Unbeknownst to me, the readership of The Fruit Salad Therapy Tapes has grown to the point where I can no longer use Mailchimp to host it without paying them money, and I’m not doing that, because I write this for free. (By the by, I will never charge for this newsletter, because I do it as much to force myself to sit down and write about ideas once a week as I do for any other reason, but if any long-term readers do ever feel like it has some value to them and wanted to send a one-off donation to keep it going, I’d hugely appreciate it! I have a Ko-Fi account here). I’ve switched over to Email Octopus, who seem much less rampantly capitalist in their outlook, but as you can see, I haven’t yet figured out how to use the templates here to make the newsletter look the same as did using the previous templates! I’m sure there will also be other kinks to iron out as I switch from one provider to the other, so please bear with me as I figure it all out. If anything about this week’s seems weird or off, do let me know and I can make sure I address those specific gremlins as I move forwards.

This week, some thoughts on writing from my three-and-a-bit-months of focusing on it full-time rather than moonlighting as a writer alongside my full-time attempts at being a Fringe comedian. I’ve banged on about it plenty here, but just to fill in any recent subscribers – I spent several years concentrating on making live comedy shows for the Edinburgh Fringe and hoping that one day that work might enable me to transition into writing and acting in comedy projects for TV and film full-time, but I only ever had time to practice writing those kinds of scripts on the side. After a Fringe show that felt like the culmination of a lot of work, and a radio sitcom that felt like the first steps towards something new, I decided that in 2023 I would put all my time into writing pitches for TV comedy projects, with live comedy being something I did on the side, and see what happened when I flipped the apportioning of my time on its head like that.

Now we’re nearly a quarter of the way through the year, I have of course learned some lessons from this approach and thought I’d pass them on! Early on in trying to navigate these changes, my agent said to me that I shouldn’t actually write any scripts unless I was being paid for them – she was sick of seeing her clients work for free, she said, and she wanted to see development deals in place before too much busywork was being done. I think this is an admirable stance, and I wish the creative industries worked more like this – with companies recognising that someone has some ability they would like to capitalise on and collaborate with, and offering to pay them to do some work for them. Put like that, it sounds pretty straightforward. Sadly, it still seems very difficult to persuade production companies to think like this, and the more I experimented, the more I realised it didn’t really chime all that well with the way my brain worked either.

In January I wrote two pitch decks for scripted projects I was really excited by – a TV adaptation of mine and Miranda’s radio sitcom, The Dream Factory, and a new high-concept idea about clones called Reconnect. They were such high-concept, elaborate ideas that I knew there was no point writing anything more than those pitch decks, because either the producers reading them would be excited by the idea, or it would not be their thing (either because it was too expensive an idea to get made, or because the absurdity of the premise just wasn’t to their taste) – my being able to knock together a script to show what the tone or the characters would be like would be neither here nor there.

But, in contrast to the previous times I’d sent scripted ideas to production companies, for the first time I had the time to go away and work on something else while they were reading my initial project. So, in the spirit of using the year to explore as many different options as possible, I’ve been using the time to anticipate the feedback accompanying potential rejections and prepare something which is the exact opposite of what I wrote initially – something grounded entirely in characters and relationships, and which will be sold not by the uniqueness of the concept, but by the strength of the writing. With such an idea, no pitch deck full of fancy images that basically says “It’s about some people doing some stuff” is going to be taken seriously, so I had to set about writing a full script, despite my agent’s well-intentioned advice about not doing that unless I was being paid.

The script I’ve written is called The Happiness Chain, and is loosely based on some of the ideas about deferred happiness I’ve been talking about in this newsletter over the last few weeks, and I’ve really loved writing it. Writing it reminded me of two things I think it’s easy to forget if you adopt too much of a “I won’t work unless I’m being paid” business approach to your own creativity. Firstly, that I actually enjoy doing this and would find ways to do it even if it wasn’t my job. Secondly, and more importantly for this week’s lesson, that writing is a diagnostic tool.

This was something that I chatted to the brilliant Desiree Burch about a month or so ago, namely that when we’re in the early stages of a writing project we assume that our principal job is to market the idea to people who could help us develop it further. The treatment and script feel like marketing tools, things we need to write in order to convince other people that the idea is good enough to be worth their time. What we forget is that, perhaps even more significantly than being a marketing tool, a treatment or script is also a diagnostic tool for ourselves as writers, to help us go “Oh! That’s what this idea is really about!” I tend to brainstorm extensively, either out loud to myself, or down on paper, to identify all the different things a scripted project could touch on, and the reasons why I think it will be interesting, and the idea of actually starting on the script often gets kicked down the road because I think “But that’s the actual work. I’m not ready for the work yet, I’m still figuring it all out.” We forget that the work is the figuring out, and vice versa.

What I always used to do, back when the ideas I tended to come up with were for short films or simple sketches rather than full long-form TV shows, was to sit down and bash out a vomit-draft script as quickly as I could, because in the writing of that script I would figure out whether I actually liked the idea or not. Inevitably, that first draft script would not be particularly good, because I rushed it out as a diagnostic tool for myself, but in the writing and reading of it I would either think “Nah, this is rubbish, I’m not onto anything here,” or, more excitingly “There’s something fun in here. I want to keep going with it.” This was a mindset I always adopted when generating short-form ideas – “Just write it, then decide if you like it enough to keep going” – and it’s one I had so far neglected to apply to my attempts to write more long-form stuff. Of course, my agent’s standpoint is valid too – it’s an exploitative industry, this, and we should be more vigilant against the principle of working for free – but when it comes to trying to find your way into an idea, and figure out what it is you really want to say with it, I still think there’s one rule that trumps all others:

Isn’t that what you wanted to do anyway?

Bit of a self-plug, this, but I recently started scouting out for script consultancy work, where I’ll read people’s comedy scripts and give extensive notes on them for flexible rates. I’ve been pleasantly surprised by how much I’ve enjoyed the work I’ve done in this field so far, and I know there are some aspiring writers subscribed to this newsletter. If anybody would be interested in working with me as a script consultant on their project, feel free to reply and let me know! I’m actively trying to build up a bit of a portfolio for more of that sort of work.

A Cool New Thing In Comedy – The brilliant Stevie Martin and Lola-Rose Maxwell recently released Screen Time, a pilot/taster weaving their viral social media-piss-take sketches into something more substantial and character-driven, and it’s great fun, with so many ideas and great silly lines in the mix. (Make sure you watch it on your phone)

What’s Made Me Laugh The Most – The visual gag in Season 4 Episode 5 of What We Do In The Shadows where Nandor keeps using Genie wishes to make his eyes smaller. Miranda spat her tea across the room and all that had happened was that the camera had cut to Kayvan Novak’s face.

Book Of The Week – Women Talking by Miriam Toews. I missed the film, so thought I’d read the book instead. It’s wonderful. The ending made me cry, it really took me by surprise.

Album Of The Week – No Sleep ‘Til Hammersmith by Motorhead. This is absolutely brilliant. These guys are dumb. It’s one of the silliest albums I’ve ever heard.

Film Of The Week – Air. This is Ben Affleck’s latest directorial effort. I really loved watching a film like this in the cinema, it feels like they don’t come round all that often any more, but I think it’s not a brilliant film. It chooses to frame Michael Jordan’s story entirely through the boardroom execs who profited off him, then in the last five minutes pivots the entire thing to be about athletes triumphing over corporate greed, but ultimately its final message is still “And everyone made millions.” It feels a bit hollow, but I am glad that low-key adult dramas like this are finally getting cinema releases again!