internet is evil

when I wrote BAD TRAFFIC (my best novel) I didn't have internet at home. I went every morning to the Somali cafe round the corner and paid 50p for half an hour of internet access, and that was long enough to do all my emails and browse the news. Apart from that my life was completely internet-free.

When I was sitting at my computer, all I could do was work. My computer did not double as an infinite library of distractions, so I didn't have to constantly fight the urge to check email or look up random stuff. I wrote loads.

When my circumstances improved, and I got internet at home, I could still remember how productive and simple my life had been when I didn't have it. The internet is a Disneyland of diversions and I have little willpower.

I decided I needed a work computer that could run a word processor, do all the normal computery things, but couldn't go on the net.

But you can't buy one. Impossible. You'd have to get a typewriter.

So I got a Toshiba satellite: an undistinguished cheap laptop, but with one crucial (odd) feature - the wifi is controlled from a physical on/off switch on the side. I set it to 'off' and squirted super glue into the switch to jam it up. Ta-dah, no internet, a work machine.

But that was clunky and heavy and now, some years later, I am back working on an internet-enabled machine. Constantly battling distraction. I have Freedom, which is a simple program that will turn off your internet for a set period of time, but it just isn't the same.

This article - how the internet, merely by being available, destroys your ability to focus your attention - really chided with me.

Now I want to write another book and I'm thinking of finding another way to go back to being internet-less cause I can still just about remember how much more work I got done when it wasn't there.

So... bad internet! Bad for writers. Bad for readers. If I had my way, it would *only* be available in Somali cafes, and people would be slightly less connected and less well informed but actually able to concentrate.

 

QUICK WRITING

One of my favourite Brit films is LONDON TO BRIGHTON. It follows a prostitute and a child running from a horrible pimp who wants to kill the kid. Check it out. It's a chase film, simple and direct, and very affecting.

One thing that interests me about it is Paul Andrew William's statement that he wrote it in a weekend. That idea, that you could do something very good, very quickly, is very alluring. Because a screenplay is not very long, it certainly would be physically possible to write one fast - but that would mean you got everything right first time. Sadly it almost never works out like that. Generally you have to write a vast amount that ends up being cut before you get to something that seems simple and straightforward. Simple is not as easy as it looks, just ask Matisse and Brancusi.

Anyway the characters in L2B were based on people Paul had written about in a short, a couple of years previously. So in a way, a lot of the work had been done earlier. And cause he was also the director he probably got to do a lot of rewriting on the hoof.

I guess if you do want to do something fast, a chase film is the easiest genre to get a handle on in a hurry. Something where you can set an antagonist and a protagonist against each other and just kind of let them tick through it. Know the world well enough so that you don't have to do any research. I don't think MEMENTO was written in a weekend...

quick review, AMERICAN SNIPER

AMERICAN SNIPER

Why are there so many films with the word 'American' in the title? It annoys me, it always sounds bombastic, like the film-makers really believe their country is exceptional, their pyschos and beautys uniquely place specific. In contrast, I don't think I've ever seen a film with 'British' in the title. And I can't imagine anyone ever thinking a title like 'British sniper' could be a good idea.

Anyway Bradley Cooper plays Chris Kyle, a real life sniper and massive liar (look on the internet for debunkings of his cascade of bullshit) and the film tells the story of his Iraq tours, with plenty of juicy fiction - such as a duel with a deadly enemy sniper - added to what was probably quite dull fact - just one damn spurty headshot after another.

He's a big hunk of beardy manliness who wants to keep his buds safe by killin savages. Except when he's at home, when he gets freaked out by cars and dogs. But he has a good woman who keeps him strong. Turns out he can't keep all his buds safe and some of them die then the Horrors of Wah get to him and he can't bring himself to take a shot against a kid who picks up an RPG, the big pussy. But that works out fine and he kills more people from very far away and then lots of orcs, sorry Iraqis, try to overrun his position in a sandstorm and then drama and then he goes home.

There's not enough 'this war is shit' and there's some 'Americah fuck yeah', so guardian readers hate it and right-wing nutjobs love it, but politics aside, I'm a sucker for a good war movie and this does the job. I think it's brave to even attempt to do the Iraq war, and Eastwood is a proper old school director (ie a good one, not like these fancy directors they have nowadays). It doesn't set the target very far away but it hits the bullseye.

how DIP got made

DIP was the first thing I had shot. A twenty minute drama that was made for the Channel Four Coming Up series, directed by the lovely Lisa Gornick and starring dishy Robert Sheehan. You can see it here.

Coming Up is a Channel 4 scheme for new writers and new directors. As a writer you enter the competition with a pitch and some kind of writery backstory, you get interviewed, then (if you are lucky) you get shortlisted for a three day training scheme which involves being lectured by industry pros and they team you up and you make a short film.

The brief was to write a film that could be shot easily over a couple of days with a small cast. So I decided I'd come up with a story all set on a night bus. And then I had to think of someone who would have something dramatic to do on a bus - so, 'pickpocket' - then I had to give him someone to talk to - so that would have to be a victim... the story evolved out of those constraints.

The film was shot over four days on a bus driving round London - they shot on the upper deck with the crew downstairs. I spent one night on set. I learned that making a film is mostly boring and involves lots of hard work, that the hours are long and so it is important to wrap up warm. I remember being astonished that so many people were involved. There were people doing jobs I had not imagined - a 'script supervisor' who checks that everything is consistent from shot to shot, for instance, and another lady's job seemed to be running up to the top deck of the bus between every shot and damping down a Sheehan cowlick. Someone had to keep spraying the windows to keep them misted up. so the background wasn't distracting. And so on. I also learned that night shooting is an expensive pain, and if you're going to set something on a moving vehicle, make it easy for all involved and pick a luxury yacht.

Anyway it gets you on telly and you learn stuff. I figured I should mention it as I find myself recommending it a lot, to people trying to get into film.

quick review - WHAT WE DO IN THE SHADOWS

WHAT WE DO IN THE SHADOWS

yawn, vampire film. No, wait, this is a really good one. Cause it does the only thing left to do with the genre, which is take the piss. It's a mockumentary about four vampires living together in New Zealand, kind of Spinal Tap does Twilight.

It's made by the people behind FLIGHT OF THE CONCHORDS and is quite similar in themes - oddballs living together, deadpan humour, deliberately flat in the face of the absurd, flatshare comedy. It starts with a digital alarm going off at sunset and a hand reaching out of a coffin to slap the snooze button, and carries on in the same vein, mining funnies from the intersections of vampire myth and modern life: cause they can't look in the mirror they have to sketch each other when they try on clothes; when they go out clubbing they have to convince the bouncers to invite them in; when they get the internet they like to watch sunrises on youtube; they bitch about who's turn it is to wash the bloody dishes.

That makes it sound like a SCARY MOVIE sketch fest, but it's much better than that because the characters are really strong, angsty, out of time, frustrated and dealing as best they can with a horrible situation. Best is the 18th century dandy vamp who is in love with a human (now in her 90s) and hates getting blood on his clothes, and the new laddy vampire, who has to start learning the ropes from his undead cohorts, while teaching them about modern world.

There's not much of a plot - a vampire hunter adds a degree of threat, there's some kind of showdown brewing at the Unholy Masquerade annual ball, but it's a pleasure just to hang out with the loveable (blood drinking) misfits.

Adapting

on adaptation

Adapting books is how most films get made these days. I think producers like to option a book cause then there is a property they can 'own', and you, as the screenwriter, are hired - and can be fired just as easily if they don't like your 'take'. An an original script, it's more 'your' project, so it's harder for them to dismiss you.

Books are not written like films, so it's generally as tough as writing an original screenplay.

Most of the work is boiling the story down - cut subplots and characters, trim locations and so on. A book is something like a gormenghast castle - ramshackle, with diversions on every corner. You wander through it without worrying too much about the destination. There are dull bits, funny bits, digressions, varieties of tone. A screenplay, in contrast, is like a cathedral, with every detail harmonising (ideally) as part of some grand design.

Plus, only when you start trying to work out how to adapt something do you realise just how much novelists rely on interior voice and flashback. Especially when they're trying to give you a handle on the characters. A novelist often lays down the whole history of a characters, shows you incidents from throughout their life, gets into their head. You can't do any of that so you have to find actions that offer an insight into the character.  

Some stories just work better in one medium than another - closed world mysteries go great in books - The Name of the Rose, some of the Harry Potters, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo... but they made pretty dull films. Maybe it's because an investigation involves lots of talking - interviewing witnesses and such like - and dialogue works better in books (and on TV) than on film.

World building is much harder to do as well. That's what makes adapting fantasy and sci-fi tricksy.

Thrillers are probably the easiest. Though not always. Lots of thriller books have surprisingly creaky or odd stories, which you only notice when trying to strip them down. I once got asked to adapt a thriller in which the romantic interest, the girl, gets shot in the head exactly half way through, and goes into a coma, and comes out of it on the last page. Can that work in a film? And the plot didn't make any sense and the revelation at the end was a fifty page chuck of flashback. But it wasn't a bad book cause it took place in a fantastically well realised world. I pretty much had to throw the plot away but try to stay true to the characters. (There is a very odd story to why that never got made which I cannot tell).

William Gibson on NEUROMANCER

I went, (along with a whole load of other fortyish guys dressed in black), to hear William Gibson talk about NEUROMANCER. Which was published thirty years ago.

For those of you who don't know it, the book is an amazingly prescient work of tech-noir - a great story that invented the concept of an internet, and the term cyberspace; inspired dozens of imitations, including THE MATRIX; kicked off a whole subculture - 'cyberpunk'; and has been seriously called the most influential book of the 20th century.

Go and read it if you haven't, it stands up well. It's about a junkie hacker living in a dystopian urban mess called the 'sprawl' who is hired by an Artificial Intelligence to put a team together for a mysterious heist. It certainly made a big impression on me when I read at seventeen or so, adding fuel to my desire to get out of suburban Wales and find somewhere a bit more cool and sprawlish.

Gibson himself came across as clear-eyed, affable, a cool academic with - suitably enough - an unplaceable, mid-Atlantic accent.

If he is bored of talking about his oldest book he didn't show it. He said he invented cyberspace - in the story a virtual world rather like that of Second Life - after watching teens playing arcade games: craning over their machines, they seemed so eager to enter the screen - what if they could? He said that as well as an original arena for a story it was a handy way to solve the age old writer's problem of how to efficiently get people in and out of rooms.

In similar self-deprecatory fashion, he said that the prose flights of fancy that the book indulges in, particularly in describing its two Artificial Intelligences, was a way to paper over some wayward plotting.

And he was quick to point out that he wasn't the first to write characters who were constructs inside a computer - apparently that was Alfred Bester, in a story called 'I have no mouth but I must scream'. He referenced one of his book's few blind spots by pointing out that any modern kid who read it would think the plot must hinge around how the AIs managed to uninvent the mobile phone.

Other influences and antecedents he acknowledged included Philip K Dick, Meryvn Peake, and William Burroughs - who he described as like a musician sitting with an electric guitar and an arc of pedals, when all the other writers were still acoustic. He wanted some of that wa-wa.

Asked why nothing he had written had been turned into a decent film, he accepted that the Wachowski's had stolen his best ideas, but lived in hope.

One of the things that made his invented world seem so real was its attention to surface detail - giving 'eyeball kicks', he called it - and branding. But as well as inventing cool names for new things (I still want an Ono Sendai) he felt he needed to keep the story anchored by using familiar tropes: So, for example, Case, the hero, is addicted to the rather archaic amphetamines, rather than some ritzy invented designer drug.

Another striking and prescient story point is the power of corporate 'zaibatsus'. The idea for those super-companies came, he said, from a college anthropology course, where a lecturer pointed out that an alien arriving on earth, looking for the most powerful entity to talk to, would conclude that the the dominant social lifeform was not the nation state but the multi-national corporation. Even during wars, he pointed out, they could split in two and sell to both sides.

So he took a lot of things that were happening, or starting to happen, and extrapolated brilliantly to create a future world, parts of which are now coming to pass.

He wrote the book as a commission, in 18 months, and if he hadn't had to do it he wouldn't have done it at all. Overall he gave the impression that he had written it the way first books are often written -frantically collating sets of disparate influences, solving problems by elision, making up the rules as he went along.

And he ended up with something magnificent. Skilful guy.