The Syrian Heart goes on sale

There are moments in the writing of a novel which become D-Days. The first calendar occasion is of course a writing day; the first sentence, the first paragraph, the first page – that is what it is like as an astronaut walking to Cape Canaveral and seeing your mode of transport to work perched there like a giant cactus.

The next – and a long way apart – is the finishing of your first novel after many, many drafts and re-writes. Occasionally this might be interrupted by an internal exuberance that occurs on a certain passages of wordplay. That self-centred day is hardy filled with glitter and why D-Day two is the actual finishing of your novel…and from there the world is your oyster. You finally have something that is worth millions of opinions.

Alas, there’s more hard work to do. Finding an agent perhaps, cover letters, a brief synopsis and then the realisation that you have to begin writing your next novel. Please, someone, take up this slack.

The greatest day of all is the one where you get the call to tell you that all the stress is being taken out of your efforts and that your book is going to be published by an expert in these matters. Phew!

On the Monopoly board of success, you have passed ‘Go’ and have saved yourself from the torture of doing any form of marketing all on your own. The presence to offer up yourself to be interviewed for the press is no hard shakes against the circumvention of book formatting, e-Kindle and social media – publishing is a wonderful land, an avatar of joy.

So, my D-Day three is arriving on May 2nd 2018. No need to stress about me launching anything as Syrian Heart goes public with someone else – a publisher – doing what they do.

If you do see the book on any bookshelf then please flick through. If the corners get damaged the retailer rarely returns it to the publisher – book sold.

That day belongs to all authors. Good luck and keep writing.

When the idea isn’t enough

How often have we been out with friends and been fanned with blessings that a good idea would either make a great film or that your already furnished script sounds like a great movie? In telling people what your movie is about is always about the nugget, the hook, the logline. It is not until people actually see your vision on the screen that the other themes surface to compliment the dialogue, the characters and overall plot.

Ideas, therefore, must be like fish in the sea because I am reading an interview which says about script-writing competitions that…
“When it comes to the jurors, they only receive the one-line synopsis and the 10 pages, so it’s judged purely on the quality of the scriptwriting. The idea doesn’t come into it.”

Those are the words of Farah Abushwesha – a BAFTA-Nominated Producer, Amazon Best-Selling Author and a 2017 Screen International Star of Tomorrow.

Loglines are easy to spread around like confetti but they do hold the majesty of what writers then pound on top. How often do we see the screen credit of “from an idea by” – Robert Altman does this.

Ideas do count and it is the reason why so many film producers ask for loglines. I was trying to sell an idea for a film script in 2015 called Farewell to Kings. It had this logline: “100 years after the end of WW1, some old scores still needed settling.” More of a marketing blurb but the man I told it to was a film producer and commissioned the writing of the script there on the spot (obviously there was a bit more to it). So ideas do count and give the writer a vision of tunnelled eternity to keep on track. In every line, it was what the producer paid for.

However, a good idea badly written will get the writer nowhere but if you are after perfection then the idea must be in the 100% bracket from the very beginning. The film producer who bought Farewell To Kings gave me this chance of success: of all the scripts we commission, we take only 3% into development. They go into a pot and the 3% make it into pre-pre-production. Of the 100 pre-pre-productions, we make just one.

It’s a tough world out there.

My current effort is The Syrian Heart using this logline:

“An ageing and Wealthy philanthropist needs a heart transplant, but the female donor he discovers has one minor drawback – she is still alive.”

 

Three Billboards too hyped?

Five BAFTAs, several nods to the Oscars, this surely can’t be a bad film and it isn’t but unlike other award-winners in the past, it isn’t a glorious one either. Three Billboards is an angst-ridden, venom-spitting movie mostly full of ugly characters and coldness in the face of vulgar dialogue. Nobody likes anybody else and the film builds up over these cross-references of hate and conflict to ultimately bring a passive enjoyment.

The central idea of a murder going uninvestigated isn’t really what the film is about and that is its problem. I come from an Inspector Morse school of drama and the sideshow of malpractice within the bigoted police law enforcement only gropes at the attention like a scratch to the face.

For all the experts this was probably the film they had waited for. Why? Well, it harnesses the terrible injustices of brutality and hatred with an attempt to show that kindness lives in all of us, rather like a diet. For me, it was just meat and two veg.

Hardly one I shall even watch when it appears on Channel 4 in five years time.

What words work in novel writing

In the writing of my novel The Syrian Heart I was certain to make sure the technique of one of George Orwell’s rules of writing was adhered to and that was to take out any  unnecessary words

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The first draft of the novel was 133,000 words long and finally trimmed down to a final 100,000 which is still a mammoth task bearing in mind the ten re-writes the book went through. So when seeing another writers advice that certain words are usually padding then it was off to work again on another this time specific re-write but I found it altered  character dialogue and not necessarily in a good way.

Words such as ‘some’, ‘then’, ‘really’, ‘very’, ‘indeed’, ‘but’, ‘just’, ‘ask’, ‘shrug’. Should they all be a victim to the backspace?

That’s just for starters (I have used the word ‘just’ there). It does work but it is not a bad form of editing to tighten up your prose where you can even identify other words which are superfluous to the sentence structure.

Take the words ‘the’ or ‘and’ – they too can be replaced but be careful because it can spoil the rhythm or alter the cadence of your character. ‘The’ & ‘and’ can be taken out but make sure it still all makes sense – dialogue more critical than non-dialogue.

The exercise of subtraction is one more useful for journalists where every word is a premium but over 100,000 words it is something that you give to the reader and that is clarity. Why read 100,000 when it can be said as good in 95,000?

 

Ext. Murder of a script. day

For many aspiring and even working TV and film writers, the appearance of Collateral on the BBC must have brought much anticipation. The fact the BBC is tackling the tough gritty genre of high-end drama with a great cast and script by Sir David Hare, it should have been across the winning line and looking forward to next year’s BAFTAs. Alas, a few frames in and the only thing it is heading for is the scrapheap and a listing in ASDA as DVD of the week.

Understand that not all writers – even the great Mr Hare – can transfer to contemporary genres and his name must have meant not a single word be changed from what was delivered on the page. Lord Hare of Tippex must have used some form of script bullying to ensure his sieve of a script not only was shot as an overwritten piece of prose – more like an instructional manual – but never touched by the director, script editor or actors. Maybe it’s a fault of a single idea being spawned into four hours of TV when there wasn’t really an idea to begin with.

Collateral is a fallow entry into the drama world for the BBC. So under prepared with lack-lustre research that it would have not have even won the most amateurish of TV writing competitions – and that’s the pity. There are much better efforts out there than this Carillion of a drama. So many faults I would need a novel sized number of pages to list them but essentially the story and script are to blame.
I caught a dreadful conversation between two police officers and they continued as they walked out of the office. Presumably – at least 30 seconds later – they re-appeared on the stairwell of the police station and the dialogue was seamless as if no time had elapsed from office to stairs. Little elements become big elements and overwritten exposure of the plot only pushes this further down the listings – the audience deserve better.

On the back of Hard Sun and McMafia, there could have been a triple success but halfway through and the series, and its flaws, are the real killer
What is on ITV next Monday evening? Let me look…

Edging your writing bets

It is safe to say that cracking the business of making money from writing is tough going but there is a multitude of baskets to make this happen.
Writing a novel is the start.
I have just completed a 100,000 novel called The Syrian Heart. It was written with page after page of interloping backstory and character thoughts and as soon as I was happy with the end results, the 330 pages were sent to a literary agent.
With as many as 1,000 manuscripts reaching the in-tray of agents every week the chance of my work being picked up are quite slim. So what’s to do?

My entire process of doing the novel before any other medium is that the book form at the very least will earn money on Kindle. That aside, it should be a steering point for the array of a medium from radio to screen and that exactly what I have done.
After the novel came the radio script and after the radio script came the screenplay. All I did was work with the template of the novel and edited it down until the visual and audio aspects stood out.
For a novel that took a year the write, the following adaptations were each done within a month of one another and now I have the additional chance of success.
There are more free-to-enter competitions for both radio and film screenplays than the novel in the shape of a book.

You know it makes sense.

Syrian Heart novel coming at ya!

Hello dear friends. I’m delighted to let you know that my second novel, THE SYRIAN HEART (published May 3rd) is now available to pre-order on Amazon.

Ask yourself this: Would you make the decision to prolong your own life if it meant ending the life of another?… ✨

That’s the dilemma for the stinking rich philanthropist, AA Roxan, who is given the news that he needs a heart transplant. The path isn’t so straightforward as Roxan needs to source a new heart with matching rare blood. His search alerts him to a Syrian migrant woman who washes up – barely alive – on a beach in Greece.

This of course ventures medical ethics but it’s his life over hers. He dupes the NHS into performing the operation under the smokescreen of the heart being discovered in the UK when all along he is bringing organ tourism to the UK – and to kill her.

Full of heart (as you’d expect) and thrills, this is a very modern adventure – with an unexpected twist.

The Syrian Heart beating at last

So after over a year of writing and re-writing, my second novel The Syrian Heart is ready to get on Kindle. https://www.amazon.co.uk/Syrian-Heart-value-death-price-ebook/dp/B078WVRKSW/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1515592377&sr=1-3&keywords=The+Syrian+heart

The book cover took no money at all and I used a creative sharing website called Fiverr to pool the resources and come up with a design for under £50. The end results should accompany the novel so please get hold of it and give it a read.

 

Book cover risk worth the peanuts

If, like me, you’re writing the novel that everyone has inside them, then there’s a moment where the marketing overtakes the workload of writing and editing. With as good a stab at the content as I could gather – it took me a year – I turned my attention to arranging a book cover.

All the guides in self-publishing say the cover is crucial and who can disagree with the science of the shop window? Then, I produce one myself which is too narrow in its scope and then a website community called Fiverr came up trumps. You boil down the basic elements of the novel and it comes back as a rounded up caricature.

This is the end result which the more I look at it, promotes themes in the novel that were not even discussed between designer and writer. For instance, the notion the woman is walking away in the darkness is almost a cry for help. It was designed by an American who thinks London is Westminster yet my novel takes place at the other end of this bridge (St Thomas’ hospital).

Let me know if you’ve had similar serendipity with covers.

Syrian Heart will be published in the spring.

Magazine for PIW

One of the great pleasure about putting on the play Paint It White was the magazine.

Putting together the 32 pages was a pain killer to the crazy pain of the pace of staging a show through pre-production and rehearsals. The play – based on the life of football fan, Gary Edwards, was a great project but things were never straightforward. Problem after problem had to be resolved and once the button was pushed then it was full steam ahead in getting the production on stage.

Achieving the applause and the final curtain was easy because the power had transferred to what I was in control of and when the actors took over. But before a line was ever spoken then it was a 24-hour job. That’s why coming home each night, I was able to power up the PC and get to grips with writing a Leeds United theatre programme.

It was a release and a ground where I could escape the day job issues. From the planning to the writing, it was a great aside to the main responsibility. Okay a magazine wasn’t essential but it was great fun. Some of the jokes are now a bit dated but I decided to put it on here to show you all what the end product of those late night came up with.

Have fun.tour mag 24 pages