Paul Cornell Interview - Part 2

You mentioned your two favourite books on writing were McKee's "Story" and King's "On Writing". Now McKee's very much an outline, outline, outline man, and King never outlines. Where do you fall on the continuum?

I would like to say outline, outline, outline, cos I think that's much more sensible. And I think that King probably has now got to a point of being happy enough with his own ability to hack his way out of problems that he doesn't need an outline. But there's no point in creating problems for yourself.

I've just written a novel without an outline and I'm never going to do it again. With a complete plot you can always drift off it and go and do your own thing when you're in the middle of writing it. But then you'll find that you'll probably want to clamber back to it or go back to it and change it. I think plot, plot, plot, until you become good enough to ignore all the rules.

The rules are there to help us. Picasso became the greatest figure painter of his generation, doing perfect naturalistic drawings, before he became the Picasso we know. John Lydon knows how to sing note perfectly. You've got to learn the craft perfectly, then you become a master, then you can break all the rules.

Tell us a little bit about your writing routine.

Well I never believe those writers who say I get up at seven o'clock in the morning, put on my business suit, go to my office and work an eight hour day, stopping only for a cup of tea at lunch time.

I go for amount. I will write two thousand good words of prose, or five pages of comics, or five pages of screenplay in a working day. If I do that by lunch time then I can do what only writers can do and pop off to the cinema in the afternoons, which is the whole point of being a writer. It's what it's for. But if I don't manage to do it during the day I may even be up until the early hours hacking it out.

You've got a blog.

I've got a blog. It's what took up all my time before Facebook came along.

Blogs are dangerous for writers. I was actually at a panel where Neil Gaiman's editor was complaining hugely about Gaiman's blog because he was writing for that instead of writing for her. But it's because writers love to communicate. It's not a very chatty blog, is mine, I sort of plonk up articles and opinion pieces, or just fun little things. It's more like I have a regular space in a magazine. I'm a little too tensed up and English to really kind of pour my heart out in a kind of emotional blog, although I do subscribe to some of those that are very well written.

When I got back from Japan I think I wrote ten thousand words about my trip. Because I don't have a professional outlet for travel writing. And it's lovely to have those immediate comments coming back straight away from your work. As a writer that's what you're after really.

Doctor Who is a big hero. What would you say is the essence of a heroic character?

I think the Doctor is a hero because he's an outsider. He is not part of the societies he encounters. And he offers a different set of ethics. He won't carry a gun. He tries and always fails, or the show would be very dull, to resolve things through diplomacy.

He's also the victory of intelligence over might. He's the hero of bullied children, the smart one in the glasses who will blow up the planet of the big bullies. And you know Daleks are big bullies.

I guess that defines him. I may have spent several decades thinking about that.

In Human Nature, the idea of the Doctor as this avenging force, and his punishments for the Family of Blood, comes across as very mythical.

I was kind of keen on the Doctor doling out those punishments to the Family of Blood, because he really went out of his way to not do that. He tried very hard to be merciful to them. But they kept poking and poking the beehive. Putting children at risk and ruining many, many lives. And so he finally turned round and they found out what happens when you poke the beehive too often.

I think there's the possibility of redemption in all of those punishments. Russell shared my keenness that he not kill them. And I think we'd have to know an awful lot more about alien mental processes to say whether or not he was being unduly cruel to them.

You've written Human Nature twice now, once as a book, and once for the TV series... How different was it writing the TV version from the novel version?

In the novel the Doctor - the Sylvester McCoy Doctor then - is still quite doctorish when he becomes John Smith. He is an outsider amongst the school. He has some of the Doctor's principles. It's interesting because we can illuminate in other ways how he is not the Doctor. We have internal monologue in prose to do that. In the TV version I think it is more interesting in a lot of ways that he is a product of his society, that he's a good man from 1913, and he's not such an odd man out in the time he's been placed into. He has, if you like, a conscience, an odd man out inside that takes time to express itself.

And there's all sorts of little differences... for instance we're in 1913 rather than 1914 so you can just say 1913, the year before the Great War, rather than saying it's nineteen fourteen but the Great War hasn't started yet.

In the book the thing that would turn the Doctor back to being the Doctor is a cricket ball. It's a watch rather than a cricket ball because a watch has a face you can open. It has a thing that's either open or closed. A cricket ball doesn't have anything like that. In the novel you can just tell the audience what the cricket ball is, but on television you don't have that. You have to have something visual that works.

We don't have the scarecrows in the novel - in the novel the monsters look human until the moment they strike. But in the TV version that's kind of dull for all the little kids watching, who just have people with guns up to that point. So it's nice for them to have some real monsters in the form of the scarecrows.

But all these little things are the differences between the two approaches. And of course the novel was written for a niche SF audience, so you skew towards their needs rather than the needs of the mainstream audience.

Both are absolutely valid and I'm incredibly proud of the TV version. I think it's the best, the most lovely thing in my TV career ever.

What's it like working on one of the few UK series with a showrunner?

I think this is a really good idea. On Doctor Who, if a prop looks wrong or if something on set's not working, Russell can see the whole picture top to bottom and change a small thing without having to ask a committee about it. I would like a British show to move to the full American Writer's Room system. A showrunner and a bunch of employees who clock in every morning and are a writer on that TV show. That's their job.

There's all sorts of reasons that doesn't happen in Britain, one of which is that we've produced much shorter runs of things. We have a showrunner and a bunch of freelancers who are doing other things at the same time, who don't clock in and aren't paid a wage but are just paid for their script. Some of that is, I think, down to the old-fashioned gentlemen and players thing, that writers are still not quite seen as employees. If you're an employee, then you're a script editor on your way up to being a producer. You're not a writer on your way up to being a showrunner.

I think if we want the showrunner concept to prosper and keep going we're going to have to get the Writer's Room at some point. You'd need a big long hefty show like Holby City to really do it, you'd need agreements with the Writers Guild, and you'd need a producer who was willing to have the same ten writers write a year of Holby.

I think somebody should try it.

What are you working on at the moment?

I'm doing several things at once. I've just finished a horror novel in the Stephen King tradition about school bullying. There's a Primeval under another showrunner - Adrian Hodges - coming out. That was great. I've got three different pitches for my own shows in, one of which I'm just about to start scripting. Whether or not these will actually happen is anybody's guess. But I have high hopes. And I've got lots of Marvel Comics work, including taking over as writer on Excalibur, the British X-Men, in the new year.

1 | 2