I’ve decided to stick with the characters and the period, but am considering ditching the whole songwriting thing. The reality is:  the concept would never get past the suits. OK that’s if it reaches them in the first place Either way, better to stick to one simple premise and be done with it. So I’m writing a North American 1960s road movie about a draft-dodging maniac and a pair of freespirited, miniskirt-wearing ladies. They do tell you to write what you know, don’t they? Never mind. I like a challenge.

This is all about making a film on the cheap and doing a good job of it. He says. It’s in collaboration with a producer and director who are both keen to get involved in developing the story. We seem to be coming at it from the same angle - looking at the practical parameters set out by the sheer smallness of the scale of it. I hope I can buy into that cliche of contraints having a freeing effect. Or maybe that cliche of acorns becoming oak trees.  I saw Ray Mears on TV eating acorns last night. Very nutritious apparently. Way to go.

This one started its life as a novel about a guy who falls in a cave, gets knocked out, wakes up several hours later and keeps on having bizarre visions. I won’t bore you with the details - suffice to say the novel went nowhere fast (actually I lie; it went nowhere very slow) and so was remoulded into a screenplay about a guy who has a dual need for hedonism and solitude. The hero comes up against a villain of gargantuan proportions in a quest for salvation (or something like that) and then there’s a nice old-fashioned showdown at the end. That story did actually get somewhere eventually, but the villain was way more interesting than the protagonist, and in fact, theoretically, he was the protagonist, although it took me a while to figure that one out.

It was all a bit unbalanced and messy as a result, so I reshaped it into a screenplay about a guy who goes searching for his missing girlfriend and gets  drawn into a bizarre underworld. To some writers it might seem like a ludicrously circuitous way of finding a story, but at least I found the characters along the way - and really got to know them. Given a choice though, I’d much rather be more clinical and come up with a nice, clean, calculated treatment without having to invest so much time and effort into stuff that never ends up on screen. I know people who work that way and they’re pretty efficient workers. In defence of my method though, the result can be really satisfying, as you can end up with a screenplay that’s multi-layered and brimming with bright, three dimensional characters…