John Collee

John Collee trained as a doctor before becoming a novelist and screenwriter. His films include Creation, Happy Feet, Master and Commander, and Paper Mask (which was adapted from his own novel).

How did you get started as a writer?

I've had a very strange sort of CV, really. I trained as a doctor, and always saw medicine as a way of travelling and exploring the world. So when I graduated I did a couple of jobs in the South of England, then began travelling. At university I'd always had an interest in writing - the end of year review, a couple of shows at the Edinburgh Festival, this and that. And these two things very quickly merged, and the travels and the medical jobs became inspiration for writing.

I began writing novels and had some success. These were all published while I was working as a doctor and they were largely drawn from and inspired by experiences of the medical profession.

Then my second novel A Paper Mask was optioned for a film. Christopher Morahan directed it, and I wrote the screenplay of that. So that was my first screenplay. And, as is often the case, the first one you sort of don't have any idea what you're doing, and it's only afterwards you then start trying to sort of define what it is you do so you can do it again. When I worked with Peter Weir, Peter told me that he made two films and then he stopped making films for a year just to watch films, to try and deconstruct what it is. And I think that reflective part of writing is often missed out.

They say that film writing is all about re-writing. It's absolutely true. But you have to know why you're re-writing, and you need to know how to re-write. You actually have to at some point sit down and work that out so that at least you can critique your own raw work and improve it.

You talked about deconstructing other people's films there. Is that something you did as part of your own training?

Absolutely. When I started writing novels, I read a few novels that I thought were in the same genre. When I wrote Kingsley's Touch I read Jaws, which was a thriller. Absolutely nothing to do with the medical thriller that I was writing but I thought, well I'm going to read this and I'm going to work out how characters are introduced, how chapters work.

I also read John Braine's classic book How To Write A Novel, and John describes how you work out what your story is in short form and then you break that up into twenty or thirty chapters and then you work out what's going to happen in each of these chapters. So rather than starting at the beginning and working to the end you're starting from a core idea and you're working outwards in all directions.

I had a hysterical conversation once with Helen Fielding and Salman Rushdie. He said – and I don't think he realises how extraordinarily exceptional this is – "Oh you just start at the beginning and it comes". And Helen, like myself, is: how the hell do you do this? Let's work out the science of it, the structure of it.

I think the majority of writers are like that. Most of us have to find a framework. Apart from anything else it's a great way of never having to sit down and face a blank page. If you've worked out a framework beforehand then you always know what you're going to write next.

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