theeyeless

Under Construction

2010-06-26T18:32:00.001+01:00

http://lanceparkin.wordpress.com/

... but the moment has been prepared for.

2008-12-26T17:48:00.003Z

Okeydokey.

Well, it's Boxing Day, and The Eyeless is officially out in the shops. As promised, my blogging ends here.

Thanks for reading, I hoped you enjoyed some insight into the making of the book. As I said in the various entries, there's no one way to write. I'm sure a lot of other writers reading my stuff about 'the process of writing' would have been baffled and bewildered because so little of it was like their own process. If you're an aspiring writer, good luck and the trick is to actually write stuff, not just to want to if only you had the time.

This blog's still here and it's not going anywhere ... please feel free to post reviews, comments, links to reviews about The Eyeless here and so on. I'll still be here to answer questions.

Thanks again, and a Merry Christmas to all you at home.

Lance Parkin

Death Ray Interview

2008-12-21T20:29:00.001Z

Great big long interview with me at Death Ray.

Approved and Proved

2008-12-16T19:29:00.000Z

OK … so here’s a quick description of the various stages a Doctor Who book goes through once the manuscript has been delivered. This is an author’s eye view, of course. Which is a polite way of saying that, for an author, a lot of this is pretty much invisible – you hand your book to someone, a few weeks after that you get back a list of comments and you don’t do very much with your book in the mean time.

Once a book is written, it’s edited. That’s what Justin had done during June, and what I described last time – he went through the manuscript looking at it artistically, making sure the story worked, suggesting ways the narrative could be improved, letting me know if there were any wider issues. With Doctor Who, there’s the danger that you end up clashing with something that’s coming up in another book or on the telly. As you’ll have seen, I pretty much finished The Eyeless before the fourth season even started, and I had no special prior knowledge of it (less than most people reading this, probably, as I try to avoid spoilers).

The edited draft then went to Cardiff for approval. The book’s going out with a Doctor Who logo on it, the BBC have all sorts of taste and decency standards. Obviously this is a stage most books don’t have to go through. On 30th July, I got a rather anti-climatic note from Justin saying that the book had been approved by Cardiff, but that they’d asked for ‘a couple of changes’ and I’d see them at the proof stage. My paranoia gland started secreting whatever it is a paranoia gland secrets, but Justin assured me that there was nothing to worry about (his actual words were ‘we removed all that stuff about a powerful alien fortress and replaced it with a sinister hillbilly dance routine’).

It was now onto the next stage – Steve Tribe, Project Editor, got in touch on 8th August to let me know that he’d got the approved manuscript and would be dealing with it from now on. Different publishers do different things at this stage, but it boils down to copy editing and proofreading stages, with a proofreader also going through the manuscript checking for spelling/typing errors, punctuation and so on. BBC Books run these two stages at the same time, but the books have separate proofreaders and copy editors.

Steve’s job was to take the completed, edited and approved manuscript and end up with typeset page proofs – a PDF file of the book that looks just like the pages of the final book (and for good reason, because the printers will use that file). Then we all have a final read of the proofs to make sure we’re happy and we sign off on them and they go to the printers.

All publishers have a house style, and one job at this stage is to make sure the book conforms to that. These can involve a set of quite idiosyncratic rules, and it’s usually fairly mundane stuff about the use of dashes, the exact form that numbers and dates are expressed (‘26 December 2008’, not ‘December 26th 2008’, that kind of thing), the use of American spelling (Virgin had some quite bizarre rules about that, ones that probably made sense to someone). Consistency in place names (it’s World Trade Center and Pearl Harbor, for example – you could have a sentence that ran ‘the Japanese attacked the harbour at Pearl Harbor’) and titles (the rank isn’t capitalized, the individual is, so the Brigadier is a brigadier).

Then there’s all the grammar stuff that makes me glad I have a proofreader. Sometimes I’ve had fairly heated discussions about grammar. Proofreaders tend to want good grammar throughout a novel – which sounds like the sort of thing we should all want, but this has led to proofreaders in the past changing some of the dialogue I’ve written. Now … I want readers to be able to parse the sentences and stuff, but I think dialogue’s allowed to be a little rougher (‘a little more rough’?) than the narration. People don’t speak grammatically. And sometimes the change of grammar can alter the sense of the sentence. A proofreader would make Mick Jagger sing ‘I can get satisfaction’. Kate Orman has the best anecdote here – one of her proofreaders changed ‘the spaceship left the planet’s gravity well’ to ‘the spaceship left well the planet’s gravity’. The way it should work is that the proofreader highlights every grammatical ‘mistake’, the editor and author decide whether to implement the change.

With The Eyeless there were no arguments.

The changes Cardiff wanted were very few and far between and almost all were incredibly minor. The thing that linked most of them was that they didn’t want to pin down things the TV series hadn’t pinned down – how the sonic screwdriver recharges, what the TARDIS defences can and can’t do, how long the Doctor’s been travelling the universe. There were notes on how they don’t like referring to the person the Doctor travels with as an ‘assistant’ these days, and that there are some other words they’re wary about. They took out a joke about shoe sizes, possibly because they didn’t see it was a joke (which is as good a reason as any for taking out a joke, of course).

In addition to those, I got a list of notes back from Steve on 4th September. Steve’s developed a good ear for the tenth Doctor, and noted about a dozen places where he didn’t think what I’d written sounded like something David Tennant would say. He’d altered one scene that was a flashback within a flashback within a flashback and so was hideously confusing. But there was nothing changed for being too gruesome, there was nothing major or dealbreaking at all. As with every stage, I wasn’t presented with any of these things as a fait d’accompli, and we talked everything through and I persuaded Steve to change his mind about a few things, he persuaded me he was right about others.

To show how smooth this all was, we settled everything so quickly that Steve was able to go away and come back with typeset proofs on 9th September. As is the way of these things, we all noticed a few minor things that had somehow managed to elude us all up to this point, despite dozens of re-readings – an item that was described as ‘featureless’ on one page was ‘covered in symbols’ on the next, that kind of thing.

Editors have reasons for making suggestions and if a writer disagrees, his job is to work out why the editor thinks what they think. Both the writer and the editor should be able to back up their opinions, explain themselves. Often, an editor and writer agree about what a scene should be trying to do, but disagree about the way to land the scene on that spot. It is possible for writers and editors to lose track of the fact they want the same thing, or for some pretty basic miscommunication to mess things up, although that’s thankfully been an extraordinarily rare occurrence for me. I think the crucial thing to note here is that this stage of The Eyeless felt no different to the editing stage of any of my other books – it was a lot smoother than most, to be honest.

A lot of the online discussion about ‘mistakes’ or ‘inconsistencies’ or ‘wrong turns’ in either the books or the TV show just doesn’t recognise that the writers and editors have endlessly discussed things. As I said very early on in this blog, if a writer chooses to do something, he’s almost always making a conscious choice not to do plenty of other things, things he’s agonized about, talked through and so on for months, decisions that are influenced by often the weirdest things. The main influence for Doctor Who is, surely, time – my book’s out on December 26th 2008. It had to be finished in time for that to take place. It’s the same for television, only far moreso: actors have to be booked, sets built, costumes made and so on and so on.

So … 17th of September, that was it. The proofs had been corrected, the file went off to the printer. The Eyeless was done and out of my hands.

Spotted In The Wild

2008-12-15T19:26:00.000Z

News from TBFKA Outpost Gallifrey that The Eyeless has started showing up in actual shops. Good hunting!

Edited ...

2008-12-12T17:22:00.000Z

On June 20th, I got the comments back from Justin Richards, consulting editor and prolific author in his own right.

The note he sent was about 1700 words, and made about thirty separate points, about twenty of which were minor and easily-corrected with a little bit of clarification. For example, I’d done a sequence with three people talking and it wasn’t always clear who was replying to whom. Those little ones just take a minute or two to sort out, on the whole.

Justin’s very good on plot logic stuff, and there were a couple of things he needed to be sure I’d thought through. Generally, there were bits that were a little confusing, and needlessly so. There were also a couple of places where I’d moved a scene around and not noticed that a character now knew something they’d only find out about later. As ever, there were a number of Hartnellesque pronoun problems (I managed to write ‘They could do so much they couldn’t’ at one point).

A good example of the bigger things that needed fixing – in the first draft, the locals called the Fortress ‘the Folly’, while the Doctor called it ‘the Fortress’. Gradually, some of the locals started using the Doctor’s name for it. It meant I ended up with people exchanging dialogue like ‘We should go to the Folly’ / ‘Yes, you’re right, we’ll head off to the Fortress in the morning’. Now, that wasn’t the end of the world or anything, I’m sure people would have figured it out, but why not just have everyone call it ‘the Fortress’ from the beginning? As you can tell from the cover, it’s a perfectly sensible thing to call something that looks like that.

As I’ve noted before, Justin wanted the opening trimmed back a little. This was the only time in the whole process he invoked ‘the younger readers’, saying they’d want to get to the story faster. I lost about two or three pages, purely of descriptions of the Doctor walking through the city. On the initial read throughs, people had made that same point – Mark Jones and Lars Pearson both suggested cutting it down, Mark Clapham wondered about it, but said he liked it the way it was.

Other than that, it was fairly straightforward. The Doctor mentions an encounter with an alien that I’d made up for the book. Justin was worried that people would think they were missing a reference to a telly episode or one of the other books. At the same time, I was meant to be avoiding continuity references, so I couldn’t just change it to refer to the Daleks or whatever. I cut the Gordian Knot with a slightly meta line from the Doctor explaining that this wasn’t something a reader should take as a continuity reference.

Conversely, there was a continuity reference I’d put in the first draft I really wanted in there, if at all possible, it was smack in the middle of what The Eyeless is about, although I’d always known it might be a problem. Justin and I talked it through and … well, it’s on page 46 of the finished book. You’ll know it when you see it and you might even think ‘I can’t believe he got away with that’.

One thing I didn’t think would be a problem: I’d broken the book into two ‘parts’, and there’s a big cliffhanger at the end of part one. The book is a game of two halves, too – like most of the telly two-parters, there’s a definite shift in emphasis for part two. This was a bone of contention for a little while – it has page count and other design implications that I hadn’t realised. I did really want it broken up like that. Ideally, I’d like people to take a week off between part one and part two! It is, though, entirely artificial – going strictly on wordcount, the novels are more like four episodes of new Doctor Who (or six or seven parters in old money). In the end, Justin was able to grant my wish, and so if you’re the sort of fan who insists the first story is called 100,000BC (it is, of course), then The Eyeless is actually called The Eyes of a Child / Unless. Which you can shorten to The Eyeless, of course.

We played around with one of the very last scenes, one where the motives of the characters and what they were really thinking wasn’t clear. One of the characters was the Doctor, and – as ever – I wanted some ambiguity and mystery about his thought processes. Back in the days when Virgin published the books, it was an absolute no-no to have scenes that went too deep into what the Doctor was thinking. Here, though, what the Doctor was thinking and planning needed to be a little more explicit. It’s the end of the book and he has to be resolute and strong … but not psychopathic, which is how what originally happened could read in certain lights. This was a bit where the editor was doing what a director would do if it was for TV – just making sure the motivation and movement of one scene wasn’t cutting against the story.

That was, to be honest, the only tricky thing this time around, and it was tricky because – as I’ve said a number of times – the ending of the book was something that had to be very poised and carefully-judged. I always have a faint dread that an editor is going to want something completely removed or changed. Or, worse, that they’ll ask for something they think is minor but which will mean great big structural changes. If it’s in the synopsis, there’s always the ‘it’s in the synopsis’ defence, but as I’ve explained in earlier entries, very little of the book is actually in the synopsis. I had my new anxiety that, at some point, the fact it was a new series book would mean someone would be going through it and changing it. It still hadn’t happened.

Justin is always very clear about what he wants, and open to negotiation – it’s my name on the book, and I’d spent six months thinking about it and writing it. If I can make a case for something, Justin is always willing to listen. I had a list of things he wanted me to do. I’d had a month off from the book. I was now able to re-read it again with a bit of a fresh eye, and I spotted a couple of other things I could do and tricks I’d missed. With any project, it’s great to be able to put it in a drawer for a few weeks then come back to it with a bit of distance. It’s rarely a luxury I get, though.

The changes took a week, and I posted the second draft back to Justin on June 27th. He was happy enough with it to send it on to Cardiff for approval.

Gulp.

Pullman Interview

2008-12-11T01:16:00.000Z

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/arts_and_culture/7774176.stm

A Philip Pullman interview there. Lots of short answers, but the longish answer about democracy in texts is a good one, I think.

MAY

2008-12-09T01:24:00.001Z

May was a busy month.

I delivered the official first draft of The Eyeless to Justin on May 16th.

I say official first draft because … well, these things are hard to define. Back in the day, an author (or his or her secretary!) would type out a manuscript and it would be a very solid, defined thing. Now it’s a computer file, and I went back and forth changing as much as I wanted, whenever I wanted.

For the record, Justin was getting a fourth draft, I think:

By the end of December, I had just about everything done but the ending. I sent it around to people and waited for feedback from them – in part because I needed that feedback to help crystallize that ending for me.

By mid-March, I’d got a much better second half and an ending that worked but which I wasn’t completely happy with.

There was a much stronger draft by the end of April, thanks in large part to all the people who’d read it and commented. The ending was a lot better, but still not quite right.

By 'ending' I really mean the 'third act' - the whole last bit of the story, where all the cards are on the table, all the plans are in the open and reaching a critical point. Every Doctor Who story has one - in the olden days, it was the whole last episode. Now it's that last, frantic ten minutes or so. I say every Doctor Who story, but Mark of the Rani just sort of stops. So every Doctor Who story but one has one.

One of the things I wanted to avoid was what I’ll call the ‘The World Is Not Enough’ problem. There are two main baddies in that movie. They kill off the most interesting one first, then the last act is Bond beating the less interesting one. And, as it turns out, in an extremely dull way – literally they push a prop back and forth until the bad guy dies. I really have three sets of antagonists by the end, and spent a long time juggling the order in which – spoiler alert – the Doctor sorts them out.

I wrote one ending and it was literally, almost word for word, the ending of Watchmen. Which has a great ending, but one with the slight disadvantage - for my purposes - of not being something I wrote.

There was also a separate question of the actual last scene. I had four or five different versions of this, all basically the same scene, played differently. These were nothing like the end I'd described in the synopsis - that no longer fit the book. In Doctor Who there's always a problem with this last bit - you want the Doctor back in the TARDIS, ready for his next adventure. If you're not careful, you end up finishing with a pretty redundant bit - the Doctor and companion walking back to the ship saying, effectively, 'well, that was exciting, wasn't it?'.

Around May 10th, it came to me exactly what the very last scene needed to be. This, though I say it myself, had everything – a nice echo of some things Russell Davies wrote (no, it’s not someone shouting ‘Paul McGann doesn’t count!’), the Doctor doing something clever only the Doctor can do, a sense of the story coming full circle to an extent, and a real sense of closure. A real ‘eureka’ moment, and quite a relief.

As is the way with these things, once I knew what to write, writing it was pretty straightforward. It quickly expanded to become the whole last chapter - as I was already bumping against my wordcount, I then had to go back and did a bit of trimming to fit it in. This sounds blithe and untroubled, but I’d been trying to find this last scene since the end of December, getting increasingly worried. Writing endings is a little like doing a balance sheet, it all has to fit together and add up, while leaving nothing out. Some of my favourite authors are hopeless at endings, and I think it’s because they’re reluctant to leave the wonderful world and the characters they’ve created. I understand that, certainly.

It’s also because life never has neat endings. One of the best endings of anything, ever, is the end of Our Friends in the North. It feels like a culmination of the thirty year journey we’ve been on. Superbly written, and expertly performed by Christopher Eccleston, the guy who went on to play a famous doctor on the telly. (Indeed, nowadays, as it also stars Daniel Craig, Our Friends in the North feels like a story not even Paul Magrs dare write – the Doctor and James Bond growing up in the sixties as Geordie best friends). If you nitpick it, then the end only feels like things have changed, but it's incredibly cathartic and emotional. And now I've said all that, I can’t find it on YouTube, so just … y’know, buy it on DVD. It's worth it.

Endings are tricky, and I speak from experience.

Now … I know I run a risk with this blog. I’ve been on the internet since 1991, and I know that it’s an information-driven economy here. I’ve given people information about how The Eyeless was written. I am genuinely worried that I’m tainting the evidence, that the people who’ve read this know the second half took a while to write and this will affect how they read the book. It's very easy to let what you know about the author or the circumstances the book was written in colour your reading of the book.

Just look at how people let their ... well, often their prejudices, affect what they think of Russell Davies' work. It's all gay, it's all atheist, it's all Welsh, it's all just so ... tall. I know Russell Davies wears glasses, but does he really have to impose a bespectacled Doctor upon a family audience? I'm very, very suspicious of this way of seeing novels or movies or telly. We all wrote essays in school that said things like 'Shakespeare clearly thought that ... ' but ... well, we can't telepathically commune with the dead.

Obviously, by this logic I can't presume to tell you what Russell Davies thinks. Speaking as a poststructuralist, technically I can't even presume to tell you what Lance Parkin thinks. In the end, though, what I tell you here or what Russell Davies says in The Writer's Tale is ... well, not half as important as what we're telling you in the stories we've written.

I went through a process to write The Eyeless, I had to identify, define and solve problems. Part of my job was to make the final book seamless and untroubled and to make that process pretty much invisible. If you ever go 'that was a great bit of direction' or 'what a great special effect' ... it wasn't. Not in the normal course of things. Reading should be a bit like driving a car - if you can hear the engine rattling, something's gone wrong. We're all very savvy and postmodern and meta and well-informed now ... but the paradox of my job is that, at its root, what I'm trying to do is to distract you from the mechanics of what I'm doing and leave you with a purely aesthetic experience. And, surely, I get bonus paradox points for announcing that in a blog about writing the book.

These are the risks we take in the age of DVD commentaries and making of discs. I hope that the people who’ve read this far are the sort of people who appreciate a trick all the more if they know how it’s done. David Copperfield once said that the difference between a Vegas audience and the London audience was that in Vegas, they look at him when he started flying overhead, in London they look past him for the wires, but they end up clapping louder. I hope you're a London audience.

Anyway, I sent the book to Justin.

Within a day or so, Justin was able to send me the cover (which I’ve talked about before in this blog). At first, I got a PDF file emailed to me, but I soon got a nice glossy copy posted to me. I’ve always frame these, which means, by now, I’ve got enough book covers to fill up a fairly sizable wall.

The Eyeless was announced around the 25th, and I started this blog on the 27th. I spent six months knowing I was writing a tenth Doctor book without being able to shout about it!

The book wasn’t finished yet, though …

TV Writing

2008-12-04T12:38:00.000Z

Charlie Brooker, who's been mentioned here a fair few times, has interviewed a number of TV writers about their craft for his show Screenwipe and it's well worth a look.

Buy The Eyeless ... for less!

2008-12-02T15:57:00.001Z

So ... here are the best deals for The Eyeless I've found.

According to the wonderful, saved-me-so-much-money site Find DVD both Amazon and Play have the book for a fiver.

For non-UKers, there's no excuse. The Book Depository delivers free worldwide within a week. When they get their stocks in, it'll be less than cover price, too (5.24 GBP, usually). That works out cheaper for someone in the US than it would do from their local Borders ... three months earlier, too. Delivered to your door. Go on, you know you want to.

There will be deals in supermarkets and three-for-two offers, too.

So ... are these the best deals out there? Let me know.

When it does come out, please feel free to review it - on your own blogs, on Amazon (that's particularly useful, because so many people will read that) or just by posting a comment here. I'd love it if people posted a link to any review here (positive or negative, I don't mind as long as it's not actively sweary or libellous).

Companions and Allies

2008-11-29T18:04:00.000Z

I asked a number of people to look over The Eyeless for me – they’re credited in the book, and absolutely every single one of them immeasurably improved the story, and if you’re not named specifically in this blog, please don’t get offended – your freebie copy is, even as we speak, in the post! It’s no exaggeration, for example, to say that Jon Blum gave me both the best joke in the book (the ‘down the pub’ one, when you get to it) and one of the best scenes (‘begone, shift!’).

A lot of the time, people would say things I knew already, either deep down or just because they were obvious. This is often the most helpful criticism of all – a lot of what a writer does is, as I’ve mentioned, papering over cracks and he needs to know what he’s got away with. There were a couple of plot logic things I’d been avoiding thinking about, but everyone agreed I had to address. The blurb for the book – which I’d written pretty much when I’d started – talks about the weapon at the heart of the Fortress and asks ‘What is the true nature of the weapon?’. This was a very good question. I knew what it had done, I knew what it looked like … not its ‘true nature’. As with so much science fictiony stuff, you want an explanation that’s both bizarre, over-the-top and yet which is simple enough to get your head around. It would be difficult, for example, to build a ringworld or an ansible or a transporter or whatever, but it’s simple enough to explain what they are and what they do, and why it would be cool to get your hands on one.

Another problem … and I think this is pretty common with a lot of writers: faced with a second half of a book that was a problem, I just went back and refined and revised the stuff I’d already written. It was something to do, but every time I polished the beginning of the book, the gap between the lovely first half and the scrappy second half just became more and more pronounced.

I think it was Lloyd Rose who first pinpointed that there were two distinct problems I was facing in the second half. The first one I knew, but was too close to the story to see as a big problem: I’d set up an interesting group of characters, then had the Doctor just walk away from them – it was essentially a bit of a waste. The second was something I hadn’t spotted at all, but which was absolutely fundamental. Plenty of stuff was happening to the Doctor – quite big emotional beats, real challenges and so on … but they were just happening very episodically, there was no real sense of things getting harder for him, or any development at all.

The mistake I’d made is something I’ve already talked about here – the idea of the protagonist and his choices. I was giving the Doctor a sequence of physical challenges, and these were getting trickier and trickier. The emotional beats, though, were all at one level (broadly ‘gosh, how will I beat this physical challenge in time?’). Part of this is the problem with the Doctor as a character generally – he’s a thousand years old, he’s been through so much. It’s hard (arrogant, even) to imagine that your story is finally the one that really puts him through the ringer or threatens to break him. He’s resistant to any kind of change, really – even when something extraordinarily traumatic happens to him (Rose leaving is the best example recently, perhaps ever) he should be back to being the Doctor pretty quickly. He’s not all that different in The Runaway Bride, and three episodes into the season, when he mentions Rose to Martha and it’s still a sore point, it feels a little ‘off’, I think.

Mark Clapham noted the places where the ‘influence’ of The Subtle Knife on my book was straying into legal territory and wondered if the characters were a little too ‘normal’, given their circumstances. Mark Jones and I had a long phone call where we talked through the plot logic of just about every element of the book, including – again – the psychology of the other characters. Kate Orman and Lloyd Rose set me straight about when the tenth Doctor wears his glasses.

Everyone asked why the Eyeless were called the Eyeless.

The second half of the book began snapping into place, but it took a long time. It’s quite intricately plotted – very tightly focused on the Doctor, but with stuff going on close by that’s affecting the action. At every stage, there’s a tension between moving the story along and dwelling on things.

I had my own notes, too. Three pages of my big notebook were taken up with bullet points that needed addressing – these were often big things or just references or lines or words I wanted to fit in the book somewhere. Many of these look pretty obscure:

‘Sunlight = plants’
‘Handful joke’
‘why no survivor guilt’
‘No H in “Antony Gormley”.’
‘callous to boys, not girls’
‘how Eyeless can see?’
‘Casino Royale’
‘Civilisation Zero?’
‘Museums rotting’
‘Urban jungle’

OK … the upshot of this was that I had to completely restructure the second half of the book, and there was a lot to fit in there. The irony is that I recently re-read the synopsis now, and it’s pretty much exactly the same as both the first draft and the published book.

I’d got a second draft I was relatively happy with by March 10th. I think I could have got away with this version of the book – it was the first complete draft. For the first time, the ending felt satisfying - although it still wasn’t quite right. I sent this revised version to people, saying that it was ‘still missing that special sauce’.

I also had a secret weapon. Phil Purser-Hallard. On the Jade Pagoda mailing list (which is all about the Doctor Who novels – in theory at least: be warned that the list once got into a fight over whether the argument they were having was circular or, as one person suggested, triangular) PPH’s reviews of my books were always incredibly perceptive and constructive and eventually I realised that if he reviewed my books at the manuscript stage, I’d end up with much better published books. I only emailed Philip the book when it was at this stage, because I knew I wanted a fresh eye on it. As ever, I got another great list of tweaks and suggestions.

Oh, and you should track down The Vampire’s Curse by Mags Halliday, Kelly Hale and Philip.

A piece of television has hundreds of people making direct creative contributions, it’s actually quite tricky to see ‘authored’ TV – Doctor Who, of course, is now an exception. But even shows with ‘showrunners’ whose names you know aren’t created by one person, not even one writer. The Eyeless is ‘more me own work’ than a television episode would be – even so, there are dozens of people on the production side – editors, copy editors and so on … and plenty of people who were happy to give me their time and perspective while writing. Thanks, everyone.

Meanwhile, back at The Eyeless

2008-11-25T20:03:00.000Z

Okeydokey. Writing The Eyeless had been very smooth, but now I’d hit a structural problem, and this can basically be summed up – spoiler free – by saying that the middle of the book was proving to be better than the big finale I had planned.

I’d whizzed through the book at this point, and at one point seriously thought I’d have it all done by Christmas. Bear in mind that my deadline was June – and the secret editors never like to share is that these deadlines always have a little bit of a buffer built in, because writers are prone to miss deadlines. When I handed one of my first professional magazine articles in, the editor said ‘this is on time, it’s about what you were briefed to write about and it’s the word count we agreed’. I said something along the lines of ‘well … duh’, and he told me ‘no – if we only get one of those, we’re happy’. Note that ‘well-written’ doesn’t factor into that.

But now it was mid-January and I’d stalled. I’d kept writing … I now had about two-thirds of the book, but I wasn’t that happy with the last couple of chapters and I only had a scattered impression of where I was going. I knew I had structural problems, I knew I'd be throwing out a lot of what I was writing, which I always dislike doing (This sounds strange - but there are two basic writing techniques, I think: writers who throw down twice as much as they need onto the page, knowing they'll carve away at it and get it into shape; or writers who only commit things to paper when they're broadly happy with it, so end up putting half as much as they need, then adding things to get it into shape. I'm definitely the latter.).

Structural problems usually aren’t the result of something external like Vampire Science suddenly having to lose Grace. It’s usually something the author realises isn't working about their book. The Alsa thing I mentioned last time is quite a good example. Changing her role in the book changed a fair amount of other things. I wrote earlier about how a story is about choices – we see far more of her choices, the reasoning behind them and so on. All that meant that she had to be in different places at different times and all of that has knock on effects.

The first ten days or so writing The Eyeless, I was writing stuff that was setting up the story and it was fairly straightforward. It’s not a spoiler to say that the opening section has the Doctor arriving and doing a little bit of exploring. Now … there was a complication. In a normal Doctor Who story, there’s a companion, and it’s the perfect set up: an older, experienced character can answer all the questions the companion has. And because the companion is an audience identification figure, unless the range has temporarily gone a bit mad, the questions the companion asks are the ones the audience would, if they were there.

The Doctor is travelling without a companion in The Eyeless. The easiest thing to do would be to have him meet someone early on who can act as a sort of temporary stand-in for a companion. I wasn’t interested in doing that – I had an opportunity to have the Doctor alone, and hooking him up with someone would cancel all that out. And I didn’t have the option the TV series has exercised a couple of times, now, to have a stellar celebrity guest star as a one-time companion.

But I’d known all along that the Doctor wasn’t going to have a companion, and that was all part of the plan. You’ll see how I got on when you read the book. The irony was that my writing slowed down once I got past that phase and to the easy bit where the Doctor met up with other characters.

In the synopsis, this was a fairly brief encounter – the Doctor would meet them and move on. Even when I was drawing up the synopsis, though, I suspected that this would be an area of the book that would expand. It always happens – there will be some part of the story that just comes alive and presents all sorts of dramatic opportunities. Then there are always parts of the synopsis that seemed like really great ideas that would fill fifty scintillating pages which you realise you can cover in one chapter, one scene or even a single line … if it needs to be in there at all.

One thing that dropped out – I originally wanted the Eyeless to have a caste system, with clearly-defined roles. One would be a pilot, one would be a telepath, one would be a leader, some would be warriors and so on. That’s completely missing from the finished book for a couple of reasons. First, it’s a bit of a rubbish science fiction cliché. I’m not saying it couldn’t be done, or hasn’t been done - there’s meaty stuff to be had about ‘we’ve all got our part to play’ and individual v society stuff, which are nice big themes for any book, and already part of what my book is talking about. I was originally going to explore that using the Eyeless characters. Those are still themes of the novel, but there were just better characters to tell that story with.

Second, though … it was just taking far too long to explain the set up. I was literally creating a convoluted problem for myself, then taking forever to solve it. The problems in the rest of the book are fairly straightforward and easy to relate to real life. I’ll probably write a SF novel at some point where there are aliens with a strict caste structure – one of the great things about writing is that you end up recycling your old ideas sooner or later but it’ll be a book all about that.

My big structural problem came when it became obvious that the people the Doctor meets are actually big identification figures … and that one of the problems with the book was that there were precious few identification figures.

It coincided with me realising that the bulk of the second half of the book wasn’t going to work. Remember that bit with the big grabby robot arm thing in Planet of the Ood? That hadn’t been shown at the time I was writing The Eyeless, but the whole of the second half of the book was going to be like that – relentless action. It was something I knew would be a challenge, and not quite right or sane for a piece of prose. There’s a piece of received wisdom that there has never, ever been a great car chase in a novel. I can’t think of one. I’d probably look in Ian Fleming to find it. The idea was to take something that would work really well in a movie and try to make it work in a book.

Yeah … it quickly became obvious that I couldn’t get it to work. Whenever I tried, what I was doing sounded like the subtitles for an action film.

So … I had a couple of problems. The action bit didn’t work and I wanted to expand the role of the people the Doctor met. The problem: the location of the story switches, definitively moves away from those people.

And, for the first time, it was a problem for me that the Doctor didn’t have a companion. In a normal Doctor Who book, the narrative can be in two places at once – the Doctor in one location, the companion in another. That’s actually what happens in most Doctor Who stories.

The Eyeless is more like first person narration, in a way – the Doctor’s in virtually every scene. Which has the advantage that it feels nice and immediate and that you're in the heart of the action ... but the disadvantage that it's hard and vaguely boring whenever you cut away from what the Doctor's doing. I suspect I'm not the only person who has been reading a Doctor Who book and decided to skip ahead when there's half a chapter about the colonists (or whoever) and the Doctor and companion aren't in that bit. It's called Doctor Who, not The Colonists.

Originally what I planned was for the Doctor to be in and out of the Fortress pretty quickly … that had to change. The air car chase sequence that I’ve dropped from pretty much every Doctor Who book since Cold Fusion got dropped again. Alsa’s new role was working nicely, and helping to show off the Eyeless themselves. To be honest, what I was writing was OK, and would have made for a functional Doctor Who book, but … well, this was my first tenth Doctor book, I had plenty of time, and I wanted it to be special, if I could manage that.

This wasn’t exactly a looming disaster, but I was finding it frustrating. So I sent the book out to a few people, hoping they’d be able to tell me where I was going wrong.

Thankfully, they did …

Special Guest Synopsis

2008-11-15T02:20:00.000Z

As promised, a special guest synopsis, courtesy of Jon Blum and Kate Orman.

About a week after I started writing The Eyeless – when I was sixty pages into the book - Justin emailed in the morning and said ‘how would you feel about putting Rose in it?’. That would have … altered the structure of the book somewhat. Almost before I’d had a chance to reply, Justin emailed again to say that he didn’t want Rose in it. Problem solved. Although, to be honest, while I told Justin that my concerns were purely artistic, this was basically a lie and my main problem was that I’d already written the beginning and wasn’t keen on rewriting because that would mean more work.

Such things happen, albeit rarely – Kate Orman and Jon Blum started the second EDA, Vampire Science thinking that Grace from the TV movie was in it. They then had to edit her out, when various licencing and editorial people decided against it.

Vampire Science: The Original Synopsis

This is the original synopsis for VS, before Grace had to be dropped from the novel. Her role in the story was divided between new companion Sam and Dr Carolyn McConnell.

Dr. Grace Holloway is one of those people the Doctor doesn't forget. He turns up on the odd occasion to take her to the opera in various centuries, and every year he shows up on her birthday to bring her breakfast in bed. Until, that is, the year when she leaves a note for him in the kitchen suggesting that he not wake up her new boyfriend.

The Doctor has also helped with getting Grace a position consulting for UNIT. When it doesn't conflict with her more ordinary hospital duties, they call her in as a medical advisor. This time, UNIT has her conduct a couple of unusual autopsies - for deaths which follow the classic patterns of vampire attacks.

Intrigued, she gets her new boyfriend James (a lighting designer at a prestigious uptown theatre) to do some additional investigation into the deaths. He's not entirely sure about all this risky cloak-and-dagger stuff - he's not used to being her legman, or rather her companion - but he cooperates.

Her own contacts lead her to a young doctor by the name of David Shackle, working at a downtown hospital, who knows about a whole series of similar cases of apparent vampire attacks. Thing is, all those happened to homeless people, lowlifes and bums of various sorts... Shackle's rather ticked off about the fact that all these cases have been ignored up till now, when "nice" people have started to die.

After swapping information with Dr Shackle, Grace goes back to the cafe where she was supposed to meet James, and waits for him.

And waits.

He doesn't show up. He's vanished, and she has no clue at all what's happened to him. Neither the police nor UNIT turn up any leads. Now she devotes all her energies into trying to find one man who's disappeared in the midst of a cityful of people, but to no avail. While she copes as best she can with trying to juggle all her work, she's coming apart at the seams.

So she contacts the Doctor. She feels a little awkward about involving him, not least because she's never actually told James about this other man in her life, and the Doctor feels similarly odd about it. But then, he's used to being the hero who doesn't get the girl - there's nothing really different about this time, is there?

He decides that, since James was probably kidnapped to send Grace a message - back off or else - their best course of action would be to press on with the investigation into the vampire deaths, so the kidnappers will get in touch with them. Grace is shocked by this approach - what if the kidnappers decide to simply kill James? - but she trusts the Doctor.

The Doctor, Grace, and Shackle continue their investigations, staking out the alleyways near a gothic bar/club which appears to be at the center of the "uptown" attacks. Shackle gets mugged. Once they get him away to safety, the Doctor and Grace are incredulous at his lack of regard for his own safety, and the stupid chances he took on the stakeout. Shackle, it becomes clear, really doesn't care much if he lives or dies - he's spent so much time swamped in his downtown hospital, surrounded by the trivial deaths of unnoticed people, that he doesn't really see much point in fighting to stay alive. He still has his idealism, but figures that all it'll get him is an eventual death from cholera while working in some squalid Third World charity hospital... where's the point in fighting it?

The Doctor's plans pay off when a man meets Grace in a cafe. "Slake", as he calls himself, is a lurid, self-consciously Gothic poseur, trying to act all menacing, threatening, and darkly sexy in an Anne Rice sort of way. Grace, of course, isn't buying any of it. Finally he gets to his point, giving Grace the ultimatum: back off, or he and his "brothers and sisters" will kill James and come for her. He shows her his fangs as a final touch.

The Doctor intervenes at this point. He very politely tells Slake that he's a Time Lord, a member of the race which wiped the vampires' kind off the face of the cosmos a few million years ago, the race which is sworn to destroy descendants of the Great Vampire anywhere they may find them, so could Slake kindly take his dreary little melodramatic self back to his masters and tell them to let James go? Because otherwise the Doctor will be most displeased with them. Slake tries to look unimpressed, but slinks away with his tail between his legs.

Meanwhile, Dr Shackle has been sending blood samples from victims off to one of the premier medical labs in the city for analysis, looking for some kind of common factor in the blood types. He goes there and meets the woman who's handling his samples, a rather dishevelled-looking post-graduate student named Joanna Harris. Harris seems attracted to Shackle's morbid-idealist persona, and he offers to bring her in on their investigations once they find out more.

Grace and the Doctor go back to the bar and continue to watch for signs of the vampires. Another vampire attempts to pick Grace up. This one's a particularly sociopathic one, who has lost the ability to distinguish between pleasure and pain, and who thinks that his victims suffer willingly. It takes the combined efforts of the Doctor and Grace to fight him off.

Slake reports back to his fellow vampires: a coven of fourteen, led by Joanna Harris. She's still the same unassuming, somewhat dumpy figure Shackle met - she's so used to being powerful that she doesn't need any of Slake's posturing. Her extreme age and experience - she's about as old as the Doctor - allow her to get away with being a vampire geek.

She's the only one of them who remembers the legends of the Time Lords, and figures that the Doctor needs to be handled very carefully. After a few withering comments in Slake's direction, she sends him back to arrange a meeting between her and the Doctor.

Slake delivers the message to Grace's home: the Doctor is to meet the vampires at an old abandoned theatre at midnight. Come alone, don't inform the police, et cetera et cetera. The Doctor has Grace drive him there, and leaves her with strict instructions before he goes in: if he doesn't walk out of this building by two AM, she's to set fire to it. Great, Grace says to his back as he strides inside... How?

As they await the Doctor's arrival, Slake tempts James with the possibility of becoming a vampire. James refuses - not out of a sense of any great nobility, but simply because he's not interested. He likes his life to be pretty much normal, thank you very much.

The Doctor arrives and offers Harris a deal - if the vampires let James go, and cease hunting humans, the Doctor won't destroy them, despite his oath as a Time Lord to do so. He knows that doing so would reopen the old war between their races, and he'd much rather try to take steps towards some kind of peaceful coexistence. Slake is scornful, but Harris tells him off. She says that if someone hadn't started breaking the rules of the cabal by hunting the Remembered, rather than derelicts who wouldn't be missed - not to mention gorging themselves on many more victims than they need to survive - they wouldn't have attracted this attention in the first place.

Harris dismisses all the other vampires and then gives her answer to the Doctor. She will try to control the feeding of the vampires, though she can't promise that they'll listen. She's already working on an alternative method of feeding, she says. In return, she demands to be bonded to the Doctor - an exchange of blood and a telepathic link between them. That way they can trust one another, because if one of them dies, so does the other one. To safeguard James, the Doctor agrees.

The weakened Doctor walks out of the theatre, leading James with him, much to Grace's joy. The Doctor assures her that his pact with Harris isn't going to turn him into a vampire - he's just getting occasional flashes of what she's experiencing. All appears to be under control.

But the next day, back at Grace's house, things begin to come apart at the seams. When Grace finds out that the Doctor let off a group of killers like the vampires with nothing more than a "don't do that again", she's shocked and furious - the Doctor's protests that he's trying to avoid restarting the Great War, and that Harris seems to be seriously trying to change the vampires' ways, mean nothing to her.

On top of this, James has a Long Talk with her... if she's going to be dealing with this insane world of vampires and extraterrestrials, he doesn't want any part of it. He leaves and tells her to call him when it's over, if it ever is...

And Dr Shackle meets again with Harris. Slowly but surely she's leading him to believe that everything he's devoted his life to - trying to hold back death - is hopeless. Death wins. And if you can't beat 'em... She offers him the choice to become one of them. He balks at the thought of killing, but she tells him that she's working on a method which could let the vampires feed without hunting the mortals. He won't be hurting anyone, the only one it affects is himself... She leaves him with her offer.

Shackle runs to Grace. She tries her best to persuade him back from the abyss, but he doesn't see much reason not to believe in Harris. He ends up going off, not sure what he's going to do, much to Grace's distress.

The Doctor again infuriates Grace by seeing Harris' side of the matter. These people are killers, Grace tells him, they hunt and eat humans! So do lions and tigers, counters the Doctor, but he doesn't see Grace campaigning for their extermination... Grace refuses to just sit back through all this, and she storms out on the Doctor.

She goes to the lab where Harris works and follows her - tracking her to a secret laboratory in which she and her fellow vampires have been working on their project. Grace discovers what they're growing in their nutrient vats... fully-formed humans, mindless zombies... experimental subjects. She rushes back to report to the Doctor.

Meanwhile, the Doctor has gone to James, to convince him not to run out on Grace. He tries to inspire him with tales of all the good he can do, and how well-suited he and Grace are for each other... like Grace's intervention with Shackle, though, this hasn't quite convinced James.

Shackle himself has given up and gone to Harris. He's ready. But she's not; she wants him to help her with her research first, and as a reward she'll turn him into a vampire. Slake overhears this, and offers Shackle a quick fix: he'll turn Shackle before Shackle changes his mind, in return for information about this Doctor...

Harris catches Grace snooping around the lab. She considers Grace's investigation an infringement on her agreement with the Doctor. For this she is going to kill Grace - making sure the Doctor can see this through their link. Across town with James, he can do nothing to stop her... except that the Doctor clambers out onto the ledge outside James' apartment, threatening to kill himself (and therefore Harris) unless she spares Grace. (James, who has no clue what's going on, is horrified.) Harris relents, and the Doctor, himself amazed by what he was about to do, asks James' help to get him back inside.

Harris is horrified that the Doctor would pervert a bonding - a symbol of trust - and use it as a weapon against her. In return for this, Harris kills someone just to make the Doctor experience it through her eyes. The Doctor, shaken and furious, goes to confront her. "How could you?" he demands. He's beginning to realize the mistake he's made in trying to do a deal with her.

The Doctor challenges her on her scheme, and realizes why she's growing humans - they're like veal, grown and fed in controlled circumstances to be a good meal for the vampires. Harris says this is a humane method; her synthetic humans are mindless, not self-aware, no more likely to feel pain than your average cow. But the Doctor demonstrates to her that she hasn't perfected it - these humans are dimly self-aware, and suffering. And then of course there are those vampires like Slake and his fellow uptown hunters, who won't be satisfied with killing domesticated humans, who love the hunt too much...

Shackle tells Slake about the link between the Doctor and Harris, which Harris has been keeping from the other vampires. Slake realizes that, if they can kill the Doctor, that will destroy Harris, and Slake will be free to lead the cabal... In return for his cooperation, Slake prepares to turn Shackle. To avoid any incriminating signs of Slake having fed on Shackle, the turning will be done by artificial means. Slake draws a syringeful of blood from himself and injects it into Shackle. There's no romance, no dark drama, none of the supposed sensuality of a vampire's kiss... just a cold, lethal injection.

Then Slake and his followers move against those loyal to Harris, killing them. Harris and the Doctor realizes that they both face a greater threat from Slake's bloodlust. They need a weapon against him... The Doctor and Grace leave Harris to continue working on the toxins while they go home.

James is waiting on Grace's doorstep, with roses and an apologetic look. He's sorry for the things he said, and he wants to try to help in any way he can. Grace's reaction is awkward, unsure. She's not feeling particularly close to either him or the Doctor at the moment.

James also has a message for the Doctor - Slake stopped by earlier. The Doctor is to meet him at the abandoned theatre tomorrow night. Of course it's a trap, the Doctor realizes - they want to kill Harris by killing him. He comes up with an idea, and he'll need both Grace's and James' help to pull it off.

During the day, James goes down to the theatre. The Doctor and Grace go back to Harris' lab and finish work on the anti-vampire toxins... the Doctor swallows a large dose himself.

That night, the Doctor and Grace arrive at the theatre. The first vampire to show himself is Shackle. Grace has a moment with him, just to ask him why. He shakes his head and asks, "What else was there to do?"

Slake and the others arrive and instantly move to attack the Doctor. The Doctor is aghast at this poor form on Slake's part - not even a half-hearted attempt at pretending he's interested in negotiating, not even pausing for a few melodramatic speeches, just going straight for the jugular. He waves his hand...

And James, up in the lighting control booth, powers up the lighting rig he's set up... a perfect simulation of full-bore sunlight, right down to the ultraviolet. It's not quite right to destroy the vamps, but it throws them off long enough for Grace and the others to escape.

Except for the Doctor. Enraged, Slake and his fellow vampires surround him and tear into him. The Doctor struggles for his life, but they're all sharing in his blood...

...and, as they realise too late, in the vampire-killing compounds he'd ingested. They're destroyed by their own bloodlust, and all would be well, if not for the fact that the Doctor himself is at death's door.

Harris, aware of the attack through their link, races to the theatre. She can't let the Doctor die - her solution is to turn him into a vampire. Grace refuses to let it happen, tries to get him medical help... but the Doctor waves her away. He's ready for this. Grace is horrified. She tells Harris, with cold conviction, "If you destroy what it is that makes him the Doctor, I will kill you." Grace shakes her head. She can hardly believe that she, a doctor, could find anything worth killing for. But it's true.

Harris just shrugs and crouches over the Doctor. The turning begins.

All sorts of cardiovascular hell breaks loose. The vampire-killing compounds in the Doctor's blood reject the infusion of vampire DNA, and in effect kick- start the Doctor's healing. In turn, his link with Harris causes the effects to bleed over to her, just as he'd planned. She'd assumed a taste of the anti-vamp formula wouldn't kill her, because she's so old and strong, and it doesn't... in fact, it heals her. It restores her humanity, severs the link with the Doctor, and turns her back into an ordinary mortal. Life wins.

Later, as the survivors all walk away together, Joanna Harris tries to figure out what to do now. Hell, maybe she'll just find another vampire and get them to bite her all over again. No, urges the Doctor. "Read a book, get married, go on a picnic, feed the ducks, do all the little things you humans do." Caring for the proto-humans she's grown would be a start. His words might actually be reaching her.

And James and Grace are becoming reconciled. Each has seen the other show strength and determination they'd never seen in them before... as well as compassion, when Grace mentions wanting to arrange a decent funeral for Shackle. After seeing her devotion to the Doctor, James is willing to step aside so that Grace and the Doctor can go off together... but Grace tells him that's not what she wants. The Doctor, after all, is half not human; James is right for her.

And the Doctor, healed, says farewell.

Shackle, the only one among the vampires who wouldn't drink the Doctor's blood, stands alone in the theatre. His one-time friends think he died with the others. He has no idea what to do now.

Outside, the sun is rising.

Copyright Jonathan Blum and Kate Orman, 1998. All rights reserved.

Game on

2008-11-13T15:38:00.000Z

I got my first copies of The Eyeless this morning. Now, the book's not out in the shops until December 26th, but it's real!

Father Time Synopsis

2008-11-11T13:53:00.000Z

I thought it might be useful to look at an actual synopsis. This was the second draft of Father Time - note that the title at this point was still 'Miranda'.

The basic story is exactly what ended up in the book. The odd detail or name gets changed - I really streamlined the far future politics stuff, I lost some of the Cold War parallels. I think the real difference is that there's a whole bunch of things in the final novel that just aren't even mentioned here - supporting characters and so on. I think that's pretty typical - the synopsis is there to give a book a good, strong skeleton. This is the deep structure of the book, a bit like the foundations - I've often found that the big problems with books come when the synopsis doesn't quite work. The key thing is that anyone who's read Father Time will recognise what they're about to read, it may even clarify a few things for them.

This is pretty typical, I think - it's certainly what happened with The Eyeless.

More on the writing of The Eyeless soon, and that pesky structural problem I hit and I'll also feature a Special Guest Synopsis from another EDA, so you can see an example of how other people write their synopses.

So ...

MIRANDA

A proposal for an Eighth Doctor Adventure by Lance Parkin

The 1980s. The Doctor inadvertently discovers Miranda, an alien princess and child, in hiding on Earth. A number of factions of her race want her for their plans – regardless of the human cost. As the Doctor protects her, he takes on a role we have never seen before: a father. The story takes place over ten years, and the Doctor in it is a Byronic, Romantic figure – fighting for a child, by turns both reassuring and scary. It’s a story of revenge, destiny and the importance of family – even to a man with no past.

Part One: Winter, 1981

Schoolteacher DEBORAH Rowley’s car breaks down a few miles from her Derbyshire home. Trudging through the snow to the nearest farmhouse, she finds the DOCTOR, living in isolation with his books, experiments and cats. The TARDIS sits outside the farmhouse, looking like a Police Box. (This familiar object has struck a few chords for the Doctor. He still doesn’t know who he is or where he’s from, but he sometimes surprises himself with scraps of knowledge.)

The Doctor fixes Debbie’s car, and Debbie (who has seen he has a chess set) invites him to speak at the school’s after-hours chess club. He challenges every member of the club to a game – and works around the room, move-by-move, outsmarting every one of the ten-year olds and their teacher. Every pupil but one – the Doctor is horrified to realise that a ten-year-old girl called MIRANDA is letting him win. He tells Miranda to try to beat him, and she does.

The Doctor realises that this girl has great potential. He asks to give Miranda extra tuition. The school are enthusiastic, but the PARENTS aren’t – they just want her to be ordinary. The school explain to the Doctor that they are immigrants – fled from the East Germany for political reasons, and they want a quiet life. The Doctor tells them Miranda should make the choice, and her enthusiasm to be taught by the Doctor convinces her parents it’s a good thing. The Doctor starts to teach Miranda after school, and learns that her parents are over-protective. Miranda is an enthusiastic pupil, and the Doctor is gradually drawn into village life.

The Doctor’s friend Debbie is married to BARRY, a boorish lout who wants her to give up her job to raise children. The Doctor thinks she should do what she wants. Barry is growing suspicious of a man who spends so much time with his wife. Despite this, or perhaps because of it, the friendship flourishes.

There’s a UFO flap on in the local area, and it’s becoming a magnet for UFO spotters. The villagers find it all a bit amusing, and good for trade. The Doctor, of course, is less sceptical – these are the first aliens he has come across since the 40s, and he is fascinated by the prospect of contacting them.

The Doctor witnesses a UFO landing. The aliens are a mixed bunch of weird robots and creatures, and clearly possess advanced technology. He follows them around. At the very end of the night, the Doctor hears where they are from: the Klade Imperium. They are a long way from home – they are from millions of years in the future. The Doctor is drawn to them like a moth to a flame – could these be his people? Is he a … time traveller?

Gradually, the Doctor is growing suspicious of Miranda’s parents – he realises they aren’t from East Germany at all. One night, while they are out, he searches the house and finds a few items of advanced technology. Miranda’s family are Klade, fleeing from enemies in the Imperium. The Doctor tells them he’ll protect them from the aggressors. The parents tell him the Imperial Family are notorious throughout the universe for their brutality and crimes. The Doctor is enthusiastic – he’ll gladly fight them. The parents are forced to explain: there has been a bloody revolution and the Family were rounded up and killed. Only the infant Miranda survived – brought to Earth by her nanny and the nanny’s lover. She is all that remains of the Imperial Family. Miranda could be an important figurehead to the Royalist cause, perhaps justifying any atrocity. Her adoptive parents are terrified that the Republicans will have them all killed – the Republic is far more brutal than the Imperium ever was.

The Doctor makes contact with the Klade party, and they claim that they are Royalists, here to protect Miranda – they want to return to their own timezone and take her to safety, but her adopted parents have refused. The Doctor is sure he can broker a deal, but it’s clear he is uneasy about having the Klade, whatever faction they might be, on Earth at this time, and doesn’t want Miranda involved in the war – she’s innocent of the crimes of her family.

The CAPTAIN and his DEPUTY know about the Doctor – the Deputy has met him before, and although he doesn’t say it, it’s clear they were enemies. The Klade are suspicious of the Doctor and his motives: is he feigning amnesia? The Doctor assures them he isn’t, and is fascinated to discover what they know of him. The Klade keep the Doctor in the dark, telling him there’s a more pressing problem: an enemy battleship is on its way from the future. They had hoped to have left with Miranda by now, but the Doctor’s delays have allowed the enemy to locate her; they don’t have a hope of stopping a battleship. The Klade tell him that he can earn their trust by helping them to repel their enemy. The Doctor adjusts the Klade time machine to seal off the time corridor, preventing the battleship from arriving – he’s surprised to realise he knows a lot about time theory. Once he is out of the way, the Klade commander adjusts the settings. Instead of arriving in orbit, the Klade ship crashes into a hillside.

The Doctor examines the wreckage of the Klade battleship and discovers that it’s from the Royalist faction – the last survivor uses his dying breath to tell the Doctor that the Klade from the UFO are a Republican death squad sent to kill Miranda and her family.

The Republican death squad have tricked Miranda’s father into taking them to Miranda. They kill him when he realises they aren’t Royalists. The mother and Miranda escape, with the Doctor’s help. After a pitched battle, the mother is killed. Barry also dies, and Debbie is surprised just how relieved she is.

The Doctor makes an appeal to the human captain of the Republicans – how could he kill an innocent child? The captain explains it would be very easy – her grandmother massacred his family, and his family has blood feud on the Imperial Family. Miranda’s entire bloodline is tainted. The captain is convinced Miranda, if she lives, will become a terrible dictator.

We see a darker, more Byronic side to the Doctor as he defeats the Republicans – they’ve crossed the line, and the Doctor seems willing to follow suit. The Captain is killed, but the Doctor refuses to kill the Deputy – he has to return to his timezone and live with his dishonour.

Miranda has seen nothing of this. The Doctor returns to Miranda – something terrible has happened, but he’ll look after her. The tearful Doctor hugs Miranda.

Part Two: Summer, 1986

Debbie is astonished to bump into the Doctor in the City of London, in a Porsche and a sharp suit. The Doctor tells her he has responsibilities now, and needs to provide a certain level of income. He works in Trend Analysis, and is proving to be good at predicting trends and fads and is finding it ridiculously easy to make a fortune. They go back to the huge house he owns on the bank of the Thames. A beautiful teenager walks in and pecks the Doctor on the cheek. This is his daughter, Miranda.

Miranda is one of the star pupils at a southern boarding school, and a champion swimmer, capable of beating any boy her age. A teacher tells a new colleague that her parents died in a car crash five years ago, and she has a wealthy guardian who adopted her, and who’s grooming her for Cambridge or Berkeley. (All this exposition might be framed in an Ian and Barbara style investigation).

Something odd is going on – it becomes clear that the new teacher is a disguised Klade agent. He reports back – he thinks he’s identified the princess, but there is no sign of the Doctor.

The Doctor tells Debbie he has never explained Miranda’s heritage to her. Her parents wanted Miranda to have an ordinary childhood, and that’s what he’s giving her. But he knows the Klade will come back for her, and he’s been watching out for them. But are the Doctor’s motives pure or is he keeping Miranda close so that he can find out more about himself when the Klade find her?

In the pool, Miranda loses a race to a boy from a visiting team, Ferdy, a honey-skinned lad like herself. She’s annoyed to be beaten. Ferdy gets her alone – unseen, he draws a knife on her, but is interrupted by a teacher before he can assassinate Miranda. They part.

Ferdy returns to his craft – he is the younger brother of the Captain from 1981, and he’s brought a group of Klade soldiers here to avenge his family’s honour, led by his father’s Deputy. Ferdy is angry that he was not able to kill Miranda, but refuses to sanction the more drastic methods urged by the Deputy, such as the destruction of the whole area – this is a matter of honour, and he must kill her face to face. Ferdy is sure of his success – there are no records of Miranda after this year. The Deputy only wants a chance to avenge himself on the Doctor. We get a sense, though, that Ferdy’s heart is not in it – and that he wants Miranda alive for some reason.

Miranda’s best friend Dina has a crush on the Doctor, but it’s clear there’s not a hint of that with Miranda – she’s keen on Bob, one of Ferdy’s classmates. As Miranda returns for half term, the Doctor paternally grills Bob, asking whether his intentions are honourable – a mortifying experience for Bob, but for Miranda in particular.

Dina’s parents are away, and she invites Miranda and some friends over for a party. It goes very well, and Miranda is getting on very well with Bob. (We also see how odd ordinary life seems to Miranda – she doesn’t have a-Ha posters on her bedroom wall, unlike Dina, Dina hasn’t spent every summer travelling the world). That night, she sneaks into the room Bob’s sleeping in - and finds him in bed with Dina. Miranda storms out of the house. Miranda is being stalked by Ferdy, but hails a cab and, oblivious to the danger, gets away.

Dina tries to apologise, but Miranda isn’t interested. Instead she catches up with Ferdy and invites him out to the pictures. At the pub, Ferdy tries to poison her drink, but the landlord throws them out for being underage before she can drink anything. By the end of the evening, Ferdy has fallen for Miranda, although when he returns to his ship he angrily denies the Deputy’s charge that he could have killed her given the chance. Ferdy gets to see Miranda’s strengths at school – he sees she’s a powerful, charismatic person. Ferdy is ambitious, and realises that if they were to marry, his family would strengthen their standing among the Klade. The Klade Republic is teetering on the edge of collapse and needs a strong leader – Ferdy realises it could be him, if Miranda is there to legitimate his claim. Something Miranda does reveals something of a ruthless streak – she’s not quite as lily-white as the Doctor thinks (we get a real sense that she could take the dark path).

The Deputy discovers where the Doctor lives.

There are some areas the Doctor just can’t advise an ordinary teenaged girl on – he can’t remember his own childhood, but seems to recall it involved being taught by giant robot badgers. Debbie tries to help, but Miranda resents this new presence in the house and Debbie can’t get through.

The Doctor and Debbie go up to Derbyshire for a reunion night. Miranda sees her chance, and invites Ferdy over for the evening. As soon as her guard is down, Ferdy explains everything – her alien heritage, the crimes of her family, the Doctor being an alien. Miranda is convinced and horrified – she can’t possibly come back with Ferdy. Ferdy tells her that in that case, she has to die. Miranda escapes, with Ferdy and his mercenaries chasing her. The Doctor returns in time to save her.

The Doctor tells Miranda she doesn’t have a destiny – she is not responsible for the actions of her family, she doesn’t have to return. Miranda tells the Doctor she’s leaving home – she just can’t face him, now, her entire life has been a sham.

The Deputy kidnaps Debbie, and uses her as bait – the Doctor has to rescue her rather than follow Miranda. The Deputy attacks the Doctor, out for revenge for the defeat he suffered in 1981. This time, the struggle ends with the Deputy’s death (and there’s some dispute – could the Doctor have won without bloodshed?).

Ferdy departs, defeated, but defiant that there will be a final reckoning.

Miranda has gone, and the Doctor is left devastated.

Part Three: Winter, 1989

The Doctor has been searching for Miranda for years, and he’s spent his fortune looking for her. He is in Berlin, watching the Wall come down, but Miranda isn’t there. We can see the Doctor is edgy, more rattled than we’ve seen him for a while. He phones Debbie – has Miranda called? Debbie tells him what he already knows: there’s been no hint of her.

Miranda is in India. She wakes up next to a West German backpacker – they spent last night celebrating the end of the Cold War. For the last three years she’s wandered the world, earning enough to get by, and having adventures. She goes outside – and a Klade Saucer is hovering over her hotel. She is captured. Ferdy is inside – ten years older than her, now. He’s spent a dozen years searching the ancient records of this timezone for a trace of her. The German backpacker will become a famous film director, and made a film based on his experiences of India – he mentioned Miranda, so Ferdy knew she would be here. The Klade ship launches into orbit.

The Klade ship is vast, with opulent living quarters for the officers, but squalor for the engineers and slaves. It’s Red Dwarf meets the Titanic, with elements of the Liberator. Miranda is given a handmaiden and shown the glories of the Klade. Ferdy tells her they are returning to Klade homeworld, where her marriage to him will cement his claim to power.

The handmaiden tells Miranda that the Klade homeworld is now in total collapse – structurally, socially, environmentally … the old palaces stand on a polluted, shattered world. The Republic is on the brink of collapse and civil war. There are now a dozen Klade warlords who style themselves as the Emperor: Ferdy is the strongest, though, as he holds the Throneworld, and now the Empress.

Suddenly there is an explosion deep within the ship – rival saboteurs have sabotaged the ship. They want to kill Miranda rather than let her become a figurehead for a new dictatorship. In true Doctor style, Miranda escapes down a ventilation shaft, with the help of a handmaiden. (The Miranda/handmaiden relationship is very reminiscent of the Doctor/companion one).

The Doctor realises the Klade have been active in India, and puts two and two together: they must have Miranda. Miranda manages to contact him – she tells him the Klade ship has been damaged and will need to make repairs before it can timejump to the Klade home planet. The trouble is, she’s five hundred miles away – in space.

The Doctor and Debbie fly to Cape Canaveral and, in a sequence that this synopsis doesn’t do justice to, steal the Space Shuttle from its launch pad, much to the amazement of the crew. This is a first for the ‘new’ Doctor … but space travel feels like a homecoming for him.

We see Miranda is more pragmatic than the Doctor – but even she is moved by the terrible conditions the slaves live in. As she walks, incognito, among the huddled masses, we see a new maturity and sense of responsibility developing. The ship is becoming a battleground between the saboteurs and those loyal to Ferdy, and the slaves are being caught in the crossfire.

The Doctor brings the shuttle alongside the Klade ship. The astronauts are now willing to work with the Doctor and Debbie. The Doctor and the astronauts launch a daring rescue mission. It’s exciting, there’s a lot of swashbuckling – but, of course, Miranda isn’t in her chambers. They are captured, and the Doctor is interrogated – although he manages to turn the tables and learns Ferdy’s true plan. He’s discovered computer records containing lost secrets and technology from the Klade’s past, when they took place in a vast intergalactic war - if Ferdy has these, he will have enough power not only to unite the Klade, but to begin expanding the Empire. But the files can only be opened by the genetic code of a member of the Royal Family.

Miranda frees the slaves. There is a huge revolt, and the palace is stormed. Miranda rescues the Doctor.

Ferdy kills Debbie and threatens to kill the Doctor unless she opens the files, but she won’t. The Doctor and Miranda are side by side, now, and clearly a winning team. Ferdy is caught in one of his own traps.

The Doctor tells Miranda she must return to Earth – opening the files will be dangerous. Miranda laughs: no, she’s staying – she’s going to raise an army. She’ll crusade in the Klade timezone to restore the Doctor’s values, something that seem to have been forgotten in that distant future. Her handmaiden agrees – this is a chance for the universe to rebuild. The Doctor is faced with a genuine dilemma: how can he know that Miranda won’t become a dark force? Can she be trusted? He decides that she can, and gives her his blessing.

The Doctor returns to Earth in the space shuttle, landing it on the M25 and getting away before he has to answer any awkward questions.

THE BADDIES

One thing that isn’t coming across in the synopsis is that there are strong villains. Each of these get a
confrontation with the Doctor in which their philosophy is made clear.

THE KLADE

Mentioned in passing in The Infinity Doctors, the Klade come from a warlike far future, a fascist empire spanning galaxy after shattered galaxy. They resemble the Nazi supermen – tall, blond, muscular. They are militaristic – seemingly genetically destined to be cruel, warlike, sadistic and
decadent. Their technology is advanced and efficient.

The brutal, oppressive Imperial Family is wiped out in a revolution while Miranda was an infant. The fate of the Klade mirrors that of Russia in the 1980s. When they arrive in 1981, the Klade Republic is monolithic and seemingly at the height of its power. By 1986 the Republic is beginning to break up – the economic and military strains are showing. By 1989, the Klade are once more on the brink of revolution and civil war.

THE CAPTAIN

Arriving in 1981, the Captain is ideologically opposed to the Imperial Family, as well as out for personal revenge on what they have done to his family. A man in his late thirties, early forties, he’s a natural leader and military tactician. A professional soldier, he leads a disciplined band of troops who are totally loyal to him. There’s an intensity there, and he won’t hesitate to slit Miranda’s throat or kill anyone that gets in his way. There is honour there, there is pride, but a stubborness and inflexibility, too. He’s George Baker’s Tiberius from ‘I Claudius’.

THE DEPUTY

A loyal servant of the Captain, the Deputy is a vicious thug. He’s a soldier, not a thinker, and goes wherever his Captain leads him. His total loyalty and tenacity mean the Captain trusts him absolutely. When he returns in 1986 he has become obsessed with avenging his Captain and destroying the Doctor. The Deputy has no ideology, only loyalty. The collapse of the Republic means little to him – he’ll carry on fighting for his master, whatever the circumstances. Think of Michael Sheard’s character from Blakes Seven (Aftermath / Powerplay).

FERDY

A young man in 1986, Ferdy has found his life mapped out for him – his childhood was spent as a privileged member of the new Republic. In 1981, with the death of his older brother, he was thrust into the political arena, and is clearly uneasy. There are a lot of obligations – the blood feud with the imperial family, the need to command soldiers – that he is barely equipped to deal with. He’s sharper, more intelligent than his brother was, and that means he’s seen that an endless cycle of revenge and counter-revenge will end in genocide on both sides. Unlike his brother, Ferdy is imaginative, and not restrained by tradition and ‘the rules’.

When he returns in 1989, Ferdy has aged ten years – now he’s beginning to resemble his brother, but his intelligence makes him paranoid, his lack of respect for the ancient ways of honour means he is more cynical and less driven. He wants Miranda now entirely for his own pragmatic gain, not for the family honour. Ferdy sees himself as the leader of a new Klade society – a dictatorship.

Namedropping

2008-11-03T21:41:00.000Z

As requested, a brief discussion about naming characters.

It’s a weird one. At one level, naming characters is fairly trivial. What your character is called doesn’t really affect the story all that much. I’m a firm believer in the theory that if you can remember the name of the lead character in an action film, the makers have done something wrong (Broken Arrow takes this to the extreme of having the audience find out the names of the male and female leads as the last lines of the movie).

For long running characters, it seems to be more important. There’s clearly a resonance to ‘Sherlock Holmes’ or ‘Dracula’ that must be, in part, because their names are so distinctive. Would Kylie Minogue smell so sweet if she’d been called something less unusual, something that didn’t sound like a team in the UEFA cup? I’d still fancy a sniff, I think. Some of this is clearly just our familiarity, rather than because they’ve got weird names – you can’t really get more ordinary names than Elizabeth Taylor, Bruce Willis or Richard Burton.

‘Hardy and Laurel’ sounds discordant, but there’s no particular reason why, it’s just that we’re used to it being the other way round. Other things are cultural. The name ‘Kevin’ in the US is Costner and Kline and Bacon. In the UK, it’s still Gerbil.

Other names are just at hand. The name ‘Dalek’, famously – if, almost certainly, fictitiously – emerged when Terry Nation saw a phonebook that ran DAL-EK (or DAL-LEK). The most famous example of that is probably James Bond. Ian Fleming had an ornithology book by a ‘James Bond’ on his shelf. Um … I’m probably not going to help my case that I’m not a James Bond fanboy by pointing out that that’s why Pierce Brosnan poses as an ornithologist in Die Another Day. Er, or by noting that I have a first edition of James Bond’s book. Elsewhere, Fleming used the names of friends and acquaintances – not always amusing them in the way that he hoped.

I named a character in Emmerdale after a friend, once … and then (after I’d left the show) the character was revealed to be a golddigging ex-prostitute. Oops. Hilariously, when I tried to name a character ‘Mark Clapham’ I was warned not to use any more joke names. This, I think, might have been the very episode where Gareth Roberts introduced a character called Roger Blake.

It’s very hard to find an ‘ordinary name’ (this a person called ‘Lance Parkin’ speaking of course … people always confuse me with Lars Pearson and Lawrence Miles, making Warlords of Utopia, - written by me, published by Lars, edited by Lawrence – like some weird Three Doctors type special). The temptation is always to go weird and Pythonesque – Celia Molestrangler, that kind of thing. One of the things Vic and Bob always used to do so well was find ordinary names for their characters. A talking Labrador was ‘Greg Mitchell’. Douglas Adams managed to have characters called Arthur Dent and Zaphod Beeblebrox in the same scene.

There are practical considerations – on the whole, you want to avoid characters with similar names, just so the audience don’t get confused. You want to avoid libeling anyone (Barbara Cartland got very offended by Fatherland, when she learned she was still writing romances in a parallel universe where the Nazis won).

You want the names to be nice and memorable, to suit the characters without going the Restoration comedy route that would have seen Jack Harkness called something like Roger Proudcock.

So … how do I come up with my names? A lot of the time, characters just grow into their placeholder name. This has happened to me with pets in the past, and I suspect it’s the power of the label – soon, they’ve ‘become’ that name.

The names in mine usually mean something, even if it’s something trivial. All the names in my Big Finish play Davros are from Diff’rent Strokes, for example. The ones in The Dying Days are all place names from The War of the Worlds. I often use vaguely punny names, and don’t explain them – in Father Time, Ferran is a corruption of Ferdinand, for example, and Klade is an anagram.

The Eyeless has quite a small cast. A lot of the names are short, almost fragments of other names, because the planet is small and broken. This isn’t some code to break or anything, and I hope now I’ve said this, it’s not distracting, but – for example - there’s a character ‘Jeffip’ who I originally pictured as being sort-of played by David Bowie. His name’s a mashed up version of ‘Phillip Jeffries’, the character Bowie played in Fire Walk With Me. In the event, I heard Bowie was in season four, so Jeffip ended up played by someone else. Regular readers of mine will be able to work out who. Regular viewers will note that Bowie didn’t show up in season four. ‘Gyll’ is meant to be reminiscent of ‘Gyllenhaal’. The planet Arcopolis is basically a city of Arcologies, if that’s not a contradiction in terms, but the word also echoes with Ark and Arc and Arcadia.

The reason the Eyeless are called that is explained in the book, and it’s not the obvious explanation.

The Difference Between a Synopsis and a Novel

2008-10-28T15:40:00.000Z

OK … so I had a synopsis. But I wasn’t just religiously following that. No plan survives initial contact with the enemy.

The synopsis I’d written, the one Justin and I had worked through, the one that Russell Davies Himself had read and approved, was two pages long. It wasn’t meant to contain every single thing the book would. Editors know that. The idea is that when you hand the book in, the editor can look at the synopsis and go ‘yeah, that’s what we commissioned’. Basically it's so, down the line, the marketing people, the cover designer, the sales reps, the press and publicity people … they all know, months before the book actually exists, what they’ll be getting.

Tales grow in the telling.

The thing a lot of non-writers ask is ‘where do you get your ideas?’. It’s the wrong question to ask. Ideas are easy, it’s stringing them together in a coherent way that’s the challenge. What I’ve found is that to string ideas together, the process of writing is more like a set of heuristics … ‘solutions to problems’.

There are a variety of strategies a writer adopts. Now … again, as I’ve said before, very little of this is conscious, particularly when everything’s working. It’s not a matter of sitting and calculating – you don’t catch a ball by calculating a parabola, you do it on instinct. Or, in my case, you fumble and drop the ball because you lack even basic hand-eye co-ordination.

The basic problem to solve is that there’s a set of specific story points you want to make – people who study drama tend to call these ‘beats’. If you want to make the point that a character is cool in a crisis … well, the golden rule is that you don’t just write ‘Steve was great in a crisis’, you have a scene where we all see Steve coping well in a crisis (and, conversely, other people coping badly, by way of contrast). ‘Show not tell’. And the difference between fiction and real life is that everything in fiction is there for a reason, and is making a specific point – the art of it is to make it feel like real life, and the irony is that necessitates hundreds of different contrivances and conventions. So, for example, people in real life don’t speak in any way at all like people speak in the movies – unless the real life people are quoting from movies. The biggest con job of all, the most artificial and convention-bound, is the story that's 'realistic'.

Things change as the writer turns his ideas into an actual book, and that was certainly true of The Eyeless.

One character, Dela, isn’t even mentioned in the proposal and just ended up becoming a major character. This often happens – stories work much better if there are two people in a room, arguing and explaining things. As I said last time, I was splicing scenes together, keeping things pacey and efficient. I needed characters to hit three ‘beats’ – to do three things – and it turned out that Dela could do all three, and suddenly was there in my book, a rounded character.

Another character, Alsa, started out as one thing and ended up as exactly the same character but playing a completely different, much more interesting and involved role in the story. Again, I don’t want to spoil any surprises, but the book altered quite substantially once I understood the active role she’d take in the story. Gar, on the other hand, a character we first meet with Alsa, ended up with far less than I was expecting. I thought the two of them would be a double act, and get pretty much equal time.

The thing is … synopses are always a bit of a fudge. Legend has it that the outline for the Paul McGann movie ends with something like ‘and then the Doctor gets back to the TARDIS and stops the Master in his own inimitable style’. That’s the whole last act basically down as ‘TBC’. And the last act is a bit of a mess, probably not coincidentally. If nothing else, if you’ve not pinned it down, every random passing executive can pitch in and add a suggestion like ‘wouldn’t it be great if they went into, like, a time orbit?’ and he’ll be too senior for anyone to express their natural, healthy reaction to the idea, which is basically to re-enact that bit with Heath Ledger and the pencil.

There will always be things you’ve not fully worked out in your synopsis. You’ll have things like ‘and then the Doctor gets through the impenetrable forcefield and meets the Guardian who tells him the way to the Old City’ or something, without knowing how he does that literally, by definition, impossible thing or what the hell a Guardian is or looks like. In that case, it’s basically deferring your imagination. You’ll explain later.

There are two simple problems there … coming up with a trick for the Doctor to perform to get past the forcefield while trying to maintain suspense, and playing fair with your readers – ‘oh look, a button that deactivates the forcefield’ is a bit rubbish, but so’s ‘I’ll plug my sonic screwdriver into the tachyon emitters and send a plasmotic pulse’. Ideally, you want some way that the reader could guess – ‘oh, he uses the crystal he picked up in the forest in the first chapter’ or just make a fight of it. The Doctor gets past five traps a story, there are over a thousand Doctor Who stories, so it’s tricky coming up with a novel way of getting past a trap. As I said a while back, stories are about choices. If your protagonist gets past the trap by making a clever, characteristic, choice, it’s always going to be more satisfying than if he does it by luck or coincidence.

Likewise, the Doctor’s met lots of monsters – a number of them called ‘Guardian’, for that matter, like Mavic Chen, Guardian of the Solar System (except on Sunday, when he’s merely an Observer, joke © Jim Smith), the Guardian of the Doomsday Weapon, not forgetting the Black, White, er … hang on, I think I can do this from memory, Gold, Azure, Red, Crystal and Beige Guardians. Was there a Pink Guardian? Somehow, you feel there ought to be in the Doctor Who universe. Pink could play him or her.

These are basically just three pipe problems. You spend a day going ‘the Guardian’s a big lizard … nah … she’s a little girl … nah … he’s Stephen Fry in a UFO style purple tinfoil wig … yeah … er … nah’ until you hit on an idea that just works. It is, in all honesty, a ridiculous way to make a living, and to justify it, authors work themselves up until things like this seem like the Schleswig-Holstein Question or trying to prove that N=NP.

These aren’t structural problems. At the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter what the Guardian looks like from a story point of view. The story beat is only that the Doctor needs to meet someone who can tell him about the Old City. If the book was running over the word count, or was dragging a bit, you could ditch the whole forcefield/Guardian bit and have the Doctor find a signpost marked ‘to the Old City’.

If you’re writing a book and you change your mind, you only have to edit a few sentences. Or, and this is the great thing with novels, you can defer everything to your readers: ‘she was the most beautiful woman imaginable’. OK readers … get imagining. On TV, you have to be more concrete – you have to cast that woman, so it becomes a question of the most beautiful woman by the standards of the casting director who’s available and agrees the fee. Not really the same. But even on TV, the writer can palm a load of the heavy lifting off onto the director or designers. You type ‘it’s a futuristic control room’ and get on with things, leaving some other guy to design and build the damn thing.

Ten days or so into the writing of The Eyeless, I hit a structural problem …

I (heart), (heart) Doctor Who

2008-10-23T23:54:00.001+01:00

A brief digression.

Doctor Who is great, Doctor Who under Russell T Davies is the best thing on television. I love it, I love the fact that millions of people also love it, I love the fact that a television is now basically a device that lets people watch Doctor Who and its spinoffs and also has some rarely-used additional functions. This is, essentially, how I've wanted the world to be since I was about six.

With The Eyeless, I wanted to write a book that helps celebrate the strengths of the new series. Part of that, of course, is accentuating the stuff that I like and downplaying stuff I like less. Although, be warned that my favourite episode is probably The Last of the Time Lords - but there's so much competition I feel so guilty saying that - and my favourite scene is definitely the Scissor Sisters bit.

A video did the rounds last year. I've no idea who put it together, but I love it and it was a major source of inspiration for the tone of my book. It's got a lovely, bleak New Adventuresy feel to it, gives me real 'want to see' pangs. While I understand the reasons why, it's a little sad to know we'd never, ever be allowed to get away with a scene where the Doctor's down a dirty alleyway in a fistfight with a bunch of kids. Thank you, whoever did this.

Charlie Brooker also said some trenchant things about the second series, then got paid again for saying them again.

I agree with a lot of that - most of all, the stuff about loving the show and the need to hunt down and punish those who don't.

The Eyeless had drills in an early draft of the book. They didn't actually need them for anything, or use them, but they did have them.

Quotients, Balances

2008-10-20T16:22:00.000+01:00

This is going to sound arrogant and horrible, so imagine me saying it in gently ironic tones: I don’t find writing a Doctor Who book all that difficult. Douglas Adams had that quote about how writing was about sitting there until your forehead bleeds … I prefer former BBC political correspondent John Cole’s line that the hardest part isn’t getting words on a page, it’s keeping your bottom on the seat. It’s very easy to get distracted, particularly when it’s oh so easy to justify watching a DVD, popping out to Borders or just staring out the window as ‘research’.

John Cole made his remark in the pre-internet age, if anyone now can imagine such an epoch. Now you can be quite happily sat at your computer with the document open and still be involved in displacement activities.

As a productivity boost, can I recommend the Morning Coffee Firefox extension? It automatically loads a bunch of websites in the morning. So you get to check Outpost Gallifrey, Lifehacker, Penny Arcade, Unreality, your friends’ sites and so on all in one concentrated burst, then you get on with your day.

I am, apparently, a fast writer. A fair few professional writers say they manage about a thousand words a day. Now … this isn’t anything to get hung up about. If you write five hundred words a day and they’re good, that’s pretty handy. Most people have actual jobs and friends and family, that sort of thing, so it’s hard to make time to write at all. If you want to be a writer, you have to work out a way to find that time, of course. The Eyeless is 55,000 words long, and that’s at the lower end of novel-length. A thousand words a day is two months with a few days off for good behaviour, assuming you're doing nothing else.

My record is about 15,000 words in a day – the first great surge of activity on The Dying Days, where I had a really, really clear idea of what I had to do (and, more to the point, a deadline of five weeks to do it). All cylinders blazing, the first burst, or with a real mastery of the material, I can do something like 6000 words in a day. My record the other way … well, I’ve thrown away a chapter, so probably something like -5000 words. With books that completely fail to take root – my Prisoner novella, my Great American Novel that I’ve been writing for three years now and refer to, dreadingly, as The Whale Oil Book - I must be averaging less than ten words a day. On the whole, I reckon I write about 2500 words a day on average. The best trick I’ve found is to try to do a novel at the same time as a non-fiction book – they don’t really feel like the same kind of thing when you’re writing so you can displace from writing to … writing something else.

This time I had a couple of extra challenges.

The first was the length. As Pascal said … no, hang on, I quoted him last time. You know what he said.

It became very clear to me that The Eyeless couldn’t be paced at quite the way my other books had been. The Gallifrey Chronicles, to be honest, is probably more frenetic, but it had a lot to do. The pace of Doctor Who TV stories just kept speeding up. Watch The Web Planet and it’s hard to shake the idea that Tennant and Donna would get to halfway through episode three by the opening credits (virtually every ‘sting’ that comes just before the opening credits now would have been the episode one cliffhanger even in the eighties). It’s no coincidence that the ‘typical’ story started at six or seven episodes long, dropped to four, was dropping to three in the late eighties and is now fifty minutes. There’s just as much ‘story’ in, say, Planet of the Ood as a Troughton six parter, probably more.

As a digression … it’s interesting that while TV is getting shorter and punchier, novels are getting longer and longer. Technology allows this – word processors let authors store more (the completed Eyeless book would fit on half an old floppy disc, it barely registers on a flashdrive), it allows editors to edit faster. Books get emailed, not posted. An author doesn’t cross out mistakes or have to retype pages, or have one manuscript that they can’t, at any cost, leave on the bus. It’s pretty amazing to think that in the Target book days, someone at a printers was fitting together little metal letters to make up each page in turn, then running the press, then rearranging the letters on the frame to make the next set of pages. All of this means that these days a long book costs about the same for everyone as a short one.

Long story short (see what I did there?), if I’d paced The Eyeless like an old Past Doctor book, it would have felt like a short, light, slow Past Doctor book. The book starts out with quite a slow build, establishing the setting. I very quickly found myself splicing scenes together – instead of two scenes where the Doctor walks down a corridor, then into a room and starts talking to someone, we have what The West Wing production team took to calling ‘pedalogues’: the Doctor and someone walking down a corridor, talking as they go. The advice scriptwriters get is to start the scene as late as possible and finish it as soon as possible. I found myself doing that a lot.

This is all great for the book. It’s very focused, there’s not much you could mistake for padding. It was quite tricky, though – not least because if you’re writing with everything tightly packed like that, it becomes very difficult to change things around when you need to.

The other issue was that this was a book marketed as YA. I’ve discussed that already in my September posts. In practical terms, although I was very determined just to write a Doctor Who book, not paralyse myself by endlessly second-guessing what ‘Cardiff’ wanted or whether kids would like it, I did have ‘older children will be reading this’ in the back of my mind. I knew my Philip Pullman, and figured that if Young Adult books allow kids to not just go around with knives, but to stab God with them, that the ‘ratings’ issue wouldn’t be too much of a problem. But I did want to read up on what was popular, mainly – I have to admit – so I could use it as precedent (‘Justin, in Silverfin, a girl pins Bond down with her thighs and a eel squirts out of a dead man’s mouth *, so it’s clearly acceptable for the younger readers … ’).

I had a clear idea of how my book started, I’d already started assembling phrases and images and jokes and so on.

It’s always good to read. If you want to be a writer, read more, and read more widely. As I wrote The Eyeless, I relaxed by reading. And what happened is what always happens when something’s working: I’d be reading something completely unrelated to my book, and a factoid or quotation or bit of history would suddenly leap out as something to look at. This happens a lot with me. Either it’s some amazingly powerful unconscious, holistic thing, or I just become completely blinkered and uncritical. I was reading Life, the Universe and Everything when the exact quote I needed appeared, a lovely turn of phrase from Douglas Adams I’d never noticed in the dozen or so times I’d read the book before. It’s in The Eyeless, with all due credit.

I try to give every book its own ‘voice’. It’s hard to describe – it’s to do with pace and the length of sentences. The Infinity Doctors, say, has loads of descriptive passages and dwells on little details. Trading Futures skates over things really fast (there were quite a lot of long, dense books in the previous batch of EDAs, and I just thought people would appreciate one they could gulp down in two sittings). This ‘voice’ is all about the internal logic of the story. In One Fine Day in the Middle of the Night, Christopher Brookmyre talks about the bullet-deadliness quotient, he’s right and I think there are lots of equivalents in fiction. Kissing someone is far more significant in Doctor Who than having sex with them and their sister would be in Skins. Each story has its own level of meting out justice, the relationship between what they do and the punishment they get. There are Child Spunkiness Quotients, Adultery Forgiveness Quotients, Swearing Quotients, Quip and Eloquence Quotients, Character Disposable Income And Free Time Quotients, Recovery Time From Injury Quotients. You create a world, with rules. The trick is, as Brookmyre says, to stay consistent within those rules.

Some books, I really struggle with finding those balances. If I had to describe the writing process, that’s the word I would use: ‘balancing’. Writing is about making lots of choices – choosing a path, which means not choosing other paths. You have to work out if you’re telling your audience too much or not enough. A lot of this is instinctive, but writing itself is a sort of ‘guided instinctive’ process. You go on your instincts … then go back and make sure.

Finding the ‘voice’ for The Eyeless was fairly smooth. While I would eventually edit a few things down, I pretty much had the first sixty five pages or so done and dusted inside a week. Gosh, everything was going so smoothly. I’d have it done by Christmas at this rate.

By moving so quickly, I had got a little ahead of myself …

COMMISSIONED!

2008-10-14T14:02:00.001+01:00

The setting and the shape of the monsters are basically dressing. The structure of a novel is its plot – what happens and when. The trick of a novel, really, is working out when the audience finds out information. Writers keep information back. They either gradually introduce it, or keep some vital point either obscure or out of the equation so they can come back and surprise you later with it.

The typical Doctor Who story has the Doctor arriving to find some monsters menacing a group of nice people. The Doctor discovers that the monsters have a bigger plan than just menacing those people – the running joke on some Doctor Who discussion boards is that every blurb for a Doctor Who book seems to include the phrase ‘but not everything is as it seems’.

For The Eyeless, I was keen to tell a story where everything was exactly as it seems. The problem is set out right at the beginning, there are no real twists and turns. The issue is solving the problem, not simple redefining it away.

I was keen to do a type of story that Doctor Who does surprisingly rarely – what I call the ‘Guns of Navarone’ type story. Basically, it’s a mission, with the characters having to get past all obstacles to reach their objective.

I also really wanted to tell a psychological story, one that explored the Doctor’s character a bit, tested him. Now, there are limits to what you can do. Not because Cardiff are mean and don’t let you, but simply because Doctor Who is a running serial. You can’t change him all that much. What would you want to change him for, anyway, when he’s the Doctor? He’s great. What you can do, though, is reveal stuff about him, challenge him, see him how others see him.

I wanted to play with the themes of the new series, wanted to make it distinctly a tenth Doctor story, not just a generic one. A lot of the new series is set on modern day Earth, with pop culture references and a soap opera thing going on with the companions and their families. The brief was to stay away from all that – so, bye bye any story featuring a pregnant Lucy Saxon and the Space Pig and a visit from Torchwood: 2020 where Maria Jackson’s on the team and K9’s the boss. Instead of those trappings, I had to think about what the new series was about. I’ve tried to pick up on the themes of the new show and, if you’re looking, you’ll spot a few things like lines of dialogue that quote the television series.

I was writing a book in which the Doctor travels on his own. And what we’ve discovered time and time again (actually starting in the New Adventures, and first articulated in Paul Cornell’s Love and War) is that the Doctor needs a companion. When we see him in Rose, say, or The Runaway Bride, without a companion, he doesn’t have the checks and balances he usually has. He’s not a human being, he’s acutely aware of the bigger picture, and that can make him act a little … inhumanely. Think of him surrounded by fire, wiping out the Racnoss at the end of The Runaway Bride. That’s the Doctor on his own, if he’s not careful.

The goal at this stage, as people who’ve read the early posts of this blog know, was to come up with a two-page synopsis.

Here, it’s taken me the equivalent of two and a bit sides of A4 just to set all that out. You can imagine that explaining all that, while structuring it in the form of a Doctor Who story, explaining who all the characters are and what happens was something of a challenge. It’s very easy to waffle on. As Pascal said – I’m pretty sure I’ve already quoted this in this blog, but it is one of my favourite quotes – ‘I’m sorry for the long letter, I didn’t have time to write a short one’. It must be a good quote, because it’s constantly ascribed to Twain, Churchill and Voltaire.

By the 23rd of November – appropriately enough - the synopsis had been batted back and forth to Justin a couple of times and between us we’d got the two page synopsis for a book I called The Hidden Fortress into a fit state to send to the Doctor Who production office in Cardiff for approval.

Now … I’ll be perfectly honest, I’ve no idea about the process that goes on at Cardiff. None at all. They could have a trained monkey with a rubber stamp, they could have a crack team of fifty Doctor Who book-approving specialists working over every line. They might have fifty trained monkeys - that would be cool, although probably a bit of a waste of licence-payers’ money. I didn’t have any direct contact, I didn’t get to visit the set or anything like that.

What I do know is that at some stage in the process, Russell Davies looks at the synopses – and that’s presumably why they’re two pages long, now, because he’s got plenty of other things to worry about.

I got two notes back, and this was all within a couple of days (around the 26th of November). I was keen to take advantage of the Doctor being on his own, wanted the hook of ‘this is too dangerous a mission to take a companion on’, but the note came back that the Doctor takes his companions to plenty of dangerous places. The story didn’t change one bit, but the marketing hook, if you like, did.

One thing I know that came back from Russell Davies himself was that the title should be The Eyeless, after the monsters in the book. It’s a much better title than The Hidden Fortress, not least because the Fortress in the book isn’t hidden. That led to a slight structural change – originally the Eyeless showed up out of the blue at the halfway point. Now they were in the title, that reminded me a little too much of The Sontaran Experiment, a two-part story which has the cliffhanger at the end of the first episode of ‘it’s … a Sontaran’ (the working title of that story was The Destructors, which would have maintained the surprise). So I added a couple of things that mean the Eyeless show up a lot earlier in my book.

Russell Davies knows what he’s talking about, to the point that it’s mildly insulting for me to point that out. In other news: Lewis Hamilton can drive cars and Pavarotti was an above-average singer. At this stage, I hadn’t signed a contract. If he’d said something I profoundly and utterly disagreed about, I could have walked away. He was right, on both counts.

OK … as soon as that came through, Justin gave the formal go-ahead. This was around the beginning of December. The Eyeless was commissioned, contracts would be drawn up. I could start work actually writing the thing.

My deadline was the end of June.

Timeline

2008-10-10T13:56:00.000+01:00

Over the next few posts, I’m going to run through a quick timeline of the commissioning and writing process for The Eyeless, to give everyone a sense of what happens, when and how long everything takes. It’s something that people often ask me about, and it is normally (and should be) an invisible part of the process.

I got an initial email from Justin Richards, the consulting editor for the Doctor Who range, on the 6th of November last year asking if I was busy. Suspecting that, if not, he would have something that would keep me busy, I eagerly replied.

He wanted me to write a tenth Doctor book.

I had an idea for one all ready and waiting. I proceeded to explain that it was the Doctor and Donna meeting Jane Austen. The Slitheen were active in Bath during the Regency, setting up an auction for an old superweapon from the Time War. Because they were in the past, zips hadn’t been invented, so the Slitheen had button-up foreheads. Donna hasn’t read any Jane Austen – she proceeds to tell Austen the plot of her favourite book, which is Bridget Jones’ Diary.

Justin told me that if I’d just shut up a minute, they were looking for a book where the Doctor was travelling on his own, they wanted it set anywhere but Earth and that, under no circumstances was I to use old monsters.

Hmmmm.

In circumstances like this, a writer has to adopt, adapt and improve. So, naturally, I looked at my proposal and said ‘OK. About this superweapon … ’

Justin is very good at giving guidance – what the Doctor Who books are after is a story with a strong hook. That ought to be a given, of course, but with something like my earlier book Trading Futures, there’s a more like a ‘high concept’ than a strong story ‘Doctor Who spoofs James Bond’. The Gallifrey Chronicles has quite a simple idea at its heart – ‘the Doctor discovers who destroyed his home planet … turns out it was him’, but it’s not a standalone story. Father Time’s got a strong story hook – the Doctor literally is left holding the baby, Miranda, and has to protect her from enemies from the far future who are hunting her.

A couple of days later, I had a new idea and got in touch with Justin. We exchanged emails, Justin clarified a couple of points, we honed the idea. The basic story hook stayed exactly the same throughout this and it’s right there in the blurb on the back of the finished book – the Doctor lands on a dead planet dominated by an alien fortress, intent on decommissioning the weapon at the heart of the Fortress.

He wouldn’t let me use the Daleks. I suspected this would be the case, but I felt I should ask. I asked if it could show the Fall of Arcadia from the Time War, mentioned by the Doctor, and was quietly told that it was best if I didn’t. The TV people are telling those stories, and want to tell them on TV – they certainly don’t want to end up contradicting anything that’s in a novel. This actually strengthens the books. We have to come up with our own ideas.

Coming up with a story that will sustain a novel is an odd process, and it’s not something that I can break down into formulae. What I’ve found is that once you’ve got a few strong ideas, other things start to snap into place.

With a Doctor Who novel, of course, a lot of things are sketched in for you beforehand. I’ve also got notebooks full of ideas and bits of ideas going back years. There’s an aircar chase scene that I wanted to put into Cold Fusion (which I wrote in 1996), and which has been in contention for most of my Doctor Who books since. It was very nearly in The Eyeless, but I played around with the ending a bit at a very late stage and lost the scene.

I’ve had the idea for the monsters for a long time. I’m not going to reveal who or what The Eyeless are, you’ll have to read the book, but I had a clear picture of them, a little scene plotted out in my head, and that’s made it onto the page pretty well untouched (page 116, to be precise).

The setting is a Jetsons-style futuristic city – you know the sort of thing – but one that’s fallen into ruin. I just like the images that creates, all this amazing utopian promise, now rusting and collapsed.

I read a couple of articles years ago by Stephen Baxter about the human legacy – what we’d leave behind. The answers are a bit sad and strange. As the weather erodes everything away, in a million years or so, the only structures that would be left are the absolute rock solid things like suspension bridge supports. The main evidence for mankind will be the cuttings in rock for railways and roads. Oh, and there would be a thin fossil layer of refined metal, pollution and nuclear waste. Baxter dramatizes this in his book Evolution.

There was clearly something in the air that makes this idea current. As I started writing The Eyeless, I found out about The World Without Us, a book that imagines what would happen if human beings just vanished today. The conclusion of that book is that, even in seven million years, the faces on Mount Rushmore will be recognizable. It starts out, though, just documenting what happens for the first few years as a city falls apart. The movie I Am Legend came out at the end of last year, dealing with the same sort of situation. There’s always apocalyptic fiction, of course, but the current brand – almost certainly an imaginative bashing together of War on Terror anxiety and eco-guilt – is quite distinctive.

These things happen, there’s a zeitgeist and people all end up doing things independently that look like they’ve been comparing notes. Sometimes, the reason’s obvious – there was a lot of stuff set in China this year like Kung Fu Panda because everyone knew about the Beijing Olympics (this raises the prospect of 2012 being the year of movies like Pub Fight Badger, of course). It may be as simple as we’re all watching the same stuff. You can see the NA/EDAs go through phases of Terminator 2/Warhammer 40,000 gung-ho action, X Files style mysteries, Babylon 5 knock-off future wars that are a bit rubbish when you actually get there, before ending up all Joss Whedon.

A lot of my writer pals are watching The Wire and reading Death Note right now. You have been warned.

The superweapon … well, ultimately, these devices are always McGuffins. This one is a pretty ultimate ultimate weapon, though, as these things go. As the Doctor says at one point in the book ‘It’s a weapon that would give your run-of-the-mill ultimate weapon an inferiority complex’. The nature of the weapon changed over and over as I was writing the book, from just a straightforward big radiation-burst thing through to ideas so exotic they looked remarkably like they didn’t make any sense at all. The trick was to find something strange, big and vaguely plausible, but which worked in a way I could easily explain. The final version is kind of hard-sciencey, in a Doctor Who way.

These are all elements that would end up in the story, but they’re not the story …

The Net Effect

2008-10-06T18:41:00.000+01:00

I’ve written Doctor Who novels before, but The Eyeless is a little different. My last one, The Gallifrey Chronicles, was the last of the regular novels to feature the eighth Doctor (the ‘EDAs’), and came out about halfway through the run of Christopher Eccleston’s season. I was in an odd situation with that book – trying to write a novel that celebrated and wrapped up an ongoing story that was over two hundred books long, while also being acutely aware that a new show with a fresh approach would be on the scene. It’s my bestselling Doctor Who novel to date – although my Emmerdale books sold more – and while I don’t have the figures, I’ve been told that The Gallifrey Chronicles ended up as the bestselling EDA of the lot.

The books featuring the new Doctors, though, are in a different league. I’m pretty sure that virtually everyone who bought The Gallifrey Chronicles was an old school fanboy. These were people who’d read the books at one point or another tuning in to the series finale, and the audience for the books then was – pretty much by definition – the hardcore fanbase of Doctor Who.

The big difference nowadays is that the Doctor Who books are truly mainstream. In a competitive marketplace the three Doctor Who novels will be among the bestsellers this Christmas. The books are available in supermarkets and three-for-two offers in bookshops. So, a great big chunk of my readership won’t be Doctor Who fanboys, just people who enjoy the TV show and the previous books. For the first time, a chunk of my readership will be children.

Does an author have a picture of their readership in their head when they’re writing and does that affect what the author writes? Well … yes.

It’s easy to imagine that things divide up neatly between ‘art’ and ‘commerce’, but the fact is that every person buying any book has made a commercial decision, and has done so, in part, because a publisher has carefully offered them a product and persuaded them to buy it. Now, some authors may want to distance themselves from that process, to create an uncompromised, unalloyed work of pure art and form … but that just means that someone else has to do the marketing for them. Or, I suspect is more often the case, that the book is so ‘uncompromised’ the author’s cat hasn’t even read it. And The Eyeless is a Doctor Who novel and part of an existing range, when all’s said and done.

So … how do I picture my audience? This is the first time I’ve written this down, so don’t get the idea that I’ve been drawing up Venn diagrams or anything.

I think readers of The Eyeless will mostly fall into one of three categories: the old school fanboys who’ve been Doctor Who fans for years and who may well have a book by me already; more casual adult readers who like the TV show and end up giving the book a try; younger readers.

The first thing to point out is that while it’s tempting to imagine that these groups will place competing demands on the book, they want mostly the same thing: a good Doctor Who story. They want a novel which is at least competently written, with interesting characters and ideas, a story that hooks them, some stuff that scares them, makes them laugh and makes them think.

What’s quite interesting is that all three groups there tend to prefer ‘a solid story’ over more literary qualities. I’m a writer, I’ve got a Masters degree in English Literature, I tend to get a bit poncey about imagery and turns of phrases when I read (and when I write, of course). I find it very difficult to read books with just ‘functional’ prose. A lot of people who read tie-in stuff seem to want more meat-and-potatoes writing, almost as if it’s a straightforward account of what happened to their favourite characters. They want a story with a beginning, middle and end (in that order), and they don’t want an author getting in the way of it with poetry and metafiction.

I’m generalising wildly. Just because you read tie-in novels doesn’t mean you only read tie-in novels. It doesn’t mean you approach every single book wanting exactly the same thing. As noted, I read a lot of books. When I read, say, William Shatner’s Collision Course, I did not read it looking for exactly the same thing as I did when I read, say, Nicholas Christopher’s Bestiary.

I enjoyed both books, I’m a big fan of both authors and have the secret desire to be both of them when I grow up. I recommend both books. They’re very different. My point is that I didn’t go into Collision Course expecting literary fiction. As Jonathan Ross said, if you play money to see Tim Burton’s Planet of the Apes movie, you shouldn’t complain when it's got a load of apes in it all being very Tim Burtony.

Of the three audience groups, it’s that last one, ‘younger readers’, which is the tricky one for me. It’s also the one that scares fanboys most. The thing that scares fanboys is the thought that if you’re doing something ‘for kids’, it means you have to compromise and tone down and rule out and bowlderise. The thing that scares me is that … well, writing for kids is way harder than writing for fanboys.

Fanboys see it as a censorship issue or a ‘ratings’ one. As it happens, the NSAs are meant to be ‘suitable for twelve year olds’. Or, in movie terms, PG13. They can be as dark and violent as Dark Knight or Casino Royale … both of which, I’d say, are at the upper end of how dark Doctor Who should get. We can’t use swearwords … again, I don’t really see how that would ever really cripple a Doctor Who story. You can’t use swearwords on primetime TV, either. As for sex … well, again, it’s not traditionally what Doctor Who does. In the olden days, Doctor Who was ridiculously asexual – pace slashers and ficcers and shippers. I think I’m right that the first romantic kiss in the show’s history is in season 25 and The Greatest Show in the Galaxy (my ignorance will be exposed in the Comments section below). Even nowadays, it’s ‘saucy’ rather than explicit – the show now acknowledges that sex exists, and not just between a married man and his lady wife. This ‘sauce’ is filthy at times. Jackie Tyler’s ‘you could always splash out on a taxi or … whatever’ being a great example.

And the thing is … all these restrictions were in place before, with the EDAs. Doctor Who books shouldn’t really be the place to look for sexy stuff. If you’re reading this, you’re on the internet. If you’re on the internet, a hint: you don’t need to buy a Doctor Who book if you’re looking for filth.

I’ve ‘got away’ with stuff in The Eyeless that, in all honesty, I wasn’t sure I would do. You’ll see what when you read it. Nothing, at all, got cut for ‘ratings’ reasons (unlike Father Time and The Gallifrey Chronicles, as it happens). The only thing that changed ‘for the kids’ was that I sped up the opening a little, got to the action a little faster than I did in my first draft. That was on the advice of Justin Richards, my editor … although to be fair, two or three of the people that read the draft suggested the same thing. In practical terms, there are about two pages of description of the cityscape ‘missing’.

So … ‘kids’. I imagine my youngest reader as being about ten or eleven, but those would be really smart, bright ten year olds, ones who were big fans of Doctor Who. I think the ‘typical’ younger reader of the NSAs is about thirteen. And I wouldn’t know how to aim a book at ‘thirteen year olds’ – I’m thinking specifically about a thirteen year old reader. Someone who reads a lot, probably, who loves reading. So this is someone inquisitive, who likes learning things, solving puzzles, thinking things through.

In all honesty, smart thirteen year olds are going to be smarter and more literate than a dumb adult. They will know bigger words and more science and history.

The difference isn’t in the word choice, it’s in the world they live in. Doctor Who is, basically, about a man who fights what scares us. What scares me? Well, it’s not insects or reptiles or any of the phobic stuff Doctor Who monsters usually represent. It’s the idea that I won’t be able to pay the mortgage, for one. Interest rates. I was going to say that’s not exactly the topic for SF action-adventure, but then I remembered that the running story in Captain America at the moment is an elaborate supervillain plot to … undermine the credit market, thus destabilise the US economy to lever in a third party Presidential candidate.

I have a different perspective on the world and people than I did when I was thirteen. There would be something deeply wrong with me if I didn’t.

For The Eyeless, what I’ve tried to do is take a cue from Philip Pullman – who, in turn, took his cue from Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience. A child and adult can look at the same event and see two completely different things. Neither is right or wrong, particularly, but adults are often better at seeing the hidden agendas and reading into situations – of looking out for what’s not being said. There’s plenty left unsaid in The Eyeless that the younger readers won’t spot, but which the adult readers can’t miss.

The net effect of all this … I’ve written a Doctor Who book in the exact style and manner I’ve written Doctor Who books in the past. The idea that a lot of my readers are younger or more casual than back in the day has actually kept me honest – I can’t throw in an injoke or rely on the goodwill of people who know Doctor Who (or Lance Parkin) … I’ve had to make sure those characters work, that the story makes sense and so on. I think, to put it another way, having a more mainstream audience has only made the book stronger – for all my readers.

OK, YA

2008-09-11T15:49:00.001+01:00

A Young Adult book is not 'a children's book' in the Victorian sense.

Back in the day, humans had a larval stage, childhood, that suddenly ended at sixteen or eighteen and then they were adults. Nowadays, you’re a kid until you’re about eleven, you hit adulthood at some point around thirty. Many, many things that were 'for kids' are now 'for a much broader audience than kids'. Comic books, action figures, video games, ice cream, wearing football shirts on the street, watching cartoons, superhero movies, fantasy novels, pop music, bikes. We can argue whether that’s a good or healthy thing. We can argue whether it infantilises our culture. More to the point, we can argue it while dressed as a Klingon, eating Retro Edition Wispa bars, playing Jet Set Wii-lly while sitting on furniture made of Lego.

The idea that things that were once the exclusive preserve of kids haven’t been for twenty years seems to confuse a lot of people – Keith Vaz, for example, didn’t really seem to get what the '12' in a 12 rating meant when he said he wouldn’t let his 11 year old watch The Dark Knight.

Part of the problem with – let’s say - comics is that many of the things that used to rely on a casual ever-churning generation of kids are now the exclusive preserve of aging fanboys. Doctor Who had this problem in the nineties.

I’m an aging fanboy, so I think it’s wonderful on any number of levels.

That said ... Doctor Who is watched by a lot of children, now. That’s a great thing. The books are available in supermarkets. That’s a great thing. The BBC has a brand to protect and a duty to abide by taste and decency rules. So the books are never going to do anything you can't get away with on television at seven o'clock at night ... but you can get away with rather a lot. As I say, for The Eyeless I was given the guidance 'if it would be OK for the TV series, it's OK for the books'. The TV series has got away with plenty. There can't be any explicit sex or sadistic, realistic violence ... well, it's Doctor Who. If those were in your story, you were probably doing something wrong. There was none of that in the New Adventures or Eighth Doctor Adventures, either. Well, very little of it.

The obvious example of a YA book is Harry Potter - a range with a huge appeal to adults. Probably more adults than kids. It’s ‘the children’s own series that adults adore’. And, if you’re an aging fanboy, you’ve already worked out where I’m going with this – because that was the quote on the back of many of the Doctor Who Target novelisations in the seventies.

Doctor Who was consciously designed as a show that that kids and their parents could both watch and enjoy. As the years went by, a third distinct demographic emerged – the older fans of the show. But all Harry Potter did in the nineties was locate a hole in the market that Doctor Who and Star Wars filled back in my day.

The BBC have always identified the 'YA' market as one to go for. In his very first
set of guidelines for the Eighth Doctor Adventures, Justin Richards, the series editor, namechecked His Dark Materials and Stormbreaker as things that were 'like Doctor Who'. The NSAs aren't 'aimed at eight year olds'. They're aimed at the Doctor Who audience.

The best way to put it is that now a Doctor Who author also has to appeal to children, now. You don't have to lose anything, you do have another thing to think about and factor in. Next time, I’ll try to explain how I approached this with The Eyeless.

For The Kids

2008-09-02T16:13:00.000+01:00

I’ve been meaning to write about this for a little while, but a discussion on The Board Formerly Known As Outpost Gallifrey has prompted me to actual put pen to paper. Then I remembered it would have to go on the internet, so I would have to type up my handwritten notes. Could have saved myself some time and some ink. Anyway …

… ‘the New Series books are for eight year olds’.

They aren’t. The New Series books fit very comfortably into what publishers call YA, or ‘Young Adult’.

These are books with one eye on (book reading, therefore smart) teenagers, but YA books have been the publishing phenomenon of the last ten years. The key thing here is that YA books don’t just appeal to teenagers – almost the thing that defines them is that they’ve found a huge adult audience, too.

The charge was led by Harry Potter, of course, but there are other examples.

For this entry, I’ll do a short reading list of YA books. This isn’t comprehensive, or meant to be. For my next trick, I’ll explain how this applies to Doctor Who, the New Series novels and specifically my book, The Eyeless.

I’m a huge, huge fan of Philip Pullman’s books, particularly his masterpiece, the His Dark Materials series. Pullman’s work has, in places, a lot of Doctor Who feel to it. And, conversely, the end of Doomsday and Rose’s departure is … reminiscent of the end of His Dark Materials. Pullman was delighted by this, and is even writing the introduction to The Writer’s Tale.

His Dark Materials starts with the utterly superb Northern Lights.

I co-wrote a book about His Dark Materials, Dark Matters.

Which predicted that the film wouldn’t work. Well, my thoughts on that are here. And the stage play script shows just what we could have had instead …

There’s a huge boom in YA books. Not all of them are fantasy … or at least not all of them are set in fantasy worlds. Skellig is a great example of how grim and strange YA books can be. Elsewhere, YA books deal with drugs, sex, pregnancy, domestic violence, racism … it’s almost a cliché that they’re grim and gritty.

A fantastic example of a modern YA book is Strange Boy by Paul Magrs.

Meanwhile, Charlie Higson, author of one of my very favourite books, Getting Rid of Mr Kitchen, has written a range of Young James Bond books that are really quite sly and rewarding for adults, too.

While it was discussing television, rather than novels, Screen Wipe showed exactly how grown up fantasy kids shows were compared with more modern ‘realistic’ shows for teenagers and inadvertently clarify why The Sarah Jane Adventures are actually more ‘grown up’ than Torchwood. The discussion starts at about 5:30, and be warned that there’s some language unsuitable for children right from the start.

Reading List

2008-08-12T14:29:00.000+01:00

Recently, in her blog, fellow Doctor Who author Kelly Hale said that when she's writing something, she doesn't tend to read other books.

Different authors have different approaches - there's no right way and wrong way to do this - and I'm the exact opposite, throwing myself at crazy amounts of books.

Now, I quite understand a writer not reading while they are writing something of their own. But Kelly was celebrating the fact she'd finished writing and could get back to her stack of books. Any aspiring writer has to read, and read widely, for all sorts of reasons. You don't want to be able to boast, as Garth Marenghi does, that he's written more books than he's read.

Here's what I read in the four months or so I was writing The Eyeless, courtesy of the lovely and highly-recommended Library Thing website.

Reading List

Some of that is re-reading (I've lost count of the times I've read Name of the Rose, Kavalier and Clay and Casino Royale), very little of it is directly relevant to the book, some of those things are directly relevant to other things I'm working on. There are a couple of books in there that are pure research. And I was obviously on a James Bond and Iain Banks kick. Good luck trying to work out what The Eyeless is about from the list!

The Bit in the Middle

2008-08-11T16:20:00.001+01:00

Having dealt with the beginning and end of a story, now I’ll talk a bit about the middle.

DWM in the early eighties was obsessed with something called ‘the dramatic W’. The articles that mentioned this mystical sigil seemed to think it meant that a series could veer wildly from something undramatic to something that was. Or something rubbish to something good. Which was actually quite a handy way of discussing Doctor Who in the early eighties, of course.

But I, and I’m sure a lot of other people reading, sensed that ideally writers should probably not alternate between great, exciting things and rubbish, dull ones. They should stick to ‘great and exciting’. So what is the ‘dramatic W’ and, more to the point, how can it help perk up your writing?

An example. Imagine a Doctor Who scene which starts with the Doctor exploring a lovely, happy garden and discovering the monster. The scene ends with the monster chasing him. Things go downhill, and so let’s represent that with this symbol: \ .

Or the opposite: the Doctor’s being chased by a horde of monsters, it ends with him getting out of danger, closing and locking the door behind him. Starts off bad, ends up good. Or, / if we felt the need to represent it visually.

Now that’s good for the Doctor, but bad for the monsters – but, remember, the Doctor is the protagonist, we’re charting his progress. His ‘desire’ in those scenes is that classic Shakespearean theme ‘not wanting to be eaten by a monster’.

Let’s imagine a couple of scenes between those first two.

So … after the scene where the Doctor finds the monster, we have a new scene which starts with him being chased. He dodges around, finds a safe cave. The monster doesn’t follow him in. Things are looking up for the Doctor. So: / .

But wait … in the next scene, the Doctor realises that the monster didn’t follow him in because it knew there was a horde of monsters in here. Run, Doctor, run! And things have gone downhill, so let’s represent that as \ .

Then we get the final scene where the Doctor escapes.

OK … what was all that forward-slash, backslash nonsense about? Well, if I put those four symbols in order:

\/\/

… and that’s the ‘dramatic W’. At the end of each scene, the Doctor is manifestly either better or worse off than he was at the beginning of the scene.

That movement is pretty much the definition of drama, and it’s often called a ‘reversal of fortune’.

‘Hang on’, you’re saying, ‘drama doesn’t just alternate wildly from scenes with characters doing well to scenes with characters doing badly’. And, of course, you’re right. ‘Reversal’ is a little bit of a misnomer.

Sticking with Doctor Who style action-adventure for a moment (just because what happens is usually nice and visible), you could imagine a sequence of scenes where the Doctor has to escape the monster which goes:

1. The Doctor is running from a monster and runs straight into the path of another monster.
2. The Doctor is now being trapped between two monsters. He leaps for safety … and finds himself in a nest of monsters. He is now being chased by four monsters.
3. The Doctor is now being chased by four monsters. He reaches a dead end.

The Doctor’s situation goes from bad to worse to even worse … but the point is that there’s progression. The alterative would be four very similar scenes where the Doctor’s just being chased by a monster.

The Empire Strikes Back is a movie where virtually every scene ends with the good guys worse off than they were at the beginning of the scene. Even when, say, Luke escapes the Wampa’s cave, the scene ends with him injured and in the middle of a deadly blizzard. There are slight upturns and good luck – but they’re often undercut. The Falcon escapes the Star Destroyers … but Boba Fett is following them. Luke finds Yoda … who refuses to teach him.

If you’ve ever written something that just seems to noodle along aimlessly, it’s probably because you’ve got scenes with no reversal of fortune. Things just sort of happen, characters just sit there, or are going around in circles. The story doesn’t progress. The telltale sign is that you’ve written something (either in the synopsis or the story itself) that says something like ‘after a day or so exploring, they still hadn’t got anywhere’ or which has characters sitting around waiting for something to happen to them.

Gareth Roberts once told me that he’d read a Coronation Street script with two scenes that started with the direction ‘Deirdre is still bored’, which is pretty much a textbook way to not go about things.

Now, you can do great things with boredom – the best episodes of One Foot in the Grave, for example, were often based around being stuck in one place. But things happened. Part of the joke is that even the tiniest things happening seem like epic victories and defeats. The post comes … but Victor discovers it’s a bunch of bills and junk mail.

Most writing – even with Doctor Who stories – is more subtle and small scale than the first example I gave. But it tends to work with reversals of fortune.

An important thing to note: 'good' here isn't an complex ethical question, it's simply defined as 'gets the protagonist closer to his goals'. You could have a movie with a murderer as a protagonist, and it would be 'good' if he evaded the security to get closer to his innocent victim. It would be 'bad' if the police brought him in for questioning.

The protagonist in Doctor Who is the Doctor. His ‘desire’ is, broadly, to find out what is really going on and put a stop to it with the minimum of casualties. If there’s a scene where he finds a book in a library that mentions that there were mysterious lights in the sky one night in 1737 and after that the moor got a reputation for being haunted it means he’s a step closer to that goal. Even though he's not in any immediate danger, even though it's a quiet, quite passive scene.

The character doesn’t need to know the exact significance at that moment, but it’s always best if the audience gets some kind of clue. The best moments are often the ones where fortune swings the wrong way: the last cliffhanger of The Horror of Fang Rock, for example, which has the Doctor declaring ‘we’ve not locked the beast out, we’ve locked it in’.

The reality is that writers don’t sit around drawing slashes to work out where they are on the dramatic W. They don’t usually sit around going ‘my Protagonist is’. Nor should writers do that – it sounds ghastly and mechanical. And the sad truth is that writing isn't as simple as knowing this stuff. I know the gymnast who just fell off the parallel bars in the Olympics shouldn't have, but that doesn't make me an Olympic gymnast.

But thinking about your existing story in those terms can often (not always) be a useful way of figuring out what’s not working.

What I hope the people who tried the Synopsis Challenge can do now is look at the last three posts here and go back to their synopsis. Is the Protagonist and what they want clearly defined? Do events happen because of the choices the Protagonist makes? Does each section have clear reversals of fortune?

If so, then I can pretty much guarantee that your story is going to be better than if not.

Decisions, Decisions

2008-07-31T03:45:00.000+01:00

This one's a bit long. Sorry.

All right, then … this post follows on from the last, where I made the rather expansive claim that ‘a story is the set of choices its protagonist makes’.

What does that mean, what implications does that have, and why is it directly related to why some – misguided, wrong – Doctor Who fans don’t like Tinkerbell Jesus?

Protagonists want something. Often the most sophisticated stories have protagonists with the most simple desires – ‘revenge’ or ‘true love’.

Robert McKee makes a useful distinction between Conscious and Unconscious desires. In the standard Hollywood formula movie, what the hero SAYS he wants invariably turns out not to be the thing he ACTUALLY wants. Indeed, many Hollywood movies are precisely about the revelation of what the Unconscious (and invariably ‘true’) desire is.

The busy executive doesn’t really want the money and status he’s working so hard to earn at the start of the movie, he really wants some special time with his kids – and the movie is about him coming to realise that he’d rather see his kid’s baseball game than get that promotion. (I’d pay good money to see a movie which ends with a businessman saying ‘stuff my kids, I choose the money’, by the way – that is, after all, the choice all the Hollywood execs have made).

A story is basically about the Protagonist pursuing his object of desire - with varying degrees of application, luck and success.

Now … in a running series, the emphasis is a little different. Sherlock Holmes wants to solve the case in hand, Batman wants to track down the supervillain, the Doctor wants to defeat the monsters. They want the same thing next time. And the next. And the next. There’s no psychological progression. The stories are variations on the theme, the best ones are the ones rich in imaginative detail.

We’ve got a taste for heroes with more of an inner life these days, and so authors of running series tend to concentrate a lot more on the psychology than they did when the characters were created. Batman writers over the last twenty years have wrestled with the question ‘what sort of man would dress up as a bat to fight criminals?’. The problem they have is … er … no-one would do that. It’s a barmy thing to do, and by definition, you’re not going to make any great insight into human nature by asking the question. The character just can’t bear the load. To paraphrase Charlie Brooker, it’s not a good idea to do a story where Postman Pat goes postal. It’s why The Killing Joke is Alan Moore’s least successful work. In my opinion.

Did I mention I wrote a book about Alan Moore?

But the Doctor has a desire, it’s perfectly conscious and it’s ‘find out what the monsters are really up to and defeat them’.

During the story the Protagonist has to make choices to attain his desire. Big choices and little choices. He doesn’t always realise at the time which are the big choices and which are the little ones. The recent Doctor Who episode Turn Left is a great example of a story where a trivial decision has literally universe-shattering consequences. If Donna turns her car one way, she meets the Doctor. If she doesn’t, she doesn’t.

Often the hero is the hero precisely because they have insight – folk tales commonly have the hero realising that the smelly old tramp is really a great warrior or god in disguise. Captain Kirk, Batman, Sherlock Holmes and the Doctor can all walk into a room and realise that an everyday item that’s been on public display for years without anyone paying it any attention is actually some amazing and unique item that’s the key to winning the day.

But real life isn’t like that very often, and most stories don’t work quite like that. Usually stories feature a choice that you probably won’t be faced with, but might – you find a bag of money in your back garden … do you keep it? Do you tell your partner? How do you spend it without anyone noticing? What happens when the owner shows up? Hitchcock’s movies were brilliant at plunging normal people into increasingly perilous situations because each sensible choice they made exposed them to more harm.

Soap operas basically have an engine that throws out a dozen decisions an episode – very simple moral dilemmas, usually, like ‘should that character have an affair?’ or ‘should that character steal that money?’ or ‘should that character reveal a secret?’. The choices are all laid out, they’re usually ‘yes/no’ decisions’ and they’re all simple to understand.

If you watch the soap, you know something about the characters – that character’s a bit thick, that one is always unlucky in love, that one is one bad day away from becoming a drunk.

And those two things – simple decisions, made by well-defined characters - mean that millions of people watch the soaps, and millions of people can kind of see everything coming, and millions of people shout out at the telly things like ‘don’t do it, he’s a love rat’ or ‘don’t do it, you’ll hurt your best friend’.

Not all writers will consciously do this – every writer is different. But I think even the most sophisticated or literary writers, by accident or design, use this technique. They just dress it up in posher clothes.

Right … here’s the key sentence of this article: ‘for a story to work, the reader has to understand the decisions the protagonist is faced with, and why the protagonist makes the choices he does’.

If you get that right, you’ll write a good story. And if you bash the piano keys in the right way, you’ll be a great concert pianist.

The audience doesn’t have to agree with the decision the Protagonist makes, it doesn’t have to be the decision they would make. The audience often know more than the character (‘don’t marry him … he’s only with you for the money and he killed his last wife!’ – if the Protagonist had that information, you’d hope they’d factor it in to their decision). The audience do have to find it convincing that the Protagonist made the decision.

The hardest decision for an author to make convincing is often the very first one. The biggest choice is what Joseph Campbell terms The Call to Adventure. There will come a point in most stories where the protagonist is, well … basically invited into the story.

When a horror movie starts with a group of teenagers deciding that, gosh, the most sensible thing to shelter from the rain is go into the spooky house where all those teenagers got killed ten years ago that very night … the audience groans. Horror movies still tell those stories, but invariably make a postmodern joke about what a stupid decision it is.

In Star Wars, Ben asks Luke to come with him to Alderaan and learn the ways of the Force. Luke, of course …

... refuses.

Campbell notes that most heroes refuse once – the pull of their ordinary life is too strong, or they need a better incentive to take a risk. George Lucas is a devotee of Campbell. I’d go as far as to say that you can’t really understand Star Wars unless you’ve read ‘The Impact of Science on Myth’, which is a 1961 essay that basically says ‘someone really needs to invent Star Wars’ (One Star Wars fan I said this to hasn’t spoken to me since, because he hasn’t read it and felt I was calling his very Star Wars fanitude into question. It’s not as though it’s difficult to find). Having read his Campbell, Lucas has Luke refusing the Call to Adventure and deciding to stay on Tatooine … then his aunt and uncle are murdered, and he realises where his destiny lies.

In Doctor Who there isn’t always a call to adventure – it’s implicit in the series. When the villager says ‘oh Doctor, these Daleks came along and they’re hurting us, can you help?’ … the Doctor doesn’t exactly agonise about the decision. This is unusual – James Bond and Sherlock Holmes usually start by being offered a mission or case. They always decide to take it, but they do consciously decide. Even Superman usually gets a line like ‘looks like I’ll be a few minutes late for dinner with Lois’ as he swoops in to catch a bad guy he’s spotted.

All these choices lead somewhere, and that’s the end of the story. Now … I’m going to skip to that. I’ll do the middle bit next time.

The key thing that audiences always like at the end of a story is a sense of justice. Not necessarily a happy ending, but an ending that fits the story. Protagonists have a desire. The story ends with them reaching a level of understanding about their desire – usually they win the girl, defeat the bad guy, solve the crime. That sort of thing. Unhappy endings see their desire thwarted or revealed as futile or unsatisfactory.

I got in terrible trouble with my Doctor Who book The Gallifrey Chronicles, because it ends before the Doctor defeats the monsters. I knew I would get in trouble when I wrote it. We know the Doctor will win, but we WANT TO SEE HIM DO IT.

Audiences used to like to see the Protagonist get handed the reward he deserved. Plays and novels ended with good, kind characters suddenly inheriting a great deal of money, or being married off to someone good looking who was barely in the story up to that point, or facing some sudden form of external justice and being dragged away.

Even that seems naturalistic compared with Greek and Roman plays, which often ended with a god coming down and pointing at each of the main cast in turn, making definitive pronouncements on who was to get what reward and what punishment.

So in Orestes, the play’s going about its business until suddenly, at the end, literally without warning, the god Apollo appears and says (after a deep breath, one assumes):

‘Menelaus, calm thy excited mood; I am Phoebus, the son of Latona, who draw nigh to call thee by name, and thou no less, Orestes, who, sword in hand, art keeping guard on yonder maid, that thou mayst hear what have come to say. Helen, whom all thy eagerness failed to destroy, when thou wert seeking to anger Menelaus, is here as ye see in the enfolding air, rescued from death instead of slain by thee. 'Twas I that saved her and snatched her from beneath thy sword at the bidding of her father Zeus; for she his child must put on immortality, and take her place with Castor and Polydeuces in the bosom of the sky, a saviour to mariners. Choose thee then another bride and take her to thy home, for the gods by means of Helen's loveliness embroiled Troy and Hellas, causing death thereby, that they might lighten mother Earth of the outrage done her by the increase of man's number. Such is Helen's end.

But as for thee, Orestes, thou must cross the frontier of this land and dwell for one whole year on Parrhasian soil, which from thy flight thither shall be called the land of Orestes by Azanians and Arcadians; and when thou returnest thence to the city of Athens, submit to be brought to trial by "the Avenging Three" for thy mother's murder, for the gods will be umpires between you and will pass a most righteous sentence on thee upon the hill of Ares, where thou art to win thy case. Likewise, it is ordained, Orestes, that thou shalt wed Hermione, at whose neck thou art pointing thy sword; Neoptolemus shall never marry her, though he thinks he will; for his death is fated to o'ertake him by a Delphian sword, when he claims satisfaction of me for the death of his father Achilles. Bestow thy sister's hand on Pylades, to whom thou didst formerly promise her; the life awaiting him henceforth is one of bliss.

Menelaus, leave Orestes to rule Argos; go thou and reign oer Sparta, keeping it as the dowry of a wife, who till this day ne'er ceased exposing thee to toils innumerable. Between Orestes and the citizens, I, who forced his mother's murder on him, will bring about a reconciliation.’

You don’t see that sort of thing on EastEnders. The characters don’t all shout out ‘push off, we’re in the middle of something, here’, they accept the judgement and the play ends.

The god appearing at the end to pass judgement was as much a convention of drama then as things like opening credits sequences are now. The audience knew to expect it, it was a highlight. There would be mechanisms that allowed the god to make a spectacular entrance – they’d float down or spring up, or appear to materialise. It was all about the special effects, even then.

Hmmmm … a god came out of a machine. Or, in Latin, ‘deus ex machina’.

It’s a dirty word, now. It’s come to mean an ending that comes out of nowhere – a quick solution suddenly appears. In the end of the Day of the Triffids movie, it turns out Triffids dissolve in salt water. In Superman: The Movie, Superman suddenly acquires the ability to turn back time. It feels like a cheat if some external force just arrives to solve the problem – like that bit in Monty Python and the Holy Grail where they’re being chased by a cartoon monster and the animator suddenly drops dead and the monster vanishes. HG Wells just about gets away with all the Martians dying of the flu in The War of the Worlds, but it’s not entirely satisfying. It feels too easy.

Some Doctor Who fans have complained that the end of The Last of the Time Lords was a ‘deus ex machina’ ending. The Doctor literally descends as a god and passes judgement. I don’t think it’s a fair criticism (I think what happens doesn’t come out the blue, it’s engineered by the Doctor using elements that have been set up previously in the story. Russell Davies plays tricks with the convention – just look at Journey’s End, where character after character pulls out artifacts of amazing power that represent an easy solution … then they don’t work) … but the reason the fans don’t like it is that they think it feels like a cheat.

Nowadays we like stories where the fate of the Protagonist is down to the choices we see him make.

Modern audiences like the Protagonist to win his own battles. He can recruit allies, he can pull things out of his hat. The Protagonist can cheat … but his author can’t. Writers have to explain who the Protagonist is, the choices he faces, the skills and tools he possesses and why he makes the choices he does.

So, after all that, a bit of writing advice:

When you’re planning or writing a story, always look at the choices your Protagonist is making. Answer these questions:

1) Is it clear to the reader what the choice is and what the potential consequences of the choice are?

2) Is it clear how the Protagonist came to the decision they did? Is it consistent with what we’ve been told about the Protagonist? Is it consistent with what the Protagonist desires?

3) Is there a better choice to be made, and if so, why isn’t the Protagonist making it? (One question I often find myself asking is – ‘why don’t they just get help?’. It’s a joke in the Doctor Who episode Blink – nine times out of ten, characters in contemporary drama never call the police when they ought to).

Now … real writing isn’t like a checklist. Go on instinct. Write the damn story. But if something isn’t ringing true or working or feels forced, or too sudden, or unconvincing … take a step back. Look at your Protagonist, what they desire, the choices they are making. If you know who your Protagonist is and how they reach the decisions they do, you’ll find that getting your story to work is a lot easier.

To Sum It Up In A Sentence ...

2008-07-28T14:02:00.002+01:00

OK … so what elements build up to make a story?

There are probably writers who’d baulk at that question. Then again, there are certainly guidebooks for writers that make it seem like all you have to do is assemble a couple of prefabricated Epiphanies and Inciting Incidents and then Bob’s Your Uncle, you have a story.

Over the next few posts, I’ll talk about a few things common to virtually all stories. I don’t want anyone who is hoping to be a writer to think that these are a set of magic keys that will enable anyone to tell a great story. They aren’t, but they are things to think about. If, when you’re planning or writing a story, you keep what I say in mind, it’ll help you. I hope.

There are only five types of story. Or seven. Or four. Or is it ten?

Types of Stories

Well … I think there’s probably only one type of story. Every story ever written can be summed up in a sentence: ‘someone doesn’t get what they bargained for’. Or, as fellow Doctor Who author Simon Bucher-Jones once put it: ‘Surprise!’.

Basically, every story is about someone encountering something new and the story is about the implications for that someone as they deal with the new thing. It doesn’t have to be a Faustian pact … but most stories have at least some element like that, a deal with the devil where something that seems to give easy satisfaction turns out to have dire consequences. Science fiction is often – not always - about someone living in a world with a new piece of technology. A love story is about someone meeting a new potential lover. A thriller features someone discovering a new plot against their government. Most stories have someone going about their everyday - perhaps slightly too mundane - existence, then being thrust into a far more exciting, dangerous place. It doesn't have to be physical danger (although that certainly helps if you're writing a Doctor Who story) or on a grand scale.

This will either sound deeply profound to you, or such an incredible generalisation that it has no real value.

So … in order to be practical, let’s talk about that ‘someone’.

Every story needs a protagonist. The protagonist is simply the main person whose story we’re following. The person whose story it is. The ‘hero’ … although they don’t have to be heroic or even remotely likeable.

I probably don’t need to give examples of heroes in stories. Often, the author helps you along by naming them in the title. There’s no great mystery who the protagonists of Gulliver’s Travels or Tom Jones or Hamlet or Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire are.

There are multi-protagonist stories – at various times in, say, Pulp Fiction we’re following a different character. Even there, it’s always pretty clear that this is the Vince Vega bit or the Butch bit. There are stories where the protagonist changes from scene to scene, so the term becomes pretty meaningless. A good example of that is the TV series The Wire. Which everyone should watch, because it’s great:

Charlie Brooker on The Wire

In some stories, it’s not always clear who the protagonist is. Who's the hero of The Phantom Menace, for example? The poster makes you think this is Anakin’s story, loyalty has you backing Obi Wan, Qui Gonn’s in the most scenes, and it’s probably Amidala’s ‘story’, in the sense that it’s her world being invaded. Ultimately, the clue’s in the title again, and it’s Darth Sidious. The big reveal of the movie (so big that a lot of people apparently don’t see it) is that every single thing the good guys have done, every victory they have won, has only strengthened Sidious. So it’s no wonder people were confused, particularly when the protagonist of the original trilogy is so clearly defined, central and heroic as Luke Skywalker.

Although, of course, now we’ve seen all six, we know that the protagonist of the whole series is Vader and Luke’s ultimate role is just to be in the right place at the right time to cry out for mercy – Vader had a prophetic dream in Revenge of the Sith that’s about Amidala … but which doesn’t actually come to pass until the very end of Return of the Jedi.

OK … I digress. Anyone can come up with a ‘hero’ for their story. I think, unconsciously or not, a lot of would-be writers think that coming up with the protagonist is a bit like generating a role playing character – you pick their appearance, special skills and so on. It’s the easy part, in a way. It’s also fun. The bane of a lot of SF writing is stories with amazing, colourful, eccentric characters … who then get slotted into rubbish, generic stories.

What’s interesting about Doctor Who is that you’re forced to do things the other way round. For Doctor Who authors the protagonist is – to the first approximation, anyway – always going to be the Doctor. Which means you spend your time trying to come up with silly and thrilling things for him to do, not agonising about what his magic sword is called.

In Doctor Who the companion is often nearly as important. Sometimes – very rarely – they are the protagonist. The protagonist of the episode ‘Rose’, for example is … well, not difficult to guess from the title. Some fans, on first viewing, felt the first episode was a very light Doctor Who story … well, yes it was. It was about Rose meeting the Doctor, not the Doctor fighting Autons.

But most Doctor Who stories have a subplot. A subplot is what it sounds like – basically a secondary storyline that runs alongside the main one. It’s usually there to compare and contrast with the main plot – so in Pride and Prejudice, say, we see what happens to the other sisters. In Doctor Who, the typical story involves the Doctor and companion landing on a planet where there’s a conflict and splitting up. The Doctor ends up with one faction, the companion with another. That way, we see both sides of the conflict. Often the Doctor is off dealing with the cause – the monsters who’ve invaded, say – while the companion is down on the ground and witnesses the effects – the suffering the monsters are inflicting on the native population. It’s a neat way to do things.

It also allows a writer to break up the tone a bit and just ... well, cut away from the main action.

Instead of talking about what makes a protagonist interesting, let’s think about what the protagonist is there in the story for.

Here’s the key sentence of this article, so memorise it:

‘A story is the set of choices its protagonist makes’.

This sounds ridiculously reductive. It is. You can’t really sum up the whole of human literature in a sentence. What you can do, though, is bring clarity to your OWN storytelling if you keep that sentence in mind.

So mull on that a while. In the next post, I’ll give some worked examples.

Behold My Awesome Psychic Powers

2008-07-01T12:25:00.000+01:00

The cover for The Eyeless has been released, and it looks a little something like this:

I love that cover. It's striking, dramatic, the Doctor looks exactly right for the story. It'll really stand out on the shelf, I think.

Now ... one thing that has changed since the olden days is that the cover is now approved by the Doctor Who production office before the author gets sight of it. Nothing terribly sinister or surprising about that, to be honest - Doctor Who is now a multi-million pound business, and all the various books and toys and DVDs and so on have to have a house style and - above all else - someone has to make sure things aren't clashing with each other. I suspect the actors involved have to approve their likenesses and so on, too.

I've always written the blurb (the words on the back cover), and I did still do that for The Eyeless. It's about a hundred words. A lot of writing is a balancing act, where the writer has two things to do and needs to negotiate between them. With the blurb, it's a balancing act between trying to tell the reader what the book is about without giving away the whole of the story.

So ... anyway, prepare to be dazzled by my amazing psychic powers.

I was wondering about the cover, and I doodled a sketch. I'd had no contact with the cover artist (Lee Binding), and presumably he worked from my synopsis - he couldn't have worked from the finished book as I hadn't delivered it at that point. Just as I finished my sketch, I got an email with the cover on it.

Here's my sketch (I've mentioned in a previous post my inability to draw):

and just to remind you:

Isn't that extraordinary? It's like when Uri Geller gets someone to put a drawing in an envelope and then uses his amazing telepathic powers to literally read the mind of the person, then draws the same thing. Which is always a house.

So I can't draw, but I am one of the Tomorrow People. Awesome.

Practicing Prestidigitation on Pretend Pachyderms

2008-06-18T17:50:00.000+01:00

In the comments section, Neil Shurley asked:

"So. About this 1000 word synopsis. How close do you end up sticking to it? Walker Percy, I believe, made a comment once (seriously paraphrasing here) about writing being no fun if you already know in advance where it's going. But most folks, I think, benefit from having an ending in mind. But, anyway, all that being said, I'm curious about how much you end up drifting from your initial synopsis over the course of writing the novel. I suspect it differs from project to project, but I also wonder if you're contractually bound to follow the synopsis you've delivered."

This is a good question, and touches on a number of things.

Contractually, I have to deliver a book that’s like my synopsis. In practice, as Tolkien put it, ‘the tale grew in the telling’. There’s a major character in The Eyeless who’s not in the synopsis at all, another who does all the same things for completely different reasons. I dropped one big thing about the monsters: they were going to have a strict caste system, with strictly defined roles. I had it all worked out and had drawn pictures of the various castes and everything. I dropped it not because it’s an SF cliché and invariably rubbish, but because it just didn’t really go anywhere when I came to write it down. They spent far more time explaining the caste system than doing anything with it. One bit that I thought would take up chapters and chapters ended up being half a chapter long. When the title changed, I decided I needed to introduce the Eyeless themselves a little earlier. The ending hits all the same basic beats and points, but is quite different from the original plan. Justin Richards – Series Consultant/my editor is a writer, an extremely prolific one, and knows that these things happen. So ‘like’ doesn’t have to mean ‘identical’. There’s no doubt at all that the synopsis and the final book are ‘like’ each other. And, in the end, no editor worth his salt will ever say ‘that works at every level and doesn’t clash with our other plans … but isn’t like the synopsis, so change it’.

Now … the rules are different when you're writing for a series with lots of different authors, particularly one based on a TV series that the books are running alongside. If you’re an established author writing your own standalone book, with your own characters and so on, your publisher probably won’t require you to write a synopsis.

But The Eyeless is one of three Doctor Who books coming out on the same day, and that’s the day after a television episode. It’s the thirtysomethingth book of the range. The tenth Doctor books aren’t a ‘series’ like the New Adventures and Eighth Doctor books, which told an ongoing story – they’re all self-contained adventures … but they are all part of a range, and lots of people read them all.

The synopsis is a quick way to make sure that the stories are all sufficiently different. In a series that’s been running as long as Doctor Who, it’s very easy to come up with an historical character or setting or type of monster that’s been in a story before (it's harder not to, at times). All series and genres have formulae and only tell certain types of stories – Doctor Who is a great deal more flexible than most (Paul Cornell once said ‘the format is there’s no format’), but I don’t think I’m being massively controversial when I say that there are some old stalwarts – the alien invasion; the base under siege; the planet that seems nice but is secretly ruled by aliens; the everyday object that turns deadly as part of the invasion plans; a shipwrecked alien having to kill to survive. In any given year, the Doctor will face evil insects, evil robots and aliens disguised as people. There will be stories set in the past, present and future. It’s the rules.

Individual writers, though, won’t know what the other writers are up to. Not at first. Now, obviously part of my job is to come up with something … well, let’s be polite and call it ‘original’. It’s not original in the true sense of the word – it’s more like coming up with something that you assume no one else will be doing at the moment. If the editor has a synopsis he can say things like ‘don’t end it with a big shoot out, a lot of books recently have done that’ or something like that.

Once the book is commissioned, the synopsis is very useful to the various marketing and sales people. The cover has to be designed while the book is still being written, so the artist has to work from the synopsis (I’ll be talking about my cover soon).

There may be people – other writers, even – who read that and think that novelists shouldn’t be worried about commercial stuff. Surely, they say, novelists are artists and should be free range and organic and dancing around meadows, and so what I’ve just described makes me the writing equivalent of a battery hen. No wonder these books end up in supermarkets.

Well, they’re wrong for any number of reasons, but let’s just pick one: once it’s been approved, the synopsis actually frees me from all the ‘commercial stuff’. I can get on with my writing, confident that all the marketing and publicity and editorial people know what they’ll be getting and are happy with it. That’s all sorted out before I’ve written a word my readers will read.

But …

I also think there are at least two obvious advantages to having a synopsis whatever you’re writing. I think new and aspiring writers should at least try writing a synopsis before they set out trying to write a novel.

Firstly, it's much, much easier to change a synopsis than a novel. This is obviously true physically - if you write and rewrite and edit 10,000 words, then throw it away and write another 10,000 words ... that all takes time – weeks, at least. But I think the main advantage is an emotional one: you can get very fond of your writing. There’s a bit of description you really love, or a joke, or a character … but that section of the book isn’t working. Instead of biting the bullet and throwing it away and starting again, you get the urge to tinker and juggle things around and rework. It becomes all too easy to throw good money after bad.

It's very hard to get emotionally attached to a synopsis. The ending doesn't work? Come up with a different one. In the end, you’re changing a couple of sentences, not a couple of chapters. And the prose is usually pretty functional.

Secondly ... it's easier to see the problems. Novels are big and complex and take months to write. You make thousands of little decisions, all the time, and it's very easy to end up drifting a little off course. Sometimes you'll end up in a more interesting place - often, though, you'll just be getting lost.

But even before you set off, if you have the plot laid out in front of you, you can see where the problems are likely to be. There are always weak moments. Bits where you write ‘she decides to trust the Doctor’ when there’s no real reason for her to do that other than you need them to work together now, or ‘the Doctor suddenly reveals that’, where what you’re really saying is that the Doctor doesn’t earn the knowledge, he’s kind of known it all along.

Top tip: when you’re plotting something, if the word ‘suddenly’ appears, you’re probably doing something wrong. I’ll explain why in a later post.

The trick isn’t always to eliminate plot holes, it’s often to understand where they are and hide them. Authors use the same basic trick as stage magicians – distraction. Look at my right hand. My right hand is doing something really interesting with a handkerchief, ooh ooh, look at my right hand. While you’re busy looking at that, my left hand is slipping the playing card into your pocket. Telling a story is exactly the same sort of thing – controlling and limiting the information the audience is receiving. Getting you to ask the wrong question, withholding the one piece of information you really, really need to see what’s really happening.

There’s a massive plot hole in the greatest movie of all time, Star Wars. A stupid one. One that defies all logic. One that you’ve probably never noticed (although the writer of the radio version did and tried to plug it). Our heroes escape from the Death Star, Princess Leia says that the escape was too easy, that they’re clearly being tracked and then says … let’s got to the Rebel base. The one that the Imperials have spent the whole movie looking for and have no other way of locating. They lead the Death Star to Yavin. And know that’s exactly what they’re doing. Which is pretty dumb.

Now, George Lucas is a genius. Yes he is. If you don’t agree, leave – we don’t serve your kind in here. He distracts the audience with the space battle, the mourning of Ben, Han teasing Luke about Leia. That bit of the movie works brilliantly as a nice, short gap between the action of the Death Star escape and the big space battle at the end. Even though it’s people just sitting around, it moves so fast, there’s so much else going on, that you’ve seen that movie loads of times and never noticed the ‘plot hole’. Although I’d wager a lot of you will be telling your mates about it now.

It is, in the end, basically the same trick that Arnie uses in Last Action Hero when he’s surrounded by an army of mobsters – he points behind them and shouts ‘look – an elephant’, then runs away while everyone’s looking for it. Writers point at a lot of imaginary elephants.

The synopsis allows an author to see the story laid out without the distractions, allows him to see if there’s stuff that doesn’t work. There’s then the choice of either fixing it, or burying it. In the case of Star Wars, getting the Death Star to Yavin for the final act was the important thing, and made for a much better story than any alternative way of doing things.

I saw a lot of synopses for the New Adventures when I was researching the Virgin version of A History of the Universe. Some writers, like Andrew Cartmel, sent in vast chunky things – I think the one for Warchild was about thirty pages, complete with dialogue samples and so on. He clearly preferred to have it all mapped out before he started. Gareth Roberts and Ben Aaronovitch preferred two or three pages, get the strong basic idea down, then build on it.

Writers all write differently. They all have their own tricks and ways of getting the job done. Kelly Hale recently said in her blog that she never reads when she writes … I do the complete opposite, almost pathologically. Some authors swear blind that they just start writing and don’t know where the characters will take them. That sounds reckless and crazy to me, like jumping off a cliff and then trying to work out what to do next.

In the end, the reader never sees the synopsis. In the end - while it's often preferable - it doesn't matter if the creators of some story all got along, or whether the writer had fun doing it, what matters is the end result.

Become A Published Author Guaranteed

2008-06-10T16:42:00.003+01:00

Some discussion on The Forum Formerly Known as Outpost Gallifrey about 'the Challenge'.

http://www.doctorwhoforum.com/showthread.php?t=183189&page=2

The 'challenge' is, as I say there, the challenge I faced, writing the book. If people want to try taking on the challenge, please feel free. But I'm not asking people to write a whole novel in six months.

It would be a fun exercise for people reading this to try writing the 1000 word synopsis now, though. Better still, when this blog ends on Boxing Day, it might be fun to try again. Hopefully you'll do a much better job second time around because of all the wonderful things you've learned.

I think a week to ten days is a perfectly sensible timescale for those 1000 words. So ... if you're going to try, try getting it finished sometime next week.

Now ... what I've done here is lay out the guidelines I was given. There were no sealed orders to be kept away from the eyes of muggles or whatever. You've been told what I was told.

I already know what most people will get wrong. The guidelines are very simple, but people will ignore one or more of them. I've said, for the purpose of the exercise, that you use Donna as a companion. Someone, somewhere has decided they don't like Donna, so they'll use Martha. Well ... send that into Justin, he'd reject it out of hand. Or, if he was feeling kind, ask you to rewrite it for Donna. Someone's decided that they're doing it for fun, so they've put the Daleks in it ... well, again, instant rejection. Or, if the idea's great, a very swift email saying 'try doing the same story, but with new monsters'. If it was a good Dalek story, that should be almost impossible.

The rules are transparent. The things I set out in The Challenge post are the non-negotiables. If you find yourself negotiating with them, you're doing something wrong.

Writing a novel isn't a thought experiment. It's a series of concrete choices. You decide to do one thing, not to do ten others. The end result isn't a vague set of ideas about what your story should be, it's the story.

Which is great ... because the great enemy of the writer is the idea that writing is what you are, not what you do. You wouldn't call yourself a plumber if you had vague ambitions one day to do some plumbing. You're a writer if you write.

These days, it's never been easier to be a writer. Hell, I'm being a writer just now by typing away. Here's my gift to everyone here: reply to this post and become a published writer. Assuming I don't moderate the comment, so try not to libel any comics creators.

What's more difficult is to be read.

Over at www.despair.com there's a great T-Shirt reading 'More People Have Read This Shirt Than Your Blog'. It is probably true of most blogs. Oh, and they also sell this, http://www.despair.com/pessimistsmug.html,, which is great.

I'm hoping to offer some really useful tips to improve your writing and storytelling. But above all, I hope to be able to show that the real art is in being read.

The Best Advice I Can Give You ...

2008-06-08T17:40:00.003+01:00

Before I really start wibbling away, I should probably admit that the best practical advice I can give anyone who wants to improve their writing is to read this book:

The Creative Writing Coursebook: Forty Authors Share Advice and Exercises for Fiction and Poetry

Now … one 'how to' book a lot of people tend to end up mentioning is Robert McKee's Story,

Story: Substance, Structure, Style and the Principles of Screenwriting

and that's a great book and it's a good read ... but it's mainly about how to write a Hollywood movie. It’s a little like going on a bodybuilding course with Arnie, when what you really need when you’re starting out is a bit of walking and perhaps a swim a couple of times a week. For us mortals, McKee’s book is probably better as a tool for analysing the formulae of American cinema than as a place to find hints and tips to improve our own writing. It's cool to learn stuff like that the twenty third minute is often the crucial one for a traditional Hollywood film, though.

(The twenty-third minute was the traditional place to put the moment when the Protagonist of the story is presented with the Call to Adventure. In other words, you spend the first twenty two minutes showing us the everyday life of the main characters and establishing what the status quo is ... then the hero gets a chance to change it. In the twenty-third minute of Star Wars, Luke sees Leia's message; in Back to the Future it's when Marty sees the time machine for the first time. The hero then … doesn’t leap into action, at first he almost always decides to stay home, because - well, buy McKee's book to find out. After you’ve checked all your movie DVDs to see what happens in the twenty-third minute, of course.)

The Coursebook has all sorts of exercise and insights. It’s a much more practical and everyday than McKee’s if you’re just starting out, and is based on the UEA creative writing course. It was co-edited by Paul Magrs, who by an amazing coincidence has also written - amongst many other things - Doctor Who books like:

Doctor Who - Sick Building (New Series Adventure 17)

And so, to conclude, everything always comes back to Doctor Who.

Here are those links for US Amazon:

The Creative Writing Coursebook: Forty Authors Share Advice and Exercises for Fiction and Poetry

Doctor Who: Sick Building (Doctor Who (BBC Hardcover))

Story: Substance, Structure, Style and The Principles of Screenwriting

Finding The Books

2008-06-06T14:33:00.003+01:00

I read a lot of books. More of this anon (I know I keep promising this).

People often say things like 'the NAs are difficult to find'. It's certainly expensive and time-consuming to locate, buy and read all of them. Remember that the NA/MA/EDA/PDAs were released one or two at a time for the best part of fifteen years, so trying to collect the whole range in one go will be like trying to swallow an elephant.

There are books available for free online, including my novel The Dying Days (the first original novel featuring the eighth Doctor) at: www.bbc.co.uk/doctorwho/classic/ebooks/.

And you can still find bargains at Amazon Marketplace and Ebay.

A site I use a lot to feed my insatiable book habit is:

www.bookfinder.com

And a quick check shows that there are a lot of old Doctor Who books on there.

I've also started using www.greenmetropolis.com and they've got
a smaller range (and are UK-only), but the books are cheaper and you save the planet and stuff, and surely that's what the Doctor's all about.

The Challenge

2008-06-05T19:40:00.000+01:00

People often ask me for advice about writing Doctor Who books.

These questions break down into two categories, really – the first is a practical one, specifically about the Doctor Who books: ‘Who do I write to at the BBC? What do they want? What’s the secret to getting commissioned? What’s the appropriate level of bribe?’. I’ll write a little about this at some point, I’m sure, but the harsh truth of the matter is that the BBC aren’t looking for new writers at the moment. They return, unread, any unsolicited submissions they get. The secret of my success with The Eyeless? I don’t know. I’ve written a fair few Doctor Who books in the past, and I’d let the BBC know years ago that I’d be happy to do so again, but hadn’t had any real contact with them for ages until Justin Richards (the Creative Consultant of the Doctor Who books) phoned me up out of the blue last November. So the only advice I can offer at the moment is ‘sit by your phone and wait for Justin Richards to ring’. Not terribly helpful, sorry.

There’s a second set of questions, and they boil down to ‘how do you write a novel?’. People are very interested in the general process. I suspect this is because of that old expression ‘everyone has a novel in them’. I don’t necessarily think everyone does really have a novel in them – on my darker days, I wonder if some published novelists do - but I think it’s certainly an area of creative expression that’s valuable. Particularly if, like me, you can’t really draw, dance, sing or play an instrument. And lots of novels get published every year, and someone’s writing them.

One thing that has surprised me as a writer is how many of the techniques and tricks that can be used in one sort of story can be used in another. I’ll be giving away all sorts of my secrets over the coming months, the sort of heuristics that I use. You can trust this advice, because I know fancy-schmancy words like ‘heuristics’ and ‘schmancy’.

But for now … I’ll lay out the challenge for writing a Doctor Who book. Now, if you want to have a go at this, please do. I have to warn people: this isn’t a Pop Idol type thing or anything where I can go over individual entries and offer pointers.

Also … writers have got very wary of encouraging people to describe their ideas on their websites, because of a couple of cases where someone’s posted something like ‘I think you should bring back the Romulans’ on the website of a Star Trek writer, and then tried suing when they did.

If you want to try this out, post the results somewhere like the www.doctorwhoforum.com boards, or (of course) on your own blog or Myspace page or wherever it is the young people and hepcats hang out online these days. Feel free to post a link to that here in the comments section.

So … what’s it take to write a Doctor Who book?

The guidelines are deceptively simple. In no particular order.

1. A tenth Doctor book should be between 50,000 and 55,000 words long. You have to be able to write it in six months, perhaps less.

(I think the word length thing will be the subject of my next entry here, because it’s something people seem fascinated and worried by).

2. It can’t feature any old Doctor Who monsters or anything like that. Not even stuff from the new series.

(No exceptions, no excuses – Virgin used to say this in their writers guidelines, too, and apparently about half of the submissions they got started something like ‘I know you said no old monsters, but when you read my book, Valeyard of the Daleks, you’re sure to make an exception’. They never did make that exception. The BBC want you to come up with your own ideas. Yes, there have been authors allowed to bring back old monsters – but not many, and never with their first book.)

3. You’d always be told which companion the Doctor would be travelling with. The Doctor doesn’t have a companion in The Eyeless, but for the sake of this exercise, let’s say you’ve got to have Donna in it.

4. Like the TV series, the audience for the Doctor Who books includes children these days. When you’re coming up with your story, bear that in mind. As a rule of thumb, the book should feature nothing unsuitable for an intelligent twelve year old.

(Heh … it’s safe to say that this is the source of most confusion and consternation among fans, particularly the fans of the New Adventures and Eighth Doctor Adventures, which were often pitched at adult fans. In the end, this is pretty much the easiest instruction to follow. I’ll be writing about this soon, too, and I suspect I’ll be returning to the subject after that. For now … I’ll repeat what I’ve said in a couple of other places: I’ve approached this book like I’ve approached my previous Doctor Who books, none of which were ‘unsuitable’ for that mythical twelve year old).

5. Your book has to be completely standalone – it can’t be the sequel to a previous story, or just the first book of a trilogy, or just setting something up. Imagine that, for some of the audience, this is the very first Doctor Who story your reader has ever seen or read.

Now … following those guidelines to the letter, write a synopsis of your book. It has to be concise … so, in no more than 1000 words (that’s about two sides of single-spaced A4 paper). The purpose of the synopsis is to give a detailed breakdown of the story, and to get across the flavour of your book.

(Hopefully you’ve read that last one and thought it sounds a bit tricky. That’s because it really is quite tricky. It's an art, not a science, and every author approaches it differently. I’ll talk about writing up a synopsis in a future entry, too. For now … think of it this was: this is your pitch. This is your one chance. You have to come up with something that, in a thousand words, is – all by itself – enough to persuade someone to commission the book.).

The best hint I can give – try to come up with a really strong, simple, central idea and then try building on that. Father’s Day, for example: Rose realises that if she can go back in time, she can save her father’s life. Dalek: someone has a single Dalek locked up in their basement. These stories don’t write themselves, not a bit of it, but straight away you can see the possibilities, you can see the potential for drama. You can already see that saving Pete Tyler is going to have consequences that Rose hasn’t foreseen and picture the moment when that Dalek gets free.

Try to play around a little, bring your own ideas to the story. There’s no point saying ‘oh, I want to do a story just like the ones where the Doctor met Charles Dickens and Shakespeare and Agatha Christie but with [insert name of another writer]’ … Mark Gatiss and Gareth Roberts already did that. If they want to hire someone garethrobertsesque, they already have a number to call.

OK … if you want to have a stab at that, good luck!

Interview With Me

2008-06-02T18:41:00.000+01:00

The Unreality site has an all-new, long interview with me at ...

http://unreality-sf.net/interviews/parkin.html

It's in two parts, with The Eyeless stuff going up tomorrow.

Hello

2008-05-27T20:54:00.000+01:00

I’m Lance Parkin, and it’s just been announced that I’ve got a new Doctor Who book coming out in late December this year.

What I hope to do here is … well, first and foremost, persuade you to buy my book, Doctor Who – The Eyeless. I might as well be upfront about that. Buy my book when it comes out on Boxing Day. Go on, go on, go on.

I also hope to shed some light on how I wrote this book. I know that the process of writing a book is something that fascinates people. I’m not claiming to be an expert, or that my way is the only way, or anything like that. What I’ll do is try to explain how I went about writing this Doctor Who book.

OK … my plan is to post at least once a week. Comments welcome. I don’t know any season four spoilers, though, and I’m afraid they haven’t given me the phone numbers for David Tennant, Russell T Davies or Kylie Minogue. If they did, they’d have been yours for a small fee, I promise. But they didn’t.

Welcome to The Eyeless

2008-03-25T17:02:00.000Z

This is a new site by the author Lance Parkin, best known for his Doctor Who novels.

Nothing to see here at the moment, but stay tuned.