Ben Paddon

Category: Writing

  • Insert “Jump” Pun Here

    I’ve taken a break from working on that script (as well as transcribing some notes for a friend) to work instead on a rewrite of the next issue of Jump Leads. It’s a page-one rewrite – s0mething I’ve never done before – and to make matters worse it’s a rewrite of one of Andrew’s scripts.

    I’ve seen more of Andrew’s work than has been featured in the comic and, not to diminish Paul or Euan’s work in any way, Andrew is incredibly inventive. What’s more he has a very particular sort of wit that works wonderfully with the characters, possibly (probably) because he essentially is Llewellyn. I’m hesitant to rewrite anything he’s written, but Andrew’s time to devote to such an effort is limited, and with the end of the current story creeping ever-closer, it must be done.

    Rewriting someone else’s work feels… odd. In many ways it feels like a violation, like I’ve torn open the ribcage of the work and set about hacking its organs up. In other ways it feels less like random hacking and more like surgery, with a goal of making Andrew’s story sturdier, more solid, but with that same core of humour.

    And away I go.

  • Dinner Worry About It

    I’m stuck. I’ve hit a wall with this latest script. I’ve written my characters into a sitcom scenario that should be a tremendously funny moment – a sitcom dinner filled with hilarious misunderstandings – and yet I can’t seem to get any of the words to form on the page.

    I don’t know what it is. Maybe I’ve been staring at it too long. Maybe I need a second pair of eyes to offer some advice. Maybe… I don’t know, maybe I just need to sit down and hammer the scene out no matter how it turns out. That’s what first drafts are for, isn’t it? Get this shit out of your head and onto the page, and you can make it work later. But I obsess over making it work now. The rest of this script is stupendous, containing one of my favourite moments from anything I’ve ever written, but the rest of it just isn’t coming together. Everything was going so well…

    I’ve spent the last few days just watching sitcoms and trying to absorb as much via osmosis as I can. I’m currently watching “Joking Apart” for the first time. It’s funny, but it hasn’t aged well. There’s a distinct veneer of the 90s about it that is a little difficult to get past. The saxophone in the opening titles and incidental music, the fashion, the slightly off-kilter acting, it’s all a little overwhelming at times. I can usually shotgun a six-episode series of a show in one day, but I find myself digesting “Joking Apart” in bits. An episode here, an episode there.

    Maybe I should get Adam to have a look at it. But then his schedule hasn’t been ideal as of late. He hasn’t even had the time to give me notes on the first script I sent him…

  • Lucid moments

    Earlier this week I more or less finished work on the first of six scripts for a sitcom project I’m tentatively calling “Lucidity”. It’s effectively the pilot. While it probably still needs some more fine-tuning, I’m rather pleased with how it came out. It’s bloody brilliant, in fact – some of my finest work.

    However nobody’s going to be able to read it for a while yet.

    Before anything can happen with that first script I have to work on the next episode, which I’ve codenamed the Beeb Script. It’s the script that the BBC actually want to see – a mid-series script where the characters and scenario are already firmly established and we can just get on with things without worrying about continuity. Writing the pilot is all well and good, but pilots spend so much time telling you who everybody is and what they’re doing it doesn’t get to devote enough time to where they’re going. That’s what the Beeb Script is for.

    Usually a Beeb Script should take place part-way through a series, but I’m currently torn between the second and third episodes in the series plan Adam and I put together for the show. I have a particular fondness for the third episode, which plays with an established sitcom cliché in a very fun way. That said, the second episode looks like it’d be fun as well, although as I’ve reshuffled some of the elements from that episode into the pilot I’d need to seriously rework the structure of the first half for it to work.

    Alternatively I can mesh the two ideas together and see what I get. Nothing’s set in stone, after all.

  • How to tell if you want to be a writer

    1. Watch The TV Set.
    2. Read “The Writer’s Tale“.
    3. If, after doing both of these things, you still want to be a writer, chances are you probably will be.

  • Prolific

    While in theory I have four writing projects on the go currently I only feel compelled to write one of them, and these last few days I have been prolific. Staying up late and waking up early to write. I haven’t been in front of my computer all day – Jump Leads writer Euan Mumford has been in town visiting from England so we’ve been doing touristy things like theme parks and the like – but I’ve made considerable progress on a project is long ago written off as unwritable.

    Which is nice.

    It’s very different from my usual work. As usual I’ve found myself writing about the nature of reality as we perceive it, but I’ve taken a different, much more grounded approach this time. This is real life, with kitchens and sofas and call centers and pubs. I haven’t written this sort of thing in quite some time. Arguably I haven’t written this sort of thing at all.

    I can’t take all of the credit either. Much of the core concept was developed in partnership with my good friend Adam Croft back in England. While I came up with the bare bones of the idea he and I worked hard to wrap a story around it and develop characters well-suited to the premise. He’s a brilliant writer, a cracking storyteller, and I’m very excited about working with him.

    Oh, and this isn’t a webcomic by the way.

    With any luck I’ll have something more to tell you about this project in a few short months, but for now you’ll have to make do with me riding high on a wave of creativity. Huzzah!

  • A Funny Turn – on the subject of Russell T Davies and clunky writing

    I’ve been watching and rewatching a lot of Doctor Who lately, partially because I’m hard at work on three separate Doctor Who related projects (nothing official, o’ course – just some fun fan stuff) but mostly because… well, I love the show. I grew up with it, with Tom Baker and Peter Davison. My earliest Doctor Who memory is of “The Mind Robber”, seeing Jamie McCrimmon’s face being jumbled up. It horrified me as a child. It still sends tingles down my spine, even today.

    The fourth series of the revived show is probably the second-most uneven series of the show to date, right behind the second series, and yet both series contain some of my favourite episodes of the show. One such episode is “Turn Left”, an alternate-history episode that retells some of the events of the third and fourth series in a universe where the Doctor died. It’s a wonderful episode, brilliantly grim, if a bit over-the-top at times. However there’s one moment in the episode that I cannot take seriously:

    Torchwood fans try to pretend Ianto Jones never died. Some Doctor Who fans deem the ’96 TV Movie to be non-canonical. Me? I would happily remove this single shot from the show’s 48-year history without a moment’s hesitation.

    It’s a moment that is simply too over-the-top. It’s too silly, too ridiculous, too much after seeing London get nuked off of the planet. It’s not just the pointing, either. It’s the shaking of the head, the glare, the malice. It doesn’t work. It comes across as ridiculously cheesy, and in an episode as bleak as this it becomes unintentionally hilarious.

    I wanted to know how the scene read on the page, on Russell T Davies’ original shooting script, and fortunately enough it’s one of the many Doctor Who scripts available to download from the promotional site for “The Writer’s Tale”. So I downloaded it and had a look:

    It’s a nice piece of action text, but… well, it still doesn’t work. It tries to hammer home a point from an earlier scene – the Spanish maid can see the space beetle on Donna’s back – it’s too much. Too clunky. Too forced. If it were up to me, I’d remove the Spanish maid from this shot entirely. She’s superfluous, telling the audience something that they already know. No, it’s worse – she’s repeating it, so soon after having already reminded them of it.

    Or, alternatively, can her presence in the scene be amended? Can her contribution to this moment be fixed? I at least thought it was worth having a stab at:

    [CeltX added a line break into the second paragraph during the export process. No idea why.]

    Is this any better? Well, no. I’ve tried to tone down the maid’s reaction, to make it seem more real, more human. But she still feels unnecessary. Her presence muddies the tone of the scene. What is supposed to be a tragedy, a disaster, is then punctuated by something awkward, shoehorned into the scene in an attempt to serve the overall narrative, and backfiring.

    But then, that’s something of a calling card of Russell T Davies’, isn’t it?

  • On death, television, and Ianto Jones

    SPOILER ALERT! This post contains spoilers for Buffy the Vampire Slayer season six, and spoilers throughout the entirety of Torchwood. (more…)

  • Words

    I’ve been thinking tonight about the stories I want to tell, largely because I decided to sned my friend Tealin the email equivilent of lunging at her wild-eyed* and yelling “WE… MUST COLLABORATE!!” Her response was positive, which is good, because she is an incredibly talented artist and the idea of creating a world with her is exciting. I’m excited.

    I’ve sat down and thought about the stories that I want to tell right now. One of those stories has actually been floating around in my head for quite some time and tackles the subject of religion, but I can’t figure out exactly what I want to do with it or, indeed, what the message is behind it (although I’m closer to knowing now than I was when I first came up with the idea). Tealin has pointed out, though, that there’s a risk of it becoming “vindictive”, and that’s definitely not what I want this story to be. I need to let it stew for a little longer, so back in the Corpse File it goes.

    The other story that pops into my head is very loosely autobiographical in nature. I’ve mentioned this before, and I almost started working on it last year. The problem there, and again I may have covered this in a previous entry, is that it touches upon elements of my personal past that are long behind me now and that I don’t feel a strong connection to anymore, even though those elements really only contribute to the back-story and not to the actual goings-on themselves. I’ve sat down a number of times to write this story, but nothing ever comes out.

    So where do we go from here? I find myself wondering what sort of thing I want to write. I’m hesitant to do more scifi and I’m not sure I’d feel confident tackling fantasy. I have a few ideas in my head but nothing’s really leaping out at me at the moment. Maybe I just need to write something and see what my brain thinks.

    * For some reason this sentence put me in mind of any time during the Back to the Future trilogy where Doc Brown had to tell Marty something catastrophic. I truly believe that Chris Lloyd is the hallmark for wide-eyed craziness.