This morning, I tried a writing exercise – a Doctor Who script. TV, twelfth Doctor and Clara, start completely from scratch, give myself four hours to see what I could come up with. I threw a few words into a cup and picked out ETERNAL DALEK, RELIGION and SET IN THE FUTURE.
No notes, no plan, just start writing and see what happens. The basic idea leapt out at me, possibly because I saw Stephen Chow’s Journey to the West movie last week. I’m writing the twelfth Doctor as a little tetchy, this is possibly because I only had one cup of coffee so far. I did think of the fish oil joke a couple of weeks ago, I confess, and it’s nice to find a home for it. But the technique here is simple: write, see where it leads me, don’t look back, keep writing. The best advice for writers is ‘write’.
That was 6AM. It’s now 10.15. I’ve done mild edits as I’ve gone, but haven’t read it back, so I’ve no idea if it works. So this is a *very* rough draft, of – I haven’t timed it – the first third of an episode. The whole point would be to tighten this in editing, so this will probably be a little flabby. The rest of it would be grimmer, I think.
RETREAT OF THE DALEKS
Lance Parkin 