Terry is a TV writer from Armagh. Amongst other work, he was responsible for the BBC NI drama documentary 'Holy Cross', has worked with ITV and is now involved in the new series of Messiah for BBC NI.

His work on Holy Cross won him a BAFTA nomination and Best Screenplay for Drama at the FIPA Biarritz Festival International de Programmes Audiovisuels. The drama also received the Jury's Grand Prix for TV film at the Shangai International Television Festival, the Gold Plaque in the Feature Length Telefilm category at the Chicago International Television Competition and won the Feature Drama category at the Celtic Film and Television Fesitval.

I hope your sitting down for this one because I took the longest route ever to being a TV writer.

Right from the start TV was always pretty important to me. My first memory as a kid is of watching SKIPPY the BUSH KANGEROO. Some of the fondest moments of my childhood were being allowed to sit up late on a school night to watch spaghetti westerns with my dad. My first writing attempts were poetry, like most people. I used to take the first line of a song – and make the rest of the poem up based on that one line. I’d say that was me all over – I never knew how to start. But to be honest, I thought writing, never mind writing for TV, wasn’t something that someone from my background would do.

I did an arts degree at Queens and after college I was lucky to be given a funded place at the Poets’ House. My time there coincided with the start of NYPD Blue which really changed how I thought about TV and what I would like to write. The poetry I was writing at this stage was mostly monologues – single people talking. But TV is rarely one person talking (though not always) - so again I still didn’t know how to start.

I went on and did some media training with E-force and then went to work in a community based film collective in Ballybeen in Belfast – Best Cellars – and made lots of different short films. The one I was proudest of was called ‘Burning Issues’ and was made with young people from the Tullycarnet estate – I worked with them on the technical side but the storyline was all theirs. This was only a one year contract so afterwards I went on to work at the Belfast Institute in their Video Production Unit. Planning educational videos, filming them, editing them, taught me a lot about story, structure and exposition. Knowing a bit more about the process I finally started to write my own scripts.

The best thing I did was write a spec script for NYPD Blue because I cared passionately about the show and I think it gave me the opportunity to do my best work (I’ve since discovered that even very established screenwriters in America like Alan Ball who wrote Six Feet Under, write spec scripts to show what they can do). I also wrote a few original screenplays – looking back they weren’t very good but I was reading lots of books by people who were screenwriters and I was learning all the time.

The NYPD Blue script got me accepted onto the Carlton Screenwriters Course where I met Philip Shelley who really supported me and in the end up got me my first paid writing job and used his contacts to get me an agent. Then BBC NI came along with the offer to write Holy Cross and that was when things started to feel more secure.

In the end it was very simple. To be a TV writer, you start by writing.

Has your success been an easy thing to achieve or were there days when you felt that you should have taken a 'regular job'?

I don’t think success is easy to achieve in any field. Success as a TV writer depends on people taking a chance on you and investing in you – I had people like Robert Cooper and Sue Hogg at the BBC who were willing to do that. If you start to think you’re successful, you stop working. And if you stop working you don’t improve. I think for me personally the question of success is a matter of perspective – when I was working a day job five years ago, writing early in the morning and late at night. I know I’d have given my eye teeth to be where I am today. But from where I am now, I’d give my eye teeth to be where Paul Abbot is – he’s now executive producing shows that he has written (like State of Play) and they’re popular and critically acclaimed – something every writer aspires to.

I don’t know who said it but the difference between success and failure is the decisions you make. So all the small choices you make when you’re writing a script mount up, as well as the big choices like who you work with and what projects you choose to work on. If I were to measure success as being happy with the quality of my writing, then no. I can always improve. That’s the good thing and bad thing about being a writer is that you’re always one draft away from the getting the scene perfect.

As for a regular job, it was really scary making the decision to leave work – I was lucky that my regular job helped my writing and that my partner would have been able to support me for a while if it had all fallen apart.

What have been your artistic influences in Northern Ireland?

There was a big focus at school on local poetry and of course there was the inevitable fantastic English teacher Paul McAvinchey, who bred a whole generation of artistic talent in Armagh. Poets like Martin Mooney and Janice and Jimmy Simmons at the Poets’ House encouraged me to write. That belief that I could string a dozen words per line for a dozen lines or so gave me the confidence to try bigger forms. Old schoolfriends like writer Daragh Carville and producer Colin McKeown also influenced me - over many years of watching TV and film together and arguing about it. In terms of my writing, and TV writing, I’d have to say most of my influences are American – I’m a big fan of Joss Whedon (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel); in fact I’d go so far as to say I’m obsessed by American shows - NYPD Blue, Six Feet Under, 24, The West Wing and The Sopranos. Homicide. The list is endless.

What projects have you been involved in?

The biggest project I’ve worked on is Holy Cross for BBC Northern Ireland – it was a drama documentary about the dispute that happened at a Catholic girls’ Primary School in North Belfast where there are real sectarian tensions. It was a brave thing for BBCNI to do and even braver to hire a new writer to do it. When I saw the final piece on screen and saw how fantastic the performances had been, I was really proud to have played a part in it. I’ve also written the first episode of a new ITV drama called ‘Making Waves’ and am currently working on the Messiah series for BBCNI and an other project with BBC London. I’m also just about to write my first radio play, while TV is my first love, I know doing a radio play will help me improve as a writer.

What is a typical working day for a writer?

It really depends at what stage of the script process I’m at, but it probably breaks down into either planning the structure of the script, writing the script or rewriting the scenes in the script. I rewrite constantly and believe firmly that there’s no such thing as a writer, only a rewriter.

As for my routine, I think every writer does it differently. Personally I try to start as early as possible, 8 30 AM or so is a good time for me to start, though when I’m really engrossed in my work it might be from 4AM. And when I’m not writing, I’m in meetings with executive producers and script editors. Generally there are different stages in the writing process – proposal, treatment, outline and finally script.

The first stage is when either an executive producer comes to me with an idea or I go to them with one. We have a meeting where we talk through ideas and then I put together a proposal. Then we meet again and go through the proposal trying to get more specific and focused with it. If everyone is happy then I go off and work it up into a treatment or outline which is a comprehensive breakdown of what is going to happen. We meet up again at this stage and discuss revisions. I get a revised treatment in again – this can go backward and forward another couple of times. Then if I’m lucky the script is commissioned. This just means that I get paid to write it – the nature of the industry is that a lot proposals never make it to treatment and a lot of treatments never make it to script and a lot of scripts aren’t made.

The other types of day are few and far between – you get to go and watch something you wrote being filmed.

The last type of day doesn’t exist – the day off. TV is my hobby as well as my job so on a day off I’ll catch up with the latest DVD box set or the stuff that I taped when I was writing on a deadline.

Career Highlights?

Walking around the set of Holy Cross on the first day of filming before the actors started was fantastic, as was watching some of the acting and seeing my words being brought to life by exceptional actors. Getting to go to the BAFTAs as a nominee was exciting too. But as for career highlight, I’m still really new at this so I’m hoping that it hasn’t happened yet. I’d love to get an original idea of mine to script and then on network television. But I think it’s still a few years down the line…

Any advice for budding writers?

The first thing (and it’s pretty obvious) is to watch TV drama, lots of it. DVDs are really useful for this – you can watch things over and over and listen to the audio commentaries – people like Joss Whedon and David Milch telling you why they wrote things the way they did – why they made certain decisions - is really like getting a masterclass from the best writers in the world.

Secondly, and again it’s an obvious point, you need to write constantly, and more importantly, you need to rewrite constantly. There’s an old saying ‘scripts don’t get written, they get rewritten’. So write something you’re interested in, something that you are passionate about, something that excites you and is going to bring you back to the computer screen or the page again and again. Passion will lift your writing and see you through to the end. I’d say most writers have a genre or particular type of story they are interested in. I like cop shows so the first script I wrote was a cop show. If you like medical dramas. Write that. If you like soap operas, write an episode of that. (Only after watching loads of them of course!!!) In fact most British TV writers get their training and their breaks on soap operas. Jimmy McGovern and Paul Abbott for example.

Thirdly, there’s no right or wrong way to getting a script written. Some people write one scene and rewrite that over and over before they move onto the next scene. Others speed through the first draft and then go back to the beginning. Which ever works for you is the right way. Don’t worry about it not being good or not being perfect. Chances are the first few times it won’t be. Mine were awful. Only my partner ever saw my earliest efforts, then they got better and I got the nerve up to show them to other people. It took me about five years to work up the nerve (and to believe enough in what I was writing) to send it in to someone in the industry. The hardest thing is getting started. I used NYPD Blue to write a script the same way as I used to use the first lines of songs to get into writing poetry. So what ever gets you started and gets you to the end - works.

Next, learn to take constructive criticism wherever you can find it. Writing for TV is a collaboration so you have to take other opinions and work with them. Read the scripts of TV shows and figure out the changes when they went to screen. Then read the fan transcripts. Be a trainspotter. Talk about it with your friends, really care about it. Find other people who are as passionate about TV as you are – they don’t have to be film studies students - the great thing about TV is that it reaches everyone, so you’re as likely to have a good argument with your dad or the person who cuts your hair as you are with a teacher.

Finally, good writing leaps off the page, and if its not on the page its not on the screen. But if you find that you don’t love doing it, then stop thinking of it as a profession and do it as a hobby – if you want a career you have to focus on it totally. When I had a full time job I was writing at least 4 hours a day, now on a busy day it could be 18 hours. But the funny thing about doing something that you love is that it doesn’t feel like a job most of the time. If you enjoy it, it’s not really a job, it’s your life. And at the minute, it’s a life I love.

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