Writer's unblock

or, oh god I'm 43 is it too late for me? It's probably not too late right? Right? Ri—

I was standing in this huge apartment in Cannes—converted into a temporary office space for The Weinstein Company—trying to look like I had any right to be there, which... no. Sweating a lot. Like, a lot. I looked at my mate Andrew, he seemed fine. Bastard. A door opened and Harvey Weinstein exploded across the foyer, fully screamed into a young intern’s face, “Get Bob on the phone NOW,” then vanished behind a slammed door (yeah, he was always absolutely awful). The intern looked to the two women on reception and mouthed, “Who’s Bob?” and we all knew he was fucked.

I’ve been thinking a lot about momentum, and how important and difficult it is to build and then capitalise on it. More specifically, I’ve been torturing myself about a period in my life when I was building some as a writer and how I ultimately did nothing with it.

In 2006, inspired by websites like The Sneeze and X-Entertainment, I started an online magazine. I persuaded some writer friends to contribute, and we slowly built a really good, engaged readership. Good enough that we started landing interviews with celebrities who we—frankly—felt we had no business interviewing. People we loved. People like Ernie Hudson, Toyah Wilcox, Warwick Davis, Tony Hart… we interviewed George Clooney. We had no idea what we were doing, no clue how to run a magazine, and yet here we were interviewing movie and television icons and post-punk legends.

My friend Andrew David Barker, had been writing for the magazine since the very first issue. The two of us both had aspirations of becoming screenwriters and had frequently read one another’s scripts over the years. Encouraged by our relative success with the magazine and this strange realisation that people seemed to quite like us, we decided to write a script together. We wrote a Fantasy Western called Ravens’ Bower—very Mad Max meets High Plains Drifter. Being young and naive we decided, hey this is good we should just send it out to everyone real cold and real unsolicited. Just as with the magazine, we had no idea what we were doing and no business approaching these people. And yet.

The responses were overwhelmingly positive. Ennio Morricone read it, loved it, and agreed to create an original score. Ennio fucking Morricone. (I still want to cry when I think about this.) Paramount Vantage were interested, and we had several meetings with them. We already had actors attached in principle, and Paramount were okay with those choices. If we’d had any experience at all we would have stopped and let Paramount move at their own pace. We didn’t though. Instead, we went ahead and attached a Director. I’m not going to name them, for reasons I hope are obvious, but basically Paramount Vantage went, “If you’ve attached that person then we’re out.” So we panicked and said, “okay… what do we—shall we get rid of them? Who would you prefer to have?” which was when they realised we were complete amateurs and tapped out.

So… not great. BUT we’d written something that people liked, and it had got us close with a real company. We kept plugging away with that script, and we wrote another one: Monsters’ Diner—a supernatural comedy about what monsters do when they’re not monstering (this was 2007, so way before What We Do in the Shadows absolutely nailed this theme). We wrote it with a specific person in mind: Adam Sandler. We approached his production company, Happy Madison, and amazingly I was granted a few minutes to pitch it over the phone to one of their development people. They liked it enough that I was then given a little longer to pitch it to their head of development. They asked for the script, and they liked it enough that they wanted to meet us in-person.

Andrew and I were going to Cannes Film Festival in May 2008, so we agreed to pick up with Happy Madison once we were back. We made fliers for Monsters’ Diner to take to Cannes. We left them in meeting rooms, on tables in all the tents, and we handed them out. We got some calls and took some meetings. Mostly independent production companies, but somewhere along the way we got to pitch to The Weinstein Company and ICON Productions. You can guess how the Weinstein meeting went, but the ICON meeting went well enough that we had several follow-ups in London over the months that followed.

The Monsters’ Diner flier

After Cannes, things started to go cold with Happy Madison. I have no idea what changed, but they no longer seemed ready to commit to a meeting. I pursued it as much as I felt was appropriate, but after screwing myself with Paramount Vantage, I was wary of pushing too hard. I was still feeling very positive about everything else going on, so I was okay to let things breathe. I ended up letting them breathe for over a decade.

When I was at university I got into a relationship that would go on to last a very long time and prove to be incredibly abusive. I need to be sensitive here because while I am not in the business of protecting abusers, there are people whom I love very, very deeply for whom this person is indescribably important. And because I do not intend to hurt those people, I will simply say that this person did everything to make me give up all the things that made me Me, and writing was as inherently me as it got.

I was allowed to write only as long as it didn’t get too serious. But the thing is, it was getting serious. I had a magazine being read by thousands of people each month, Andrew and I had two films gaining positive attention, we had follow-ups planned with an actual Hollywood production company… it couldn’t be allowed to continue.

I will skip a lot of details here and simply say, in 2008 I stopped writing and I stopped following up on the progress we had made. It took no time at all for everything to just… go away. The meetings, the website, the progress on Ravens’ Bower and Monsters’ Diner, the feature film and TV pilot I planned to write that year. Gone.

There were a couple of times here and there when I would try to write again but the blowback was always disproportionate and swift. It was years later before I got out of that relationship, and the first thing I did was write a novel. I’m proud of that novel, but man is it rough. It was written in a burst with the weight of years of emotion on it. It needs an editor and it needs to lose 100 pages, but I just needed to get it out of my system.

I imagined that would be some magnificent moment of reset for me, but actually it was just a fluke. I couldn’t write anything after that. It wasn’t until I had had a LOT of therapy and put several years and hundreds of miles between me and my old life that I was able to even think about writing again. That was 2021.

Over a decade after I had last worked on a script, I sat down to write a TV pilot called The Collectors, the pilot I had intended to write in 2008. I finished it early-2022 and that same year, Andrew and I wrote a pilot called Empire Amusements, about two rival criminal amusement arcades in Skegness. That one placed in the Top 10% of BBC Open Call 2023 and has brought us some attention. At the time of writing, we’ve had a number of meetings with several production companies that have felt very positive… but you’ve read this far, so you get it.

A slide from our Pitch Deck for Empire Amusements. Who wouldn’t watch this?

After we wrote Empire Amusements, we wrote a short film called Here Lies…, which Andrew directed. That one played at festivals across the UK throughout 2023 and was really well received. While that was doing its thing, I finally wrote that feature film I’d planned in 2008: Bible 2, a coming of age story about two teenage girls trying to make their voices heard in the modern world, intercut with the biblical Action Movie adventures of Jesus Christ (I know, right!)

It’s pretty easy to beat yourself up about opportunities missed, and I definitely don’t treat myself with the kindness I deserve, but I’m trying hard to focus less on that and more on re-building momentum. I did it before and I can do it again. Right now, I’ve started work on a new feature film about which I am incredibly excited, I am being considered for a BFI grant to develop another, I have outlined the pilot of another TV show that I will write this year, and I have thrown my hat in the ring for several fellowships and schemes. All while actively pushing the already-completed stuff.

I truly have no idea how any of this is going to turn out—maybe I’ve simply lost too much time, maybe I will rue the momentum I lost between 2008 and 2021 for the rest of my life. Maybe.

But maybe not.