Writer: Neil Cross

How did you get started as a writer?

I've just always been a writer; I was born that way. I started when I was seven or eight years old by drawing comic books. I moved on to scripting the comics before I drew them, and then I just left the pictures to the imagination. That's pretty much what I've been doing ever since.
My first novel, Mr In-Between, was published in 1989. That seems like a very long time ago, and in photographs of the period I look alarmingly young - I was 29. But that "first" novel was merely the first to be published.

Even disregarding the science-fiction epic I wrote and rewrote between the ages of 9 and 15, and even forgetting all the abortive late-adolescent attempts to reinvent the Catcher in the Rye, I'd written several books prior to that. I still have typescripts mouldering in a drawer somewhere. And even Mr In-Between, which I suspected might be "the one", had to wait four years between completion and eventual publication.

What was your first job as a TV writer?

My first produced TV script was Spooks Series 5 Episode 9. I was already pretty established as a novelist by then, but writing for Spooks - as beloved as it is popular - was a bit like walking out naked onto the stage of Sydney Opera House.

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

The advice never changes, from generation unto generation - so the best I can do is dust off the advice I was given and pass it on:

If you want to be a writer, it's going to hurt - not once, but often, and a lot. Don't do it unless you're absolutely driven. If you can take it or leave it, you'll end up leaving it.

Keep writing. Accept rejection, learn to welcome criticism - then learn which criticism is valid and which isn't. Don't try to write to a market, it never works. And learn discipline. Much more than inspiration, discipline is your friend. Sit down at the same time every day to write a set number of words: it doesn't matter how many words, or how few. Stephen King writes 2,000 words a day. Graham Greene wrote 500, and stopped mid-sentence if he felt like it. A little every day adds up more quickly than you might realise, and it keeps the book "alive" more effectively than writing in occasional splurges.

What's your writing routine?

I'm at my desk by 9am I fiddle around, drinking tea, listening to the radio and writing emails, until 9:30. I then dive in to whatever is currently my main project. I find the hours between 9:30 and 12:30 to be the most productive. I like to write 1,500 words of fiction or 8-10 pages of script. I take a short lunch break, or a long lunch break if it's a sunny day and I'm ahead of my deadlines. In the afternoon, I work on secondary and tertiary projects.

While an episode is being shot, my routine often goes haywire. I might find myself writing scenes (or entire sequences) that are going to be filmed the next day. This leaves no room for making the kind of mistake one usually makes in a first draft - the kind of thing you pick up the next day and are glad nobody gets to see. So that means writing, rewriting, re-rewriting, and polishing in a single day, until you're as sure as you can be that you're not going to embarrass yourself.

How do you write?

I still haven't found a single way to write. Each book is in some way a reaction to the one I wrote before.

My main work tool is a piece of (Macintosh only) software called Scrivener - designed by a writer, for writers. He's called Keith Blount, and by day he's apparently a teacher in London. I love the way he got frustrated with the writing tools available to him, and instead of whining sat down to create something excellent. Scrivener allows me to collect research, then write (and collect) outlines and early drafts in one project-centred database. For delivery to publishers or producers, I then export to Word or Final Draft, as appropriate.

As a novelist, I'm slightly suspicious of outlines. When I was a teenager I read a book about becoming a writer which cautioned - wisely, I think - against telling anybody your plot, even yourself, before you've actually written it. This is because writing, as much as reading, a novel is a process of storytelling. Once a story is told, it's told - and telling it, even verbally, diminishes the imperative to tell it again. So for novels, I tend to keep the story to myself and work from the loosest possible guidelines. I very rarely have much of an idea where a book is going next, although usually I know where its going to end up.

(But not always. After two chapters, my novel Holloway Falls began to move in a direction entirely contrary to the one I'd intended. I was stalled for perhaps 18 months. I still had a day job, and began to worry that my writing days were behind me. One day, in despair, I decided to give up and let the story take command. Holloway Falls had a complex plot, of which I honestly thought for a long time I was making no sense. And then, shazam, there it was: it all tied together, surprising me a damn sight more than anybody who read it. Holloway Falls became one of my favourite novels, and taught me a few serious lessons about where stories actually come from - that nobody really knows, least of all the people who tell them.)

For writing screenplays, an outline is essential. I still don't like them - I don't think any writer does, not least because the composition is, by comparison, so plodding and passionless.

Many "how to" books work hard to make the writing of outlines and scripts sound far more dauntingly scientific than it actually is - or actually can be. To justify the cover price, such books over-analyse the structure of existing film and TV scripts; and they seek to make the would-be writer base their work on these analyses. It's all nonsense, of course. As the first vocalising human beings no doubt recognised, narrative structure comes naturally to our species - and all these learned analyses of "inciting incidents" and "second act mid-point reversals" should be read, if at all, secure in the knowledge that we know this stuff already. All of us. We just use simpler words for it. We say "the end went on too long", or "it took a while to get going," or "it dips a bit in the middle."

So all an outline does is tell the reader what's going to happen to who, and why, and how. It's an opportunity to finesse a story, to make sure it all makes sense, that there's enough going on - that there's enough drama, and enough character-interaction too, and that the beginning, middle and end are weighted properly. This can take a few goes, not least because Spooks is a voracious story monster that chews up ideas without hesitation or remorse; its short pre-titles sequence alone usually contains enough story material to keep a more conventional show running for a full hour.

So I outline... and outline... and outline... and outline... until we all agree it's a good story. This process often means throwing out much-cherished scenes. Then I start writing a script -
- which comes alive in my hands, like all stories want to, and fights to take its own shape.

A novel can be anything from 60,000 words to, I don't know, more than half a million. How long is War and Peace? (I just checked: it's 560,000 words long). So a novel is free to find its own structure - its own beginning, middle and end.

A BBC TV drama is an hour long. A hour of commercial television is shorter, because it has to accommodate adverts. A cinematic movie is two hours, give or take. The beginning, middle and end of your story has to fit within those time constraints, and narrative structure will be largely a function of that. You can't go on too long setting things up if you've only got an hour to tell an entire story. And you can't cram a satisfying ending into the last five minutes of a two hour action thriller. You just have to get the timings right.

You live in New Zealand yet write for a UK TV show. How does the distance affect your writing, or the relationship with the producers?

A few years ago, it would have been impossible and I'd still be living in North London. But communication technology makes it all pretty easy, really. I talk to the producers every few days, often long into the night (and sometimes very early in the morning). Plus, of course, we're in constant email contact.

On top of all that, I return to the U.K. perhaps half a dozen times a year. Even that - because I always get the same flights, at the same time - has become a habit and, like all habits, I hardly notice I'm doing it.

What's more difficult - writing novels or TV?

They're very different, and each is difficult in its own way - and each is fun in its own way, too. Writing a novel gives you absolute freedom to explore a character's inner life. All a script can do is tell the reader what a character does and what they say. Inner life, motivation, is a function of inference. The two approaches require different kinds of discipline.

That said, I'm a reasonably cinematic writer. I'm a suspense novelist, inspired by people like Graham Greene and Patricia Highsmith; which is to say I don't write novels wherein university lecturers sit round dinner tables and agonise about love affairs.

The hardest part of writing a novel is the best part, too: it belongs entirely to you. Writing Spooks, by comparison, is hugely collaborative. It involves working with a team of extraordinarily dedicated and smart people, each of whom is utterly dedicated to the show. Being the writer is like being strapped to the nose-cone of a space-rocket: when it begins to move, it's taking you with it, like it or not. So you'd better be ready. That too is both the hardest and the best part.

How does the relationship with Spooks work: do they provide a plot seed? A plot document? Do you pitch your own stories?

All the above, and more - depending on the episode. My first episode (Series 5 Episode 9) was very much a one-sentence seed, which I went on to develop; first on paper and then in conversation with Kudos. Then I wrote the script, and rewrote it again and again until it was right.
The whole process is big, generous and sometimes two-fisted. It's that which I love the best, even when I am driven crazy by it.

How many drafts do you do?

About a million.

Actually, it's a bit difficult to say what's really a "draft" and what's not.
The Shooting Script is the logistical bible; from it, the military machine which is the production crew draws up the schedule. The schedule is all. So every revision to the Shooting Script technically constitutes a new "draft", even though you might only be changing two or three key words in a single scene.
In terms of what most of us would consider to be a "draft" - which I would take to be several days' or weeks' re-working - I suppose there are sometimes as few as three, sometimes as many as six or seven. After that, a further heavy-duty revision follows the cast read-through: usually this addresses clarity of plot, dodgy bits of dialogue and unfunny or abstruse jokes.

This draft is often the toughest because the read-through happens about a week before shooting begins. So there's no mucking about: you get in there, you sit down and you rewrite, as quickly and (one hopes) as well as you can.

Oddly enough, I think this script (PDF) (Series 6 Episode 1) probably went to more drafts than any of my others - certainly more than episode two and probably more than episodes 8 and 9 put together.
And even after all that, I've just noticed that scene AB1 (the very first scene) isn't mine at all, not a word of it. These scenes were filmed very late, at short notice, long after principal photography had wrapped up. Clearly the script editor, under some pressure, had to map out that first scene. Poor sod.

What's your next project?

Right now, I'm working on Spooks series 7. I'm not quite sure how many episodes yet, but at least three. I'm also working on a project for the BBC, which I hope will prove to be a unique kind of historical drama. I've never written historical drama before, and am frankly terrified. There's a novel to write and beyond that, a number of TV and film projects that I'm not allowed to talk about yet.

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

The best thing about writing for a living is that I get to write for a living. Writing is what I love to do; more than that, it's what I'm compelled to do - even if I'd stuck with the office job, I'd still be writing. Besides all of which it allows me a great deal of time with my family - the kind of precious time a more normal job feeds on like a vampire. So I'm astonishingly lucky.

Any downsides are negligible. To some extent, you're always working - even when you're doing the vacuuming or cleaning your teeth. And sometimes you feel wrung-out and incapable of ever having another idea - even though you've got no choice but to have an idea, and soon, and a good one too. This is especially true of writing for TV, when a great deal of other people's time and money is depending on it. Novel deadlines are a tad more relaxed. You can take a day off, if you really need to.
But primarily, writing isn't a great occupation if you don't like being alone. After congenital bloody-mindedness and a thick hide, a taste for solitude is probably the key required characteristic. Writing means being alone, a lot. And it's not in the slightest bit glamorous: if you crave glamour and recognition, you're looking in the wrong corner. Become a writer and nobody you meet is ever going to have heard of you. If you write for TV or film, most people will be only half-aware that your job even exists. (A close family member once asked me once who wrote the dialogue for my scripts - and when I told him "I do!" all I got was a slightly suspicious and pitying narrowing of the eyes, as if this was self-evidently untrue as well as patently absurd.)

I like my quiet and mostly solitary life, so none of that is much of a downside for me. But I know many people who would be driven half-mad by even six months of it.

You can read Neil's script for Series 6 Episode 1 (PDF) of Spooks in our Script Archive