Authors Electric

    When I started my MA in creative writing, I was asked who I wanted to write like. I was immediately indignant – I didn’t want to write like anyone else, I wanted to write like me. Then the question was rephrased – if you wanted to write like a piece of music, what would you choose? There were a number of different responses from the rest of the group. Smoky basement jazz, a clarinet maybe, or a trombone or a saxophone. Someone else wanted a piece by Corelli, there was Ravel’s Bolero and Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries. I chose Danse Macabre, by Saint Saens, long before it was popularised by Jonathan Creek. This quickly established me as someone who went for something a bit different, due to the necessity to retune the E string on the violin to E flat, which gives the whole piece its unique flavour. So the lines I wish I’d written are always a bit off-beat, and I am still in awe of the lateral thinking that creates them.         ...

 When I wrote my post last month. Happy Valley  had just started. As it's now finished, it seems right to give my final conclusion. It. Was. Brilliant!  ** SPOILER ALERT - IF YOU HAVEN'T WATCHED THE FINALE YET, DON'T READ ON!** There's so much that can be learnt from great screenwriting and what impressed me most was how the writing wasn't rushed. I thought it would be full steam ahead after episode four but no. The pace was kept spot on. Having said that, I'd have liked to have seen Faisal, the diabolical pharmacist, dealt with. All it would have needed was a police car pulling up outside his house and him noticing. But on the other hand, throwaway comments are part of Catherine Cawood's speciality. Car registration plates that lead to arrests, for example. So, a final nugget of intel that she passes on as she packs up her box and walks out of the police station, fits perfectly with her character. The policing side of things was done very well. I was at a t...

 I love Happy Valley. I really, really love it. Sally Wainwright is the most amazing screenwriter. She knows her characters inside out. She knows exactly what Sgt. Catherine Cawood would say or do in a situation and Sarah Lancashire knows exactly how to deliver it. After only the first episode, everyone's calling for another Bafta for Sarah Lancashire, and rightly so. Then, I watched the first episode of Silent Witness (I haven't seen the second one yet). I couldn't believe the contrast between the two. The plot's a bit convoluted and 'out there' but that wasn't the main problem for me. It was the dialogue. It just didn't work. It was stilted and didn't flow. (And they still don't cover their heads in crime scenes grr. ) It's series twenty-six for Silent Witness  now and unsurprisingly, there are no consistent writers. So no one knows Nikki Alexander inside out. Watching as an audience member, I wanted to shout when Nikki (as a visiting lectu...

Let's hear it this morning  for Radio 4 and too much wine the night before. I don't normally listen to Desert Island discs in bed of a Friday morning, because like all good conscientious writers I'm up and at my computer. Naturally. But the islandee, the castaway, was Sally Wainwright, and I heard her name luckily just before I hopped out of me pit to frighten off my hangover with a sunshine walk. I don't imagine that I'm alone in this, but I think Sally Wainwright is the best TV writer of series that we've got, and possibly ever had. No, that's nonsense. Come back Dennis Potter and Pennies from Heaven, all is remembered. And Tutti Frutti, come to think of it. She turns out to be a woman with a wonderful West Yorkshire accent in the Elland/Halifax mode. When she went to university to study French, the other students used to laugh at  the way she spoke the language. (How would a Parisien say Ecky Thump. I wonder? Not that that's Yorkshire, I suppos...