Mad man in a blue box. With a pen.

 

I once met Steven Moffat in 2001 when he was able to be just a regular fan. Doctor Who had been off the air pretty much for 12 years. We argued.

Now in 2016, Doctor Who’s a massive BBC flagship show, back on our screens for over a decade and Steven’s been in charge for the last six years or so. In that time, I’ve notched up four Big Finish Doctor Who adventures. I’m practically catching him up.

I’ve seen this guy on TV, read interviews, heard him wax lyrical at the British Screenwriters Awards last year (“Writing is HARD!” he declared) but here today, in the BBC Radio Theatre at an event orgainised by BBC Writersroom, Steven knows he’s among writers. There’s no show runner bravado, no trying to hide behind funny anecdotes, no trying to please an audience of fans. He seems very comfortable here. There’s a real honesty to his answers. I’m very pleasantly surprised. And I’m not arguing.

Next to him is endearing and impossibly youthful script editor Nick Lambon and expertly guided by Gavin Collinson we’re given a warts-n-all glimpse into writing for this prime time show. It sounds chaotic, frenetic but great fun.

Big thanks to Gavin, Celia and Anne at the
Writers Room for organising this event

But you’re here for the scoop aren’t you. How do you, as a new writer get to work on Doctor Who? We’ll get to that in a sec.

The biggest thing I took from this talk was hearing about Steven’s process. Turns out we’re not that dissimilar. “Accept that you know nothing.” he says. When someone of his longevity and profile says he starts every new script feeling like an amateur, struggling to remember how to do it, it makes you feel better that you do the same, right?

Discipline. He writes rigidly in chronological order. He thinks up a brilliant scene, the kind of scene that will blow the audience away. The kind of scene you want to write first. Does he jump to it? Have his pudding before his mains? No. It has to be earned. So he makes sure he has an “unbreakable iron chain of good scenes” to get there. And you know what? Once you reach that ‘brilliant’ scene, it’s been upstaged by the excellent scenes you ‘ve just written and it has to up its game.

Rough first drafts? Absolutely not. Only hand in something that you would be happy for them to go away and make NOW. Have the attitude that “It’s perfect and I’m prepared to change it all.”

Steven doesn't think Blink counts as a Doctor
Who adventure: the Doctor's hardly in it.

OK, so what about us newbie Whoie writers?

The trouble with Doctor Who, where the only constant is ‘alien humanoid travels in time machine’ (and even that isn’t true of EVERY episode!) is that there is no typical Doctor Who script. No magic formula. Many submissions “don’t get it” or aren’t interesting. Others throw in every idea at once. The best advice from Steven: “Treat it as if you own it. Don’t revere it.” The main thing is keeping people entertained for 45 minutes on a Saturday night.

Apparently, “being good at pitching will make you bad at writing.” Don’t be too prescriptive about what you’re pitching. Give the idea rather than “a scale model of your script”. A writer should always change their mind. A pitch like “what if the Ice Warriors took over a nuclear sub in the 1980s?” puts across the exciting idea but is general enough on plot to give the writer freedom. Don’t be tied to your pitch, you need to be always thinking of something better.

And when you get that commission, write as explicitly as possible and be precise about action. Never censor your scenes according to what you think is or isn’t achievable. It’s the sequence you least expect that causes the trouble. It’s not the space battle between the Autons and the Slitheen, it’s the fact that the TARDIS can’t land in a low ceilinged room!

You have three/four weeks to do your script by the way. Bags of time.

Over all, it sounds like writing Doctor Who is just as seat-of-your-pants as the good Doctor’s adventures themselves.

 

 

 

Is this a good time to mention my next Big Finish audio THE FIFTH TRAVELLER is out this month?