Jack Thorne Interview

As well as writing for Skins and Shameless, Jack Thorne has written stage plays including When You Cure Me, Fanny and Faggot, and Stacy, as well as Left at the Angel, an Afternoon Play for Radio 4. He is currently Pearson Writer-in-Residence at The Bush Theatre.

What's the main difference between writing for theatre and writing for TV?

Scene length. Over one-and-a-half pages for a scene in telly feels like an eternity. Which doesn't mean you don't ever do it, but it does mean that it really changes the way that you write.

Danny Brocklehurst's episode of Shameless was 47 pages long and at one point had 120 scenes in it, which is just extraordinary. You'd never do that in theatre.

How long does it take to write a play, and how many drafts do you do?

The last one took six months, but the play that got me started took two-and-a-half years. It went through three different incarnations and I think it took me about forty drafts. But that's because I was working out how to tell the story.

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

That it's great. Don't expect to earn much money for a long time. I lived on six grand a year for about seven years, and pasta and tomatoes gets a bit boring after a while. You get to know the special shelves at the supermarket.

And just write anything. Paul Abbot said if you can get anyone to pay you to write a menu then take that job. I wrote for a mobile phone history tour of London, I was talking to a female porn director about writing a film for her... anything going. Whatever you do helps, particularly within a professional context.

And just get stuff on, wherever, however. There's a lot of opportunities to get stuff on, I think, if you're just a bit pushy.

What's your writing routine?

I'm playing a lot of Facebook Scrabble at the moment, so that's a bit distracting... I just kind of sit in front of the computer for twelve hours and hope that something happens, really.

I don't really have a routine at all. I tend to do my best stuff at the end of the day and that means that you stretch on into morning. Probably the best work I do is between about 11 o'clock and three in the morning, but I've been trying since 10 o'clock in the morning to write something. It's just that I haven't done it.

I tend to write about 7 or 8 versions of the same scene because that's how I work out which version I want. That means that you write six shit ones in mid-afternoon and then at about one o'clock in the morning you suddenly realise what the scene should be and that's when it gets exciting. Then you go to bed and then you wake up at half four in the morning and realise how really the scene should be.

So, no, I don't have a routine. Wish I did have one.

How does writing so many different versions of the same scene work?

Well, for me it's just that I realise that it's shit!

Some writers can look at a scene and go "OK I know what needs to happen here in order to make this and this happen."

I need to write the whole scene again because you change one dynamic and that changes everything. And you find that you get little nuggets from stuff that you've written previously, like a good line here or there, but mainly it's the whole scene again.

What's the best thing about writing for a living?

Getting stuff made. There's nothing like seeing something you've done.

What I love about theatre - what I love about telly too - is that it's a communal experience. Although you're not necessarily with people when you're watching the telly, it's still a communal experience.

In theatre the bit I love is when I'm sitting beside someone and you just suddenly realise that something's really hit home. That you've got it, and he's got it, and you're just kind of really excited for that one little moment.

When you've written that, I think that's the greatest thing in the world.