Will you ever work in This Town again? – SCRIPTWRITING AND A.I.

The protagonists of ‘This Town’

This week saw the release of writer Stephen Knight’s (Peaky Blinders, SAS Rogue Heroes) latest drama, ‘This Town‘ on BBC1/iPlayer. The title I assume is derived from The Specials’ ‘Ghost Town’  (1981, the year the story is set – it opens with the Handsworth riots). It may be a touch of nostalgia for that era of music that made me so receptive to the drama but I thoroughly enjoyed it, felt it had substance, and found it moving and energising.

Also this week a UK-based scriptwriter called Guy Ducker posted a thoughtful item on LinkedIn about the potential impact of AI on screenwriting. After testing ChatGPT 4.0 for various aspects of scriptwriting – from generating ideas to writing scenes – he shared his broader thoughts. His conclusion from the testing was “right now, the best it’s going to give you without a lot of help is a third-rate script for a Ron Howard movie” (which prompted a chuckle). Beyond the product test he felt that not only does it have no soul so far, it has no personality either. He punctuated his piece with a caustically amusing scene from Michael Tolkin & Robert Altman’s ‘The Player’ which spotlights the algorithmic nature of old school movie development by demonstrating the formulaic conversion of true/news stories to movie pitches. His conclusion: “AI-generated stories feel so empty because they are: no experience or emotion is being communicated, because the storyteller has none to offer.”

‘This Town’ would be extremely hard, if not impossible, for AI to write because it is driven by an intense personal sense of nostalgia for coming of age in a specific place at a particular time. It has scenes which are visually (rather than verbally) driven, especially the scenes of the Two Tone-like band (Fuck the Factory) coming together. If Stephen Knight was writing the prompts, perhaps AI could be his machine co-writer – but what would be the point? It would be easier for a writer of his calibre just to write it.

The important perspective to keep in mind is that AI applications like ChatGPT are simply tools. They help you fill the white of the blank sheet. They get the ball rolling. They can help prompt better and more original ideas – from your human brain and spirit. Looking for such tools to write ‘Citizen Kane’ or ‘Manchester by the Sea’ or ‘The Banshees of Inisherin’ is missing the point. It’s a matter of thinking Pen not Manuscript.   

Something new under the sun: Creativity & Connections (quotation)

“Good story ideas seem to come quite literally from nowhere, sailing at you right out of the empty sky: two previously unrelated ideas come together and make something new under the sun. Your job isn’t to find these ideas but to recognize them when they show up.”

― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

What’s most of interest in this quote is the two unrelated ideas coming together to make a great new idea. Connection is the beating heart of creativity. It relates directly to the André Breton quotation at the bottom of this very early post from Simple Pleasures Part 4.

On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft (2000)

Quote: Jung at heart

“You are what you do, not what you say you’ll do.”

― Carl Jung

“Action is everything! It really doesn’t matter what you say or even what you think; it’s what you do that matters.”

Action Girl’s Guide to Living – Sarah Dyer

“Action is character.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote this in his notes while working on his final (unfinished) novel, The Last Tycoon. He wrote it in caps: ACTION IS CHARACTER.

Francis Scott Fitzgerald (1890-1940)

Coincidence No. 545 – Jackals

I am out running in St Pancras & Islington cemetery, listening to an Audible podcast about writer Robert Harris. He says:

“it’s like coincidences, which happen all the time in life, you can’t have them in fiction, they just don’t work…”

Just before this bit he was talking about how you can write novels about things where we know the ending and gave as his example The Day of the Jackal.

Yesterday I go to my bookshelves to find two things: a crappy entertaining thriller to read again and my copy of Kafka’s complete stories – see Coincidence No. 544. In the pile of crappy thrillers is The Day of the Jackal. It is behind another pile of books and I haven’t set eyes on it in years. I think about reading it (asking myself have I ever got through all of it? maybe I only know the ending from the film) but in the end pick another book set in Berlin in 1963 which appeals to me. And I find the Kafka in an equally obscure spot where two shelves meet and overlap forming a sort of hidden compartment.

Last night I begin both books. The Kafka story I pick out to start with is called Jackals & Arabs and features an old jackal.

When I finish the short Robert Harris podcast I switch to an audiobook I’ve had for a while but not listened to yet – A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari. In the opening few minutes it explains the terms Species, Genus and Family. In illustrating the biological Family it mentions, alongside dogs and cats, jackals. 19 minutes in, he explains early man’s position in the middle of the food chain by describing the scene of a giraffe being eaten by hyenas and jackals.

The Collaboration Diary 6

Last entry: The Collaboration Diary 5

After our first full-day session bashing out scope and structure, there was a bit of a hiatus. We had as ‘homework’ to each write our first 5 short pieces. We chose themes from our list (Buckets) and went our separate ways. I read relevant stuff (e.g. Rory Sutherland’s Alchemy, my collaborator Doug’s previous book Collaborative Working Pocketbook) and thought about the task. But I didn’t set pen to paper until the weekend before the second get-together/half-day session on the Monday (last Monday 11th). 

But that helped. It kept me focused. It gave me bursts of energy.

On Saturday I sat down to mark the blank sheet.

I picked the 5th topic on my list – Listening. It spoke to me because Enfant Terrible No.2 had sent me the previous day a photo from his lecture at UWE in Bristol, from his Paramedic Science course, of a Powerpoint slide about Listening and Empathy which had struck a chord with him. I used that as the springboard for a 1st person piece about the central importance of Listening in Collaboration.

It took me half an hour to write (the target 300-400 words). I went off for a short coffee break. Came back and wrote a second piece on Authenticity. That took me more like an hour.

On the Sunday I wrote two more. I didn’t write a 5th because I was happy with the first four and didn’t want to make it a chore. I sent them to Doug on Sunday night, having suggested we each read the other’s work before meeting.

I read Doug’s pieces and marked them up for the 2nd session on the Monday at the Royal College of GPs. We started the session by throwing down a quick agenda which we them worked through systematically. In so doing we addressed some big stuff…

Doug was uncertain about our working title – he had tested it on a few people and felt it wasn’t quite striking a chord. We discussed what was wrong or missing , concluded it was too narrow and added “&” and a second adjective to get something that hit the right note for us both.

We talked about the positioning of the book, the difference between Collaboration and Team-Work, and how to make our book distinctive. We felt the new title (as the old had done) captured a sense of a particular, original approach. We also spent some time debating a definition of Collaboration Doug had read and liked. We edited it a bit together and decided to make it the touchstone for the Manifesto that would be our opening. We are each going to write a version of the Manifesto and then combine them.

At 11 o’clock we stopped to observe the silence for Remembrance Day

We looked at the work we had done on structure and felt it was reasonably sound and an easy step from our Buckets document to a neat Structure document for the Proposal.

Item 3 on the agenda was a mutual “critique” as Doug put it. That was very civilised. He wanted to push me beyond the 1st person singular/personal perspective I had adopted – possibly too narrow? I encouraged him to avoid extended metaphors, neat turns of phrase where the sound overrode the sense and to include more concrete examples so the text didn’t feel too abstract. We agreed to be wary of imperative tones.

Finally we discussed the path forward through publishers, both the one Doug has been discussing this book with and other options. He was very disciplined in not making our final submission too early but to keep shaping and refining our (not particularly conventional) approach until the new year.

We concluded by setting our ‘homework’ before the next session and fixing a date in December. Doug has more time to write this month, I don’t so will probably end up leaving my homework until Sunday night just like the good old days.

It was another very satisfying, focused and productive session – shorter than last time, a half-day.

4 highlights of Geneva

Following on from the last post (All Souls’ Day) I have spent much of today reading most of Patti Smith’s new book, Year of the Monkey. It’s put me in the mood to write (which is always the sign of a special writer – her friend Allen Ginsberg has much the same effect from my experience).

I am in Geneva on a flying visit to the Geneva International Film Festival. Late last night – after returning home from my second viewing of the brilliant Joker at Warner Bros., where I bumped into my old Channel 4 colleague John Yorke and chewed the story fat with him – I managed to find the old tobacco tin at home where I keep my Swiss money. It turned out I had quite a lot – I haven’t been to Switzerland for a few years and it has appreciated markedly in the wake of the disastrous Brexit referendum (I hear they are a bit better at referenda here).

So I shifted the Swiss francs to my Euro purse, a suede purse from California my grandmother gave me as a boy – it says something like Gold Nuggets on it, long since worn away. I notice in Year of the Monkey how attached Patti Smith is to particular (not monetarily valuable) objects in her life, attributing meaning through memory to them.

I decided to blow as much of my purseload as possible – this is what I spunked it on…

1) Soup

I love soup – it’s a top food and generally healthy. In Year of the Monkey Patti has chicken soup, decorated with egg yolks (not sure which came first the chicken or the eggs), with her ailing friend Sam Shepherd on his ranch in Kentucky. This is pumpkin soup – I don’t normally like it, often too sweet, but this was delicious. I ate it outside Le Perron restaurant at the foot of the hill in the old town – I ate under the tree at that restaurant years ago with my younger brother. We did a sudoku outside another cafe in the old quarter that time too – I hate puzzles and crosswords but on that occasion it was fun. Patti seems much attracted to numbers both in dates (in which she sees magical coincidences – see All Souls’ Day) and in books of geometry. The fly leaves of Year of the Monkey have some kind of algebraic-geometric sketch and scribblings. I think it’s what she describes herself drawing on a white bedsheet in a moment of inspiration.

2) Perch

Fillet of perch is a speciality of Geneva – they get the poor little critters from Lac Leman. So I sat outside Le Perron – the only person to do so – but the weather was mild. The owner found it amusing but conceded the weather was soft. “Il faut en profiter” I told him – I’ve really enjoyed exercising my French today. Patti references Rimbaud’s Illuminations in the bit I just read – I made a mental commitment to read it soon. He wrote those prose-poems in London around 1873-75.

8 Royal College Street, Camden Town

3) Steak Frites

The Cafe de Paris was a recommendation by the lugubrious hotel night receptionist – it is a stone’s throw from Hotel Cristal. It turned out to be a carbon copy of Le Relais de Venise in London’s Soho and Marylebone. A restaurant that just does one meal but one meal really well – a great idea. The meal is green salad followed by steak and French fries aka steak frites. There must be a model for this kind of restaurant I thought – checked it out, there is – Le Relais de Venise established in Paris in 1959. Of course the meal demands red wine so I had a couple of little glasses. Patti is always eating and drinking in this new book as well as the last, M Train. It’s like join the cafes.

4) Cherries

Cherries drenched in cognac. Frankly it’s one of the BEST THINGS I’VE EVER TASTED.

I love cherries. I’ve not really engaged with cognac. Perfect combo. Highlight of the highlights.

The old town

Patti Smith – like myself – is an inveterate flâneur. I wandered over to the digital outpost of the Festival where the VR projects were on display. As usual, underwhelming. I contend that factual programming is not the strong point of what is a very important new technology. Games, health, retail, architecture, training – all no-brainers. Documentary – my jury’s out. The cobbled streets, small squares, narrow lanes and flowing fountains of the old town are charming – in stark contrast to the banks and luxury goods shops.

When I lived just over the border in Savoie (Savoy, SE France) there was an outbreak of graffiti that year in Geneva. At the end of the year they caught the culprit – a psychologist who contended that the place was too clean and boring for the citizens’ mental health. The thing is someone somewhere pays for these watch shops and luxury brands to be here – they pay in poverty and hardship. Le reverse de la medaille. Every coin has another side.

All Souls’ Day

Patti Smith by Robert Mapplethorpe (1975)

Today is the day the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe was born in 1946. Today is the day the guitarist Fred ‘Sonic’ Smith of the MC5 died, a quarter of a century ago. Today is the day Patti Smith’s grandchild was born. Patti was married to Fred, and was best-friends with Robert.

Coincidences is one of the things I write often about on this blog. It feels like there’s a pattern in the coincidences of these dates. It’s the kind of thing that makes me think of myself as a pantheist.

Two days ago, on All Souls’ Day, I went to see Patti Smith at the Central Hall Westminster aka Methodist Central Hall, a two-thousand seat domed venue near the Houses of Parliament and Westminster Abbey (and Channel 4) which served as venue for a number of key Suffragette events around 1914. It is also the building where the first meeting of the United Nations General Assembly took place (in 1946). Gandhi, Martin Luther King and Churchill have all spoken there.

On Saturday evening Patti Smith spoke about her work and life and read from her new memoir ‘Year of the Monkey’. She also performed six songs with her bandmate Tony Shanahan.

1 Wing

I was a wing in heaven blue
soared over the ocean
soared over Spain
and I was free
needed nobody
it was beautiful
it was beautiful

After the UN General Assembly used the hall on 10th January 1946 with 51 nations attending it repaid the venue by paying for it to be painted light blue – perhaps heaven blue.

The song comes from ‘Gone Again’, Patti’s 6th studio album, which was released in the wake of various losses in her life – Fred, Robert, her brother Todd and her pianist Richard Sohl among them. All Sohl’s Day.

2 Beneath the Southern Cross

Oh
To be
Not anyone
Gone
This maze of being
Skin
Oh
To cry
Not any cry
So mournful that
The dove just laughs
The steadfast gasps

This song is from the same LP – it features Jeff Buckley on backing vocals. Tony Shanahan played bass on the record. ‘Gone Again’ came out in the summer of 1996 – Jeff died in the summer of the following year. All Souls’ Day.

3  My Blakean Year

In my Blakean year
I was so disposed
Toward a mission yet unclear
Advancing pole by pole
Fortune breathed into my ear
Mouthed a simple ode
One road is paved in gold
One road is just a road

I’m not sure which year was Patti’s Blakean one – it might have been 2004. That was the year ‘Trampin’ ‘ came out, her 9th studio album. I am sure that her Year of the Monkey was 2016 – a trying year for many of us – Brexit, Trump, illness in the family, it was one you celebrated reaching the end of. The day after this gig I broke out this T-shirt from 2017 to mark the memory:

on the floordrobe

Blake is a big presence in Patti’s life, as he was in Allen Ginsberg’s. I met Patti Smith briefly once not far from Blake’s grave in Bunhill – it was after a concert she gave at St Luke’s church/concert hall in Old Street. We talked about Rimbaud and his time living in London. Rimbaud is another big literary figure in her life. In the wake of the All Souls gig I went for a walk yesterday with the member of my family who had been unwell in 2016 and we passed the house where Rimbaud lived for a couple of months with Verlaine.

8 Royal College Street, Camden Town

Les sanglots longs
Des violons
De l’automne
Blessent mon coeur
D’une langueur
Monotone.

Chanson d’automne (Paysages tristes – Poèmes saturniens) – Paul Verlaine (1866)

[Autumn song from Sad Landscapes]

4 After The Goldrush by Neil Young

Neil & Patti

This song appears on ‘Banga’, Patti’s 11th studio album from 2012. It was co-produced by Patti, Tony Shanahan and others. Both her children with Fred – son Jackson and daughter Jesse – played on it.

Well I dreamed I saw the knights in armor comin’
Sayin’ something about a queen
There were peasants singin’ and drummers drummin’
And the archer split the tree
There was a fanfare blowin’ to the sun
That was floating on the breeze
Look at Mother Nature on the run
In the 1970s
Look at Mother Nature on the run
In the 1970s

A timely anthem for the climate emergency. She changed the lyrics towards the end to:

Look at Mother Nature on the run
In the 21st Century.

5 Because the Night

Patti & Bruce (1977)

This song was co-written by Patti & Bruce Springsteen, fellow New Jerseyites. Patti said at the gig that it is about Fred. It was on ‘Easter’, her 3rd studio album, the first one I bought, after having picked up a single ‘Hey Joe’ / ‘Piss Factory’ out of intrigue at the cover and the B-side title. Inside the ‘Easter’ vinyl sleeve is a photograph of Rimbaud, a First Communion portrait with his father Frédéric.

Take me now, baby, here as I am
Pull me close, try and understand
Desire is hunger is the fire I breathe
Love is a banquet on which we feed

Come on now try and understand
The way I feel when I’m in your hands
Take my hand come undercover
They can’t hurt you now
Can’t hurt you now, can’t hurt you now

6 Pissing in the River

1974 debut single

Two years after her debut single (Piss Factory) came another piss song (Pissing in a River).

Pissing in a river, watching it rise
Tattoo fingers shy away from me
Voices voices mesmerize
Voices voices beckoning sea
Come come come come back come back
Come back come back come back

It appeared on her second studio LP, 1976’s ‘Radio Ethiopia’, which followed her ground-breaking, landmark debut ‘Horses’. ‘Horses’ features a classic photo by Mapplethorpe on the cover:

1975 debut LP

Patti got most into her stride performing this song, which is perfect for All Souls’ Day

Come come come come back come back
Come back come back come back

She spoke most movingly about working with her friend Sam Shepherd on his final publication. He passed on in 2016. As did her friend record producer Sandy Pearlman who produced Blue Oyster Cult and The Clash’s ‘Give ‘Em Enough Rope’ among others. I remember walking through the snow on New Year’s Day down to Loppylugs in Edgware to buy that record in the days when you had a delicious wait for things.

I always associate in my head BOC’s ‘Don’t Fear the Reaper’ and ‘Because the Night’ – I’ve no idea why, they were released two years apart (1976 and 1978). Patti didn’t talk about Pearlman although he was one of the key losses behind ‘Year of the Monkey’. But she spoke at length about Shepherd and made it clear that he didn’t really fear the reaper – he got to the end of his book with Patti’s help – he could no longer hold a pen or type on a keyboard, or play his Gibson in the corner of the room where they worked together on his Kentucky ranch – so she had to capture his voice and ten days after finishing he went to the big farm in the sky. One thing that really struck me about what she recounted about Sam was that they had written together back in the early days in New York so it was familiar to do it again at the end of his time in Kentucky. They had always been able to write side by side on their own things, alone and together at the same time. I love being alone but together – for example, in the house when all the family are sleeping like this weekend just passed, all souls as one.

Soul music: Patti & Tony at Central Hall

 

The Collaboration Diary 5

Our first full-day writing session worked out really well. Doug bought me a copy of Eat That Frog! at Euston Station to add to a dozen other volumes he’d brought with as references. I brought along three tomes as rangefinders for format:

• Alchemy – by Rory Sutherland (which I am mid-way through reading)
• Unleash Your Creativity – by my friends/collaborators Tim Wright & Rob Bevan
• Damn Good Advice – by George Lois

They are all examples of books which are written in small units that can be read linearly or dipped into. We quickly found we both had the same kind of book in mind in the wake of Doug’s radical suggestion to take it this way.

We put together an agenda in the classic way. Doug had brought 3 points, I added another 2 (made up on the spot) – all outputs for this session. We achieved all in a 6-hour session.

I drove the process, with Doug willingly coming along for the ride.

First, a couple of key questions I threw out:

• What have been your best experiences of Collaboration? Why?
• What have been your worst? Why?

We both listed what came to mind.

We discussed a few high-level ideas – like our core concept (codename DC) – before diving deeper into those questions. We individually drilled down into what characterised those experiences good and bad then shared the results to generate key topics in number.

I then went to the classic questions I learnt from Rudyard Kipling via Pat Mitchell (who Doug & I both worked with at Melrose Film Productions – we toasted him with coffee):

From the six core questions we developed six ‘buckets’ – a term borrowed from Tim Wright (the one referenced above) which we used when writing the interactive script of MindGym.

Doug was at Melrose when I made MindGym and he watched the process closely. By coincidence this tweet came in during our session, reminding me of how much positive impact our creative outputs can have:

Into the six buckets we dropped the topics we had generated. We then stepped through the Collaboration process – both when done voluntarily as an individual and ‘enforced’ within an organisation – and chucked those stages into the buckets. Finally we went back to the suggestions about What Makes a Good Collaborator? generated from online circles and added those too, leaving us with a set of topics divided into six main categories and in a roughly sensible order. All painlessly generated with plenty of interesting discussion in the process.

We concluded by deciding to write 5 pieces each initially to test the waters which we are to select from the list. We set a deadline for that, a date for the next day-long session and plotted a path to publication.

An all-round successful first collaborative writing session.

The Collaboration Diary 4

After an excellent weekend well clear of work (Open House days, Rugby World Cup, Underwire Film Festival, Hungry Hearts big night out at its centre) I am deliberately going in to our first joint writing day with an almost blank – or open – mind. I want to see where we get to together. So no specific preparation. No agenda. No plan.

I remain as excited about the prospect as ever. I’ll take along a couple of books to serve as potential models for the proposal Doug came back with – a less highly structured, more colourful, more narrative-centred book. I’ll take Rory Sutherland’s Alchemy and one or two books on creative thinking that I have vaguely in mind.

We’re meeting on the premises of the Royal College of GPs which is a space I regularly work in when I’m after somewhere on the informal side.

The Collaboration Diary 3

12/9/19

An email arrived from Doug with a radical rethink of our approach. Based on some successful books currently on the market in the business category and some previous work we did together inspired by Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies, he suggested we create “a book that you can dip into or read cover to cover” constructed from smaller sections carefully organised, as opposed to one long coherent body of text. This strikes me as a way we can create a really energetic, genuinely readable book.

That email was at 04:43 – I really hope Doug is abroad somewhere in another time zone! It was preceded at 03:27. In that earlier email Doug agreed with my point about how to ensure our tome is distinctive: “I think we need to make sure to keep focus on the thing that will make this book distinctive from the competition – the idea of Dirty Collaboration over and above the rather sterile notions of teamwork that are the norm”