entire town and the lives of everyone who lived there. It’s there in his very first theatre-released movie, Eraserhead, in Lost Highway, in Mulholland Drive. Lynch makes the claim time and again that how we deal with trauma is a fundamental part of living.

The key to unlocking Twin Peaks The Return is his Oscar-nominated movie Mulholland Drive. That film is a part of the Twin Peaks “universe” – it was originally designed as a TV spinoff featuring Audrey Horne’s adventures in LA – as is Lost Highway, and Eraserhead.

Mulholland Drive seems to tell one story, but in the last few scenes we learn it’s telling another story entirely, that of an actress who committed a terrible crime that has destroyed her, and that all that has gone before is her attempt – her dream – to make it right.

And so with Twin Peaks. There is ample evidence – in dialogue, in the timelessness of the town, indeed in the time loops which show the normal rules don’t apply, in the characters themselves – that Twin Peaks is not of this world.

Another film you might like to consider in relation to these thoughts is this:

The abiding mythology that Lynch has constructed across many of his works is of a place of, perhaps, collective unconscious that we visit in dreams and where idealized versions of ourselves try to work through our traumas and the problems we face in our waking world.

The primary way in which we make sense of the world, and ourselves, is Story. A problem is established, obstacles stand in the way, and a solution is found. That applies to a murder mystery and to how we cope with the abuses of the real world. And so our dreamers enter the dream-world of Twin Peaks and find the story that is pertinent to them.

In Twin Peaks The Return, Audrey Horne is terrified of being forced into the story titled The Little Girl Who Lives Down The Lane. Because that is the name of Laura Palmer’s (or rather Carrie Page’s) story, and we all know what happens in that one.

In the same way that Dom Cobb tries to resolve his trauma in Christopher Nolan’s Inception, through various forms of the real world, which may all in fact be dreams.

In the same way that Christopher Hadley “Pincher” Martin tries to make sense of his life’s traumas with his dying dream in William Golding’s brilliant third novel, Pincher Martin.

At the very end of Twin Peaks The Return, Kyle MacLachlan’s character wakes in a motel that we haven’t seen before, with a car we don’t recognize, with a new name – Richard – and in a world that has the gritty, mundane appearance of our own, far, far removed from the wonders and terrors of Twin Peaks. In Judy’s Diner, in miserable Odessa, he takes down three rednecks, not as the bright-eyed Coop we know, or the brutalist Mr C, but as some amalgam of the two, the real-world coming together of his fragmented dream personas.

There is no Coop, that idealized, Buddhist, decent-hearted knight. There is no Mr C, that epitome of evil. There is only Richard, who dreams a dream to solve the mystery of his own trauma and through it, hopefully, find some redemption. Does this trauma involve Linda, or Diane, as we know her from the Twin Peaks collective unconscious? Possibly. And we could dig into the story Cooper is involved in in that dream to find those real-world origins.

And in a fantastic piece of Meta imagining by Lynch, we are told that this end sequence is our own world because the woman who answers the door at the Palmer house, is the person who really owns that home in Washington State: Mary Reber.

And what of poor, bewildered Audrey Horne? We never got a resolution to her story, the internet cried as one. But we did. After her dreamy dance at the Roadhouse was interrupted by a brawl, Audrey runs to her partner-tormentor and cries, “Get me out of here!” Cue: jump cut to the person we know as Audrey staring into a mirror in a white room, perhaps a hospital.

She woke up.

Who is the dreamer? In this story, it’s mainly Richard. Lynch lets us know by superimposing Kyle MacLachlan’s face over the final part of the meeting in the Twin Peaks Sheriffs’ Department. It’s also all those we see manifesting in that collective unconscious.

But in the end, it’s all of us. We go into our fictions – our Twin Peaks, our books – to make sense of the horrors of our world, and through them find some way to survive.

Lynch layers his worlds, and his themes, to make his point. In the first season, the characters who exist in Twin Peaks are obsessed with a soap opera, Invitation to Love. They are drawn to that story filled with the characters’ trials, triumphs and torments as a way to make sense of their own lives. Just as their real selves are doing with that dream. Just as we do with our own stories.

There’s still so much more to glean from this tremendous work. So much to turn over and debate and sift for meaning. The original series changed the landscape of TV by showing us what was possible from that medium, and through that helped prepare the ground for the golden age of TV we’re living through now.

And with Twin Peaks The Return, Lynch and Frost have done it all over again.

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How To Enter The Secret World Of Animation

If you’re interested in getting into animation or film, here’s a Kickstarter you might want to support. My friend, the animator, Stu Gamble, says:

I come from a background where I didn’t have the opportunity to go to university to learn the production process. In fact when I was younger there really wasn’t any wide availability for professional production education. I couldn’t seem to find work placement or get into the industry in general. All I had was a burning passion to make film since I was a small child.

Of course it’s all different now. There are plenty of opportunities to learn the myriad production techniques that fill the media world. But what I still find is that its still incredibly difficult to get any first hand knowledge of how a production works. There’s lots of puff pieces and snippets of tutorials here and there but there’s been no real substance as far as a project is concerned.

This is where our Kickstarter campaign comes in. I’m incredibly happy to be able to offer the complete work files of the project in a perk. It includes all designs, storyboards, animatics and edit files, animation source files, live action plates, composite files and final sound and outputs. There will also be a short documentary that explains the production process and how we do things. It’s my opportunity to give something back and open up a professional production to an audience that wants to know what goes into making some great animation.

Grief Encounters is a series of animated shorts that brings to life the art of animated surrealist Luke Chueh.  This project explores these narrative conundrums by animating some of the most iconic paintings from Chum’s portfolio, reimagining the worlds within whilst weaving narratives that stay true to his unique blend of comedy and tragedy.

Kickstarter campaign: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/munkyking/grief-encounters

Target animation: https://vimeo.com/226332954

Stu’s website: www.stugamble.com

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Pendragon Reviews

Pendragon has been receiving some great reviews. That’s always hugely gratifying when you’ve laboured over a novel for a year, but it’s particularly nice when people ‘get’ what you’re trying to do. Here’s a couple:

Deadly culture clashes and earthy mysticism (complete with witchcraft and visions fueled by magic mushrooms) combine in this exciting saga about a dark time in European history. The plot doesn’t go where you’d expect, and there are more than a few fierce, stereotype-defying women characters.

Though it works successfully as a standalone, Pendragon can also be viewed as the beginning of a much larger tale. The events weaving together aren’t just changing individual lives, they are shaping a nation. Wilde’s latest skillfully deconstructs the myths of Arthur and Camelot but creating a stunning prequel.