I’ve never spilt any coffee in my Saab. It’s an old 900 Turbo, two seater. The aircon is chilly on the aged black leather seats. The car is clean, and there are no empty water bottles in the passenger footwell. There are no warnings about low coolant, burnt-out headlamp bulbs or windscreen wiper fluid. The car is always well maintained. I do it myself - on Saturday mornings, in the garage. I blast Springsteen over the speakers, and tinker with the old turbo.
Aoife left for work earlier than me. Here in LA, her commute is longer than mine. To be honest, we’d probably prefer not to live in LA, but with the show in production, it just makes sense. The place we’re leasing (right on Manhattan beach) is maybe a bit more expensive than we’d like, although if you’re going to live in California, and you have a bit of spare cash, you might as well get somewhere right on the beachfront.
I pull into the Paramount lot, and get out of the car. I’m still a bit stiff from the 10k I ran at dusk last night. I try to keep meals out & drinking to weekends - cardio is my midweek vice. To be honest, running along the beach with Bunk & Fitz (our dogs), I get most of my thinking done.
I like to get in to the writers room early - before the rest of my writing staff. It’s a good example. It’s also when I crystallize my ideas. At times - when I was younger, writing for community radio, I would get ideas late at night, three glasses into a bottle of gaudy red supermarket wine. Now, I find that my ideas are clearer in the morning, the characters are more real, the words are fresh and crisp. All the jokes the studio selected for the Emmy showreel were written in the morning - early and caffeinated (although I am trying to cut down on coffee).
I still listen to music when I write, and I do still waste some time fine-tuning playlists to match the mood of what i’m writing. Today, I sit down at the giant writers room walnut table, open up my laptop. hook up the speakers, and kick the day off with some Roxy Music. I’ll turn it off when the others come in.
The progression was clear from college. It started with a mixture of the novel - my first, about the girl accidentally managing a rural private detective firm - and the radio show. A few friends and I produced a comedy talk show on a small community radio station. We shopped it around a few commercial stations, and it found a late night home. That gave me the profile, when my novel was published, to get decent promotion.
The second novel followed a year later - The adventures of a trumpet player in an old tumbledown Paris restaurant. That was picked up and became a small cult film - then the BBC wanted to make a series from the first book. The detective story. Two years in London - Aoife learning about the yoghurt powder market, and me desperately weaving tv scenes from chapters in our small place in Clapham.
It turned out the show was a hit - then we got the call from Paramount. That’s when everything became tense. I can’t remember a more stressful time. Aoife was finishing her contract in London, and we were living on airplanes, back and forth, ten hours at a time. The studio wavered on the pilot. They wanted rewrites, recasting. Two sleepless months. I’d given up hope by the end.
The night we got the call that were picked up for a full season, we were sitting under strip-lights in a curry house on Tooting high street. Aoife ducked out to the Pennycatcher across the road, and came back with their only bottle of Cava.
I walk around the writers room, picking up rubbish (I can’t call it garbage). We have a whiteboard along one wall - character arcs, story circles, themes, ideas. In red, I’ve graphed out scene and episode deadlines. At one point I read a book about project management. There’s a way of mapping projects called a Gantt chart - I had someone teach me about them. Ever since, that’s how I manage the writing schedules. That’s what keeps us smooth. In another life, I might have been a halfway decent project manager. I often wonder what I’d have done.
The first season was a blur. That’s when I got thin. Sixty hours a week, sweating in this writers room, I could have gone two ways - Super fat or Super skinny. Luckily, I beat the odds, and spent my evenings panting on a treadmill.
Once we hit our third season, we were in shape. We had a handful of Emmys, consistent ratings in the key demos and the studio loved us. We had a routine. I found a deputy head writer - one of the associate producers - and i found that working as a team reminded me of the first time that writing changed everything. The night in DCU we wrote the outline of the panto, Cinderelish. Friendships, life choices, everything came from that first page.
The writers are trickling into the office. Starbucks coffees, yellow legal pads, macbooks and moleskine notebooks start to crowd the table. Shooting schedules are stacked up, table reads are booked in. I’m always taken aback at the size of the machinery that comes together to tell the stories I dream up.
It all came down to finishing. First the panto, then the novel and the radio show. I don’t know how my life would have gone if I hadn’t finished them.
