Gaby Chiappe

Gaby Chiappe has written for Family Affairs, EastEnders, Casualty, Holby City, Born and Bred, and Doctors. She is currently working on episodes spanning the first two series of the BBC drama Lark Rise to Candleford, and is also writing episodes of Survivors for the BBC. Gaby has recently been awarded a PAWS grant to develop interactive narrative The Department of Now with Paul Dornan and Tim Wright.

How did you get started as a writer?

I think I'd always written bits and pieces. You know, really bad adolescent poetry, that kind of thing. I'd done some dialogue writing with some friends, and we ended up writing our own plays. So I'd always written, and I'd worked at a theatre company, done little bits and pieces of journalism. I was trying to write a book and a friend who was working for Family Affairs, which had just started, managed to persuade them to give me a trial script, which they did. And from that they gave me a job.

I was there about three years, and then people that I'd worked with on Family Affairs started moving around, and I wrote a few episodes of Doctors. And then from there I pretty much simultaneously started doing Holby City and EastEnders. So it was people that I'd worked with moving around, taking me with them.

What advice would you give to anyone who wanted to write for a living?

I think you've just got to write, because it's very easy to sit and think "I'd like to write." But until you start producing stuff you've got nothing. So write.

There's only so long that you can keep writing on your own in your bedroom. I guess if you're writing dialogue-based work then somewhere in your mind you've got the idea that you want it to be performed.

You have to be fairly robust, because if you want to start writing for a living you've got to put your stuff up for being taken apart, which is really hard. But it's the only way it gets better and it's the only way that anybody ever gets to see it.

I guess what I'm saying when I say be robust is to try and take what's constructive in a critique. It's hard to take – well maybe it's just me, but I think it's really hard to take input from other people, to take criticism. Certainly writing for television, the draft process can be quite punishing when you're not used to it. Occasionally you can really be put through the mill, and learning the balance between taking feedback and using it and not letting yourself be chewed up and spat out is quite hard and something that you can only learn through experience.

1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5